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We all want to look great, but money is tight – how can you make the most of your appearance as your budget shrinks?
Buy with Style
- A sweatshirt is one the most versatile clothing items for people on a budget. Wear it alone, or with a T-shirt or Polo-shirt under it on cold days, or even under a shirt on really, really cold days. It can be worn with a jacket, when it will look more formal, or with jeans when it will seem more casual. You can tie it around your shoulders or your waist, to give you some variation in your clothing appearance if you don’t own that much.
- Picking two classic colours to work around for basic clothing items means that your clothing budget goes a lot further – grey and blue or black and brown, for example, as base colours for trousers, jackets, skirts and shoes means that around 80% of everything you buy can be worn in combination. Make those colours more unusual: green and pink, or red and white, and your clothing mix and match options drop to just 17%! You can keep those less common colours for T-shirts, sweatshirts and other casual clothing items where colour is much more acceptable.
Time and Space Management
- If you have shelves in your wardrobe, use them for jumpers, sweatshirts and t-shirts, organised according to one of the systems below.
- Take everything out of your wardrobe and drawers once a year and put it into four categories: keep, give away or sell, mend or pending. Keep is items you know you’re going to wear, give away or sell is stuff you no longer want, mend is all those shirts without buttons or jeans that need hemming that you’ve never got around to, and pending is stuff you haven’t worn recently but still like. That pending pile gets thirty days and if you haven’t been inspired to wear it by then, stick it on the give away or sell pile. Always try selling or swapping unwanted clothes before just giving them away.
- There are a variety of ways to organise your clothing – one is to hang and shelve it by purpose: work, casual, going-out, etc. This allows you to find items for the right occasion quickly. Or organise by colour, so hang all your black items, blue items etc in groups. This saves time when you get dressed in the morning because you can pick an outfit that’s colour coordinated without having to hunt through the rack for something you think should be there but is actually in the wash.
- Buy all your socks in the same colour and weight – then you never have to bother about matching them up – just chuck them in the drawer and move on!
Accessories
- Ties, belts and scarves should be classic or nothing, if you’re on a budget. Santa ties, pink belts and scarves with cartoon characters are all bad investments, as you can only wear them once or twice before people start thinking that (a) you don’t own any others and (b) you don’t know when the joke is over. Navy ties, brown leather belts and classic polka dot scarves are always in fashion and nobody will notice if you wear them every other day for a year!
- Take your shoes off as soon as you get home. Then you will always know where they are (inside the front door) and you’ll keep your home cleaner because you won’t track dust and dirt through the house and if you put shoe trees in your shoes they will last three times longer.
The latest research by Mintel into clothing sizes reveals that sales of plus-sized men’s clothing have increased by 40% over the past five years. This growth in XL and above sizes is partly due to spiralling levels of obesity: it’s predicted that nearly a third of men will be obese by 2013 and 90% of all UK adults are expected to be overweight or obese by 2050. The market for men’s clothes sized XL or larger is now worth £1.7 billion, up from £1.2 billion in 2003. The other driver for XL clothing sales is the modern desire to wear loose clothing such as T-shirts that are not tucked in and hoodies that have drooped shoulders and can fit at least two tees underneath.
DEFRA also reveals textiles have become the fastest-growing waste product in the UK. Nearly 74% of the two million tonnes of clothes bought in the UK each year end up in landfills. Meanwhile, the poor quality of the cheap fashion that is sold in cut price stores has destroyed the recycled textile industry. Cheap imported fashion, like t-shirts for a pound, has removed any possibility of selling second-hand tees at charity shops. And very little of the material that can’t be sold, can’t be recycled either less than 4% of the two million tonnes, around 13% is incinerated and the remainder is either sent abroad or buried in British landfill.
To stop this wasteful behaviour, DEFRA wants us to buy less often, buy better quality and take more care of our clothing. Their suggestions for better clothing behaviour will be revealed in February and are likely to include a focus on buying pure cotton t-shirts, rather than cotton/synthetic blends, for everyday wear and keeping mixed fibres for performance clothing like sportswear; investing in clothing that can be layered: T-shirts under hoodies, sweatshirts under jackets, rather than buying individual garments to be worn alone; and not buying complete holiday wardrobes cheaply that will not be worn again when you return.
Most people now accept that the climate change debate has shifted from whether we need to act to what we must do and how best to do it – and the clothing industry has been in the forefront of both innovation (organic and sustainable clothing) and criticism (sweatshops and carbon footprints). The Climate Change Summit 2008 is notable for the input that is being given by big hitters in the garment and textile industries. Taking place at the Regent’s Park Marriot Hotel between 12 and 12 February, the Summit offers delegates opportunities to explore the enormous changes that lie ahead and aims to help them discover how to make a virtue out of necessity.
Key topics include: climate initiatives that achieve both environmental and business objectives; designing climate change messages to win the support of sceptical consumers (in other words, how to communicate with your customers without being accused of ‘greenwashing’); a complete guide to using offsets and taking advantage of carbon trading; ways to report a company’s climate change objectives and achievements for maximum impact; and most crucially – how to manage the many risks of climate change. Speakers who have a major stake in the garment and textile industries include:
- Anabel Drese from Timberland
- Mike Barry, Head of Corporate Social Responsibility for Marks & Spencer
- Philip Charles Gamett, Director of the Continental Clothing Company.
National insights will be provided by:
- Jane Milne , Director of Business Environment at The British Retail Consortium
- Ellen Gladders, Manager for the Community and the Environment at Tesco.
Learn more at: http://www.ethicalcorp.com/climate/
International Conference Delegates courtesy of Oxfam
At Polo-shirts we are doing what we can to help protect the environment.
Minimum Additional Packaging.
We avoid unnecessary packaging. We have stopped individually packaging our T-shirts, polo-shirts, sweatshirts and other items. We use the minimum packaging to protect customer orders and to keep items clean. So normally each order or carton will contain only one inner bag. Our garments do not carry unnecessary swing tags.
Recycling.
Wherever possible we will reuse supplier cartons to send out customer orders. In this way cartons are reused rather than discarded.
Reduced Prices – Reduced Emissions.
We encourage our customers to buy in bulk and enjoy the benefits of quantity discount scheme. By buying and delivering in bulk there are fewer journeys required by the royal mail / courier companies which reduces carbon emissions.
Organic T-shirts.
We now offer organic T-shirts. Buying Organic T-shirts help to protect the environment. Organic cotton production avoids the use of harmful chemicals and pesticides which pollute the environment. Our men’s and women’s organic T-shirts have been produced without the use of these chemicals and bleaches.
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