Category: Blogpost

Telling the story of my Wardrobe

Wendy Ward keeps track of her clothing, how often she wears it, literally marking the Wears, and trying to work out why so many of us, keep buying more.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DGdW4uCtgyA/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

Every stitch represents one time this garment has been worn. (Wendy Ward, Author provided (no reuse))

Checkmarks showing each wear, #are made with single, perfect, and colourful stitches directly on her clothes, which become part of both her personal craft, and her doctoral research. Her father loved his soft, worn, comfortable clothes, like this gorgeous 80% wool cardigan slowly becoming meshed with marks showing how often she wears this inherited piece. Wendy speaks of how her father’s repairs of his favourite pieces was part of her childhood. She has been a clothes designer, a teacher of making and repairing clothes, and developed easy-to-use patterns and books on sewing, dressmaking, and design. #

After a Masters in During Covid, UK-based fashion designer and PhD student Wendy Ward

“It’s so easy with fashion to be tempted by the constant churn of new styles and colours and to lose sight of what you’re actually likely to enjoy wearing regularly,” Wendy says, adding a stitch to her clothes every time she wears them.

She’s spending more time with her clothes and looking at them in far more detail, which not only allows reflection on how they make her feel but is a great way to spot would-be stains or damage to fix before they become a bigger issue.

“When I take time to sew a stitch into a garment, I’m looking at … the things you don’t really pay attention to when wearing your clothes,” Ward says. Regularly checking in with, inspecting, and auditing clothing builds a relationship of sorts, so clothing stops being a fleeting addition to wardrobes and becomes something worth investing in and caring for.

From article in I News about Caring for Clothes

As part of her PhD research, Ms Ward has been experimenting with ways to encourage people to fall in love with the clothes they already own, and examining whether this could lead to more sustainable consumption. The clothes people already own were, after all, the most sustainable ones, she says.

Wendy Ward, fashion designer and researcher. (Supplied: Wendy Ward on ABC.au)

As part of her PhD research, Sheffield-based designer, maker and eco activist Ms Ward has been experimenting with ways to encourage people to fall in love with the clothes they already own, and examining whether this could lead to more sustainable consumption.

Wendy Ward shared this visual wardrobe audit on social media. (Instagram: thatwendyward)

Through creative writing, drawing and photography workshops, she encourages people to “reconnect with clothes, and the stories … and the meanings that are held in them.
I believe in small, individual acts of resistance: celebrating that loved garment through creative writing or a portrait; mending that hole or tear; redyeing that faded t-shirt; being seen in the same outfit multiple times; or engaging in ‘guerilla EPR’ by returning your end-of-life garments to the brands that made them.”

“I get really frustrated by an unwillingness to think differently: from designers, brands and manufacturers, all the way through to consumers and those dealing with our textile waste. Fashion is supposed to be a space of innovation, creativity and future-thinking, but it seems to have lost that ability. The preferred option always seems to be: ‘business as usual’ (aka overproduction and overconsumption) but with a few tweaks such as a factory powered by solar panels, or a fabric made from recycled bottles. The difficult ‘messy’ work of production and end-of-life disposal is always kept ‘out of sight, out of mind’ for consumers in the Global North, resulting in consumers who have little awareness of what it takes to make their clothes and dispose of them once they’ve finished with them.”

Most recently I’ve personally felt extremely conflicted about end-of-life clothing. So much so that I’m now keeping hold of all of mine and my partner’s clothing that fall into this category as I don’t believe a satisfactory system currently exists in the UK to deal with it. I don’t want my textile waste to be incinerated in a so-called energy recovery facility contributing to local air pollution or to be exported to the Global South contributing to waste colonialism .

“Fashion is a lot about storytelling — and brands are often very keen to do that storytelling for us, but if we are more connected to our clothes, we can use our clothes to do our own storytelling,” she says.

Reconnecting with your clothes

Wendy has done an audit to discover how many garments she owns and is now tracking how often she wears them.

Ms Ward says knowing what garments she wears a lot has made her love them even more.

Resources:

https://linktr.ee/thatwendyward

https://www.instagram.com/thatwendyward

https://theconversation.com/three-ways-your-wardrobe-could-help-you-avoid-fast-fashion-224293

https://concernedresearchers.org/blog/18-wendy-ward-mom-apr-2025-xdmxm-caghl-xdxh2

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-22/fast-fashion-wardrobe-freeze-to-reduce-clothing-waste/103585450

May 30, 2025
The story of Never Enough

“Overconsumption is the most deadly ecological killer in contemporary times, and it is closely related to any problem of environmental pollution… let us calm down and present an ecological fable with the cover image story.”

