I was fortunate to spend formative childhood years on a family farm in Otago, New Zealand, and have memories of mushrooming after rain with Nana and sitting on Great Grandma’s porch shelling peas from the field garden. These authentic slow food experiences have informed subsequent life choices.
It is a logical side-step in a diverse career across agricultural journalism and advocacy that I am now part of the slow fashion movement in Australia, sharing ways to extend the life of clothes and reduce our clothing footprint.
Slow fashion – as distinct from fast fashion – is based on principles similar to those of the slow food movement which is a conscious cultural choice to slow down and share local, seasonal food grown in sustainable ways.
According to Wikipedia, slow fashion represents the ‘sustainable’, ‘eco’, ‘green’, and ‘ethical’ fashion movements. There are many ways to engage in slow fashion including buying local artisan clothing or fair-trade labels, buying swapping and donating pre-loved and vintage clothing, choosing well-made classic styles, or the do-it-yourself options which include making, mending, refashioning and upcycling.
The 365-day Sew it Again project fits into the latter category – making a conscious choice to take time to reuse and restyle clothing which already exists in the world rather than always buying new.
Sew 311 involves mending (replacing the missing button on an opshop-found linen top). refashioning (hem of a home-made linen skirt shortened) and upcycling (cotton top has sleeves removed and sewn back together to become a scarf). Thanks to Bec, from the earlier Charters Towers workshop, for stitching the top/scarf together using my little travel sewing machine. As I went to purchase the cotton top at a Charters Towers opshop, the store manager gave it to me when she noticed it was coming apart at the shoulders and would otherwise be dumped. It feels good to breathe new life into a garment made from beautiful soft cotton that has been grown, spun and woven and is still in perfectly good condition. That’s what I enjoy about immersing in slow fashion.
