How to ‘Make do and Mend’ your Wardrobe with our Tailoring Services
For the past few years, British shoppers have been encouraged to buy less and buy better, especially when it comes to clothing and fashion. More people are now curating investment pieces for their wardrobe and working with a cost-per-wear thought process that is starting to replace the fast fashion and throw-away culture that has been dominant for years.
The cost per wear (CPW) approach is now becoming so popular that a British women’s magazine now uses an algorithm to help fashion lovers to calculate their CPW before deciding to spend out on an expensive piece for their wardrobe!
However, what happens when their favourite outfits, inevitably, suffer from wear and tear or some accidental damage? These days more people are learning the value of ‘make do and mend’ and are increasingly turning to companies such as American Dry Cleaning who have staff highly skilled in tailoring, repairs and invisible mending.
We pride ourselves in also using gentle, eco-friendly dry cleaning solutions that help to preserve the integrity of the fabrics of your clothes without causing damage to the environment.
Bringing back the WWII culture
Since the 1980s and the introduction of ‘fast fashion,’ UK shoppers have been buying more clothes than any other country in Europe, shaking off the ‘make do and mend’ culture of World War II. Our desire for cheap, on-trend clothes means fashion is costing the earth.
However, critics of fast fashion have shown what impact overconsumption of fast fashion and waste has on the environment with 300,000 metric tons of textiles being binned each year in the UK. 20% of this waste ends up in landfill and 80% goes to incinerators.
The House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee published a report stating that: “Textile production contributes more to climate change than international aviation and shipping combined, consumes lake-sized volumes of fresh water and creates chemical and plastic pollution. Synthetic fibres are being found in the deep sea, Arctic sea ice, fish and shellfish.”
Our team at American Dry Cleaning Company are committed to helping the environment as much as we can, and one way we can do this is to encourage more of our customers to adopt a ‘make do and mend’ approach to their clothing and make good use of our expert tailoring and repair services to help keep perfectly good clothes from going to waste.
Fixing Fashion and saving your clothes
The Fixing Fashion report from the UK Government states that we must end the era of throwaway fashion. They suggest doing this by making retailers responsible for waste, which may see more high-quality clothing being produced and sold that costs more to buy, but is made to last longer.
As individuals, we can also help by reducing our own carbon fashion footprint by choosing to buy investment pieces for our wardrobe that can be worn for longer and be easily repaired or tailored to meet our needs for years instead of mere weeks or months.
As the most sustainable garments are the ones we already own, we can extend the active life of our existing wardrobe by around 50% and save: 8% carbon, 10% water, 4% waste per metric ton of clothing through repairing and tailoring our garments rather than throwing them away.
So if you have outfits that need repairs made, or you need a garment tailoring to fit you better, then do not hesitate to contact us to see how we can help.