Vogue Taiwan ran this beautiful but hard-hitting photo-shoot in their January 2025 edition as an “elegy to overconsumption”

Fashion as art drives a global business model that most visibly displays the excesses, and technologies, of our age. There is almost no textile, no shape, no embellishment too wild, too beautiful, for a designer and maker somewhere to fashion. At the same time, all humans require some kind of cover, from those in tropical forests requiring only the most simple covering for modesty and protection from thorns, to NASA astronauts and Olympic athletes requiring incredibly technical garments to perform their work. Since ancient times humans wore furs, leather, and simple woven fabrics made with wool and plant fibres for protection and later as adornment,

##to our cotton t-shirts, hemp jeans, silk and linen clothes

But with increasing use of petroleum-based plastics to manufacture cheap textiles – globally, about 60% of fabric used for clothing is synthetic (and not biodegradable), manufacturers churn out increasing quantities of cheap clothing. The low cost encourages faster consumption and discarding, and in wealthy countries, textile and apparel (T&A) waste has become an enormous burden.

What we wear is a fundamental aspect of our humanity – we cover our fragile nakedness, express ourselves, comply with societal norms, and strive for beauty…

Where is our obsession with Fashion taking us all?

The need for something new and exciting to wear, for an event, an interview, or just to feel good about ourselves, has become a global obsession. And the post-event residue of once-worn cheaply made fast fashion, is literally burying us in polyesters.

Ports in Ghana, Burkina Faso or Côte d’Ivoire in Africa, and Chile, South America, have become dumping grounds for Europe’s unwanted recycled and donated clothes. This growing waste stream is pouring into informal second-hand clothes markets like Kantamanto, where 15 million imported items per week arrive by ship. Locals attempt to sort and monetise the waste by remaking and selling on any useable items, creating jobs for designers, makers, sellers, carriers, market staff. This is in direct competition to local textile and clothing manufacturers, threatening jobs in more formal businesses.

But 40 percent of the imported textiles and apparel (T&A) is unusable, dumped in landfill near the port spilling onto the beaches. These cairns of imported rubbish catch fire easily, and leach poisons, a dystopian future of fashion suggested by the Vogue Photographer Zhong Lin.

As Vogue Taiwan Editor-in-Chief Sun Yi said: “Overconsumption itself, and its impact on the earth, has caused environmental degradation, resource depletion, damage to ecosystems, and accelerated climate change. This idea, through the perspective of our long-term photography partner Zhong Ling, has given rise to a new prophecy about future habitats:

in a world where living land is limited due to rising sea levels, we become seasonal nomads, constantly migrating due to unpredictable weather. The plants and animals we once relied on for survival have disappeared, and when the soil cannot support life, we have to cultivate green plants on our bodies. We begin to carry our homes on our backs like snails.”

Ghana problem – tackling T&A waste

Credits for original article (here)

APAC Editorial Director: Leslie Sun
Photographer: Zhong Lin
Model: Zoe Fang
Stylist and Managing Fashion Editor: Chen Yu
Features Director and Text: Nicole Lee
Makeup: Sting Hsieh
Hair: Miley Shen
Gaffer: Yuanling Wang
Set Design: Setsation Studio
Producer: Nelly Yang
Zoe Fang身著黑色仿舊高跟襪靴 BALENCIAGA

May 30, 2025
The Embroiderer’s story

Traditional Wedding outfit. Wafaa Abu Gulmee, Palestine, 2020, shared on Unesco.org

A young girl sits on the stone steps of her home, watching her mother, and other female family members, create the traditional Palestinian handcraft of “tatreez” (hand embroidery). They sit with balls of bright embroidery thread in baskets, stitching on local cotton or linen or an older garment, painstakingly small cross stitches in bright colours, across the bodices, in panels for sleeves and on the hems of their skirts. The visible record of their love for their land and storytelling of their shared history, appears in the motifs, olive trees, buildings and local fauna and flora.

Jamileh and Nazmieh Salim are two of six sisters, embroider for Inaash in Mar Elias refugee camp in Lebanon

The traditional Palestinian “thobe “(long loose fitting dress), was worn for centuries, in villages near Jerusalem, and through Gaza in Ramallah, and Bethlehem. Before the colonisation and now destruction of Palestine, the choice and combination of motifs, colours, and style of embroidery (tatreez) on a woman’s thobe could link her to a very specific village and region, a personal visual ethnography.

Capture from Unesco video celebrating Palestinian Tatreez

Incorporating traditional Palestinian foods, flora, architecture and scenes of daily life, designs use colours and form to indicate a wearers regional identity and home place, and marital status. Tatreez was recognised by Unesco on their Intangible Cultural Heritage List.

