These books make it easy and fun to choose more compassionate clothing, even if you are on a budget and have to shop on the high street. Most people would love to wear more ethical fashion, but can’t afford to spend £200 on a pair of organic cotton or hemp trousers. So read these books to help you create a capsule wardrobe on your budget, using innovative ideas. See the fashion category for more ideas and places you can buy everything from slow fashion to vegan shoes and bags.
The Conscious Closet shows how to build an ethical capsule wardrobe. Learn of fast fashion’s hidden toll on the planet, garment workers and ourselves. Inspired by her own journey of getting off the fast-fashion treadmill, Elizabeth L Cline shows how to change the world, through personal style.
How to Quit Fast Fashion offers 100 simple tips to help you dress more sustainably. The fashion industry produces more carbon emissions than international flights and maritime shipping combined, and is the world’s second largest consumer of water. Yet 85% of all textiles end up in landfills each year. Find info on what the jargon on clothing labels mean and look at new solutions, like fashion rentals and how to make clothes last longer. You’ll also learn how to host a clothing swap and find a reliable tailor!
How to Break Up with Fast Fashion is a book to help reduce the estimated 300,000 tons of used clothing that ends up on UK landfills each year. Fast fashion is bad news for the planet, our brains and our bank balances. It’s time for an overhaul. Journalist Lauren Bravo loves clothes, but has called time on her affair with fast fashion, and helps you do the same. From clothes swaps to charity shops, this book is full of refreshing honesty and realistic advice, to inspire you to repair, recycle and give unwanted items a new lease of life. Because no outfit should cost the earth.
Fashion Conscious looks at ways to prevent the million tons of clothes thrown away each year in the UK, which leads to around £140 million of fashion on landfills. We have the power to change the world, through our clothes: reusing, swapping and mending, and knowing how to choose wisely, when buying something new. Includes profiles of sustainable fashion brand.
Dress With Sense is a fun colourful book on how to dress ethically, without the preachy stuff: Buy, Wear, Care and Dispose. Each chapter includes tips and case studies, and it has tips on ethical fashion labels, fabrics, certificates to trust, renting, swapping & recycling clothes.
Stitched Up is a short-listed book that delves into the world of fashion, to reveal what is behind the clothes we wear. The book explores consumerism and advertising, to reveal the interests that benefit from exploitation. Find out how the relationship between the planet and with our bodies is so damaging. Why does ‘size 0’ exist, and what is the reality of working life for models?
What is one rack of less exploitative clothes, compared to 50 billion pieces churned out each year? We need to overhaul the entire system, not rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic. Tansy Hoskins
