What Can A Person Wear?

I wear a lot of athleisure-wear -- because I like the way it look and fits, because it lasts forever, and because I do, in fact, engage in a lot of athletic activities. The main problem with most athleisure-wear is that it's made of plastic, and we now know that plastic clothes are causing tiny plastic fibers to pollute everything from oceans to breast milk.

A few weeks ago I had a minor freak-out about my plastic clothes and the plastic microfibers. There are so many horrible things happening, but I think my brain fastened on this one because the causal link between me and the outcome is so direct: I wear the clothes, I wash the clothes, the tiny fibers fly out into the world and ruin everything. I could stop doing that.

If you follow this issue at all, you know it is not simple. Producing cotton uses a ton of natural resources and energy; raising sheep for wool is an eco-disaster as well as often cruel to the sheep. I looked up silk and OK, how did I not know that making silk requires dissolving massive numbers of silkworms in boiling water?  

Of course, you can get around production problem by buying used items. I could go to thrift stores and consignment shops and try to find the few things with all natural fibers, and just wear those, and I could learn how to mend and patch them so they don't have to be tossed as they start to wear out, as natural fibers so easily do.

I could do that, but I have not done that. Why not? I could say I've been busy, a stock answer that is also true, but I think the real reason goes deeper. The truth is that I avoid natural fabrics because I think they won't look good on me.

Natural fibers are mostly non-stretchy. I'm not super curvy, but I am moderately curvy. My experience with natural fabric clothing is that it either hangs like a giant pillowcase over my body or it bunches and binds in the ugliest way around my breasts, hips, and stomach.

Now, I know the answer to this as well: tailoring. You read any serious piece about fashion and fit and they will tell you that to look good, you have to get your clothes tailored to fit your body by someone who knows what they are doing.

I can imagine a world in which that is a standard activity that I could engage in, but our world is not that world. Last time I wanted pants made shorter, most places I went wanted me to have pinned them up myself beforehand. I found a place that would do the fitting part, and it took weeks, a couple of follow-up nudge calls, and several trips there to get it all done. Plus, what if I gain or lose a few pounds? Am I going to get things perfectly fitted around my torso then be unable to wear them a month later? Ugh.

Put in starkest terms, where we end up with this is that I could dress more sustainably by buying and wearing used, shapeless items, and just not looking good.

If you put it that way, my choices seem ridiculous and monstrous. Am I seriously choosing to contribute to the destruction of the natural environment because I want to look cuter?

But I am obviously not alone in making these choices. Almost all clothes now have plastic in them. This morning I dug an old denim jacket out of my closet -- genius, I thought, not even requiring a purchase! And not only did it not look good -- it turned out to be part cotton and part elastane.  

In the short term, I decided to buy a couple of Guppyfriend bags -- bags you can wash your plastic clothing in. You put the clothes in the bag in the washing machine, the fibers get caught in the bag, like little pieces of lint, and then you can collect them and put them in the garbage so they won't go into the wastewater. At least, that is the idea. The bags are taking forever to ship, so I don't know how they will work.

It's a lame solution, like so many modern solutions. The plastic fibers will still be out there -- they'll just be in the marginally more appropriate place of a landfill rather than our drinking water.