Bethlehem, a center for design and a popular pilgrimage town since ancient times, is famous for rich and distinctive use of couch stitching, “tahriri” or “taqsireh”, involving laying a heavier cord using gold or silver thread in an intricate pattern. This style of embroidery is highly valued across Palestine and by discerning buyers online, especially for weddings.

After the 1948 Nakba many Palestinian families were uprooted, and the traditional designs connected women to their history and their home places. After the Palestinian flag was banned, its colours were specifically embroidered onto clothing. Political struggles and resistance to the Occupation appear through colours of the Palestinian flag as well as doves and other symbolism. Palestinian women literally wear their resistance and activism as beautiful and often inherited, refreshed dresses.

Palestinian heritage garment, patched, with embroidery, presentation at Courtauld Galleries by Rachel Dedman

The craft of tatreez reflects Palestine’s long history of beautiful clothes. Embroiderers throughout the West Bank still create hand-stitched items and Palestinian sellers market fine crafted home decor items, larger embroidered panels for clothing, and full thobes, exquisite as celebration or wedding garments, on sites like Etsy and Pinterest.

Exquisite embroidered thobe, possibly a Palestinian wedding dress, for rent on Etsy

Yasmeen Mjalli, the designer at Nol Collective, also supports embroiderers in Palestine creating modern tatreez designs, to sell on the global marketplace. She also supports local clothing upcyling project souk samara. She helped preserve handweaving of traditional Majdalawi fabric, a 100% cotton element of traditional Palestinian dress for centuries. Originally from the demolished town of al Majdal in Gaza, one of the last remaining master weavers was able to recently move to safe premises and continue the craft, with funds raised by selling traditional clothes online.

Denim jacket with up-cycled tatreez piece from a vintage Palestinian thobe, made by souk samara, “local Palestinian brand from Nablus, giving fraying vintage thobs a second life”.

Action :

do confirm that any purchase of tatreez work will directly support a Palestinian family, especially if you are buying a preloved garment which was a much valued family heirloom. Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and elsewhere use these traditional skills to support their families.

Additional References:

https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/the-art-of-embroidery-in-palestine-practices-skills-knowledge-and-rituals-01722

https://www.unesco.org/en/fieldoffice/ramallah/palestinian-embroidery

Book by Rachel Dedman “Stitching the Intifada: Embroidery and Resistance in Palestine” https://www.commonthreadspress.co.uk/products/stitching-the-intifada-embroidery-and-resistance-in-palestine

Talk by Rachel Dedman on the links between Embroidery and Resistance in Palestine : https://courtauld.ac.uk/whats-on/material-power-embroidery-dress-and-resistance-in-palestine/

https://www.inaash.org/pages/our-embroiders

https://nolcollective.com/pages/our-world

May 30, 2025
The complex story of textile recycling
Europe has a strategy for sustainable and Circular textiles

That shiny new top for a special night out, or fresh bright towel in the hotel room, or soft pastel no-iron sheets in the guest room, all have one thing in common – they get old, and ugly, and wear out. And existing recycling has limited options for this – despite being told to put old things in the correct recycling bin, it cannot all be recycled sustainably.

If other options have been exhausted and it cannot be reused, repaired, refurbished, remanufactured, repurposed or recycled, then basic materials should be recovered. With polyester for example, chemical recycling is an option (dependent on the mixture of fibres involved). The process is technically complex, and a lot of waste material escapes.

Image courtesy of The Ocean Cleanup, working to clear the Pacific Garbage Patch

PET (polyethylene terephthalate, a kind of polyester, used for bottles, trays, and fabric) is more recycled than most plastics, about 50% in Europe. However, only about 17% (in 2022) of that recycled PET material becomes clean new bottles, the rest becomes plastic packaging and mixed fibre clothing (recycled PET packaging/trays and mixed fibre polyester textiles, are not themselves recycled much) or is lost during in the recycling process.

Eunomia and Zero Waste Europe Report on Recycling of PET (Feb 2022)

So up to 63% of PET is lost each cycle as waste, see graph above – and the 17% recycled material becoming new water bottles, is reduced in future cycles in the same way. There is still huge value in recycling all clear plastics, but the current non-circular process requires substantial virgin/new PET inputs each cycle.

Recycling of mixed fibres like poly-cottons is more difficult. Researchers experimenting with chemical processing to separate mixed fibres for reuse, are successful with small batches processing uncontaminated pre-consumer waste like offcuts from manufacturing. These complex chemical processes involve heat, rewashing, and manual sorting with high energy inputs making them technically less “sustainable” in many cases, than virgin cotton or polyester, depending on a number of factors.

