We Are What We Wear

I’m obsessed with what we wear. I spend hours every day thinking about fashion, convinced our relationship with it contributes to social and environmental breakdown.

What We Wear Will Impact The Planet

Why do I think this? In a fractured, globalized world, we’ve become disconnected from one another and from nature. We now see our kin and nature purely as ingredients for wealth creation. The way we make, and use clothes has become a key driver of inequality, pollution, and carbon emissions.

At a time of these crises, you may think me superficial for caring about fashion. But once upon a time, we bought a few clothes we truly loved, and only the ones we needed. We used them with care, and we repaired them. The ubiquitous, cheap polyester has allowed production and consumption of fashion to escalate. Driven by trends, marketing, and low prices, we buy, use, and throw away clothing to the extent that, every second, the equivalent of a rubbish truckload of clothes is burnt or buried in landfill.

Not only has our fashion system created extraordinary amounts of clothing waste (large quantities of which are dumped in the global south), but its use of toxic chemicals and microplastic fibers pollutes soil and waterways. Worse, the global fashion system uses forced and slave labor in places without regulations and watchdog bodies.

Responsible consumption and production

How do we reframe our relationship with clothing? The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 12 is a good starting point. It provides a framework for responsible consumption and production. Among its targets, it promotes that everyone should have the necessary knowledge and awareness to adopt sustainable practices and live in balance with the environment.

It sounds quaint. But truly living in harmony with nature will require a serious reset and deep work. We need to shake habits of convenience; we need to buy less, use less, and, most challenging, we need to redesign the economy.

How are we going to achieve this?

We need to move forward with care. We must learn from the sustainable-fashion academics Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham, who argue that, “Care brings action for climate, biodiversity and social justice… It brings care for relationships, people, and other species into the foreground, paying attention to fashion practices, instead of products.”

We need to borrow from Taoism, the Chinese philosophy that emphasizes living in harmony with the world. We must be guided by the Japanese concept of mottainai: we need to respect everything, have gratitude, and not be wasteful.

When you need a T-shirt next, think carefully before you buy it. Do you know where it was made? Do you know which young woman was paid too little to stitch the pieces of fabric together? Or, will your purchase contribute meaningfully to someone’s life? Can you wear it often? Will you repair it?

Takeaway

I love how fashion has become a medium for me to explore ideas of transformation, of how to make better clothes with more sustainable materials, how to make the fashion economy benefit garment-workers, and how to encourage people to take more care of what they have.

What we wear is a reflection of how much we respect and care for one another, and for nature. We are what we wear.

Who is the author?

Jackie May is the founder and editor of Twyg, a South African non-profit media platform championing sustainable fashion, beauty, lifestyle, and design.

Back to the Earth

This article was featured in the 2025/26 Annual Bookazine edition of Longevity. You ou can also buy a digital copy at Zinio.com.

MAIN IMAGE CREDIT: Photo by Artificial Photography on Unsplash