Scaling the process is complicated since post-consumer textiles sourced from mixed recycling collections, may be contaminated with metallic dyes, chemical coatings like fireproofing, hidden fasteners, and unlabelled additional fibre content even with careful sorting. The risk from even minor contaminations, and heavy resource consumption, limits scaling (Marusic (2024), Gusein (2025)).

Reju – polyester made from textiles, for textiles.

A denim factory in Bangladesh invested in mechanical reprocessing to turn pre-consumer waste, offcuts from manufacturing, into fibre ready for reweaving, close to 100% re-use. But this could not be scaled to process post-consumer waste, due to contamination.

To move towards full circularity, policy change and funding are needed. The EU proposed Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) policy requires textiles to be clearly “labelled” (even at a chemical level) so source, and content, are known, making more complex recovery, and recycling, possible. In addition, a fee collected from textile manufacturers could cover end-of-life recovery/recycling costs. Systemiq (Hermann et al 2025) calculate that Europe could be recycling ten times more polyester by 2030.

PET bottles recycled into pellets, then spun into yarns, becoming wearable textiles (Image: Eurofins website)

Until EPR policy enables easy consumer-level recycling of clothingwhere you just check the label to know where to recycle, innovations in testing of fibres that confirm the exact fibers used in manufacturing, enable better separation for processing, but are costly and not currently available to consumers. The lack of information about our clothing make-up means a lot of “wishcycling” happens – putting items in the wrong recycling bins.

More Information from GreenBusinessJournal
- Average life of a workwear uniform is two years.
- Currently only 1% of textiles consumed in the UK are recycled.¹
- Every year, the UK produces over half a million tonnes of polyester textile waste, and households throw away 300,000 tonnes of clothing.²
- Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) or Polyester, is the most common thermoplastic polymer resin of the polyester family, used in clothing fibres, liquid and food containers, and thermoforming for manufacturing.
- A tonne of new polyester clothing creates over 20 tonnes CO2e/T.
- The UK currently has no textile polyester recycling systems. The only option is landfill or incineration.
- No worn post-consumer polyester textiles are currently recycled.
Action:
- Use less plastic, generally.
- Buy less non-recyclable materials (like mixed fibre clothing, polystyrene, and bright coloured plastic homeware) – then trying to “wishcycle” it away (thanks Sam). It never goes away, it either gets incinerated, or goes to landfill.
- Keep recycling carefully! Your clean uncontaminated recyclables in the specified containers at official collection points are very useful to organisations developing circular material use systems.
- In the UK, check for specific recycling options and locations here: https://www.recyclenow.com/recycling-locator
  – In Portugal, here: https://www.ondereciclar.pt/
References

Grant, A. et al. (2022) ‘How circular is PET?’, Zero Waste Europe, 16 February. Available at: https://zerowasteeurope.eu/library/how-circular-is-pet/ (Accessed: 29 May 2025).

ANDRITZ (2025) Sustainable fashion: ANDRITZ tearing line starts up at Pacific Jeans, Bangladesh, Andritz AG Newsroom. Available at: https://www.andritz.com/newsroom-en/nonwoven-and-textile/2025-05-14-pacific-jeans-group (Accessed: 29 May 2025).

‘The climate impact of chemical recycling technologies’ (2020) Quantis, 30 November. Available at: https://quantis.com/reports/the-climate-impact-of-chemical-recycling-technologies/ (Accessed: 29 May 2025).

Strategy for textiles – European Commission (2022) Official European Commission – TCLF (Textiles, clothing, leather and footwear) industries. Available at: https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/sectors/textiles-ecosystem/strategy-textiles_en (Accessed: 29 May 2025).

Plastics and the circular economy (2019) len MacArthur Foundation. Available at: https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/plastics-and-the-circular-economy-deep-dive (Accessed: 29 May 2025).

Gusein, S. (2025) Does the Circular Story Still Hold Up When You Do the Math? Shivam Gusain, Substack. Available at: https://substack.com/home/post/p-163767835 (Accessed: 29 May 2025).

Marusic, K. (2024) Q&A: Director of sustainability at Eastman Chemical Company talks chemical recycling – The Daily Climate, Daily Climate. Available at: https://www.dailyclimate.org/industrial-chemical-recycling-2667644755/particle-1 (Accessed: 29 May 2025).

Hermann, S. et al. (2025) ‘The Textile Recycling Breakthrough: Why policy must lead the scale-up of polyester recycling in Europe’, Systemiq. Available at: https://www.systemiq.earth/reports/the-textile-recycling-breakthrough/ (Accessed: 30 May 2025).
May 30, 2025