Style Solutions: Easy tips for building a capsule wardrobe

As the cost of living rises, we all need some clever ideas for ways to save money – or make it go further – and that extends to updating your wardrobe too. In her new book The Re:Fashion Wardrobe: Sew Your Own Stylish, Sustainable Clothes, writer Portia Lawrie explores the rise of the re-use ethos in fashion, with tips for altering or deconstructing clothes make them new again.

Here, she shares how to perfect your own capsule wardrobe – and how to repurpose those pieces you may no longer love, rather than throwing them away.

Why a capsule wardrobe? Sewing using textiles already in circulation can significantly reduce the impact on the environment. However, a sustainable, handmade wardrobe is not just about using sustainable materials; it’s also about having clothing that can be worn, reused and altered year after year, and not discarded after a season or two.

The most sustainable garment is one that gets worn over and over again. We should be making clothes that earn their place in our wardrobes by working hard for years to come. Enter the capsule wardrobe.

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What is it?

The term, coined by British fashion icon Susie Faux in the 1970s, refers to a collection of around 30 practical pieces of clothing that, when put together, create a complete seasonal wardrobe. Capsules focus on incorporating good-quality garments that are versatile, coordinate well together, and fit the needs of individual lifestyles and personal aesthetics.

There are no wardrobe orphans in this clothing utopia. Everything works together, and everything goes with something else: three tops and three types of bottoms in three different colours deliver more outfits with more ease (and less stress), than three rails of unplanned, disparate garments acquired (or made) in haste ever can.

Quite simply, a capsule wardrobe enables you to achieve more with less. This is one of the central pillars of reducing the impact our consumption has on this planet.

The theory of a sustainable capsule

A capsule is not a one-size-fits-all, everybody-needs these-precise-garments-in-their-wardrobe type of affair. It will be different for each of us, and it will change and evolve over time. It also takes time to build and curate a capsule, especially if you are making clothes rather than buying them.

So, it’s important to stress here that I’m definitely and unequivocally not advocating throwing out all your clothes today, so you can re-make or replace them using pre-loved textiles. But the demands of a capsule wardrobe could be met using textiles already in circulation, combined with skills as a maker.

A capsule wardrobe can be broken down into ‘mini capsules’. These are different collections of garments that address different needs, with a few key pieces that straddle more than one mini capsule. Examples of these might be:

Separate work and leisure mini capsules – both include the same classic white shirt and blazer that can be styled formally for work, or casually with jeans for leisure

Separate summer and winter capsules – both contain the same simple top that can be styled with shorts for the summer or layered under knitwear for winter.

Besides reducing your environmental impact, the well-planned and well-executed capsule wardrobe will save you money, time and stress.

We all need to work towards shifting our fashion and fabric consumption towards a capsule wardrobe that is first based on garments we already own and wear regularly – the foundation of sustainability is to use what you have first and foremost.

We then look at what we have, identify the ‘gaps’ that remain, and fill these with ’new’ items that fall into one of the following categories (listed in order of sustainability):

• Refashioned from what you already own but don’t currently wear
• Garments bought from a pre-loved marketplace (such as brick and mortar charity/thrift/op stores, or online secondhand sites such as Depop, Etsy, Ebay and Vinted).
• Garments refashioned/made from textiles or garments sourced from the pre-loved marketplace (see point above for sources)
• Garments made from ethically and sustainably sourced yardage*
• Ethically and sustainably sourced garments that are ready-made.

An important note: Products that are ethically and sustainably sourced and made with fair-wage labour understandably cost more than the cheaply produced products that have become our norm.

This can be a very real barrier for those of us without much disposable income. While ethically and sustainably sourced goods are a more expensive option, hopefully over time the money saved by sourcing pre-loved textiles can be put towards occasional, higher-quality, more ethical new purchases when needed.

Sorting your current wardrobe

The first step is to edit what you already have. Keep what you wear and purge what you don’t. Depending on the size of your wardrobe, this could take a few hours or a few days! But time committed will pay dividends later on.

Pull everything out of your wardrobe and lay it all on the bed. Go through the pile one item at a time and sort as follows:

• Items you currently wear at least weekly (and ideally love) – put back in your wardrobe
• Items you wear regularly during other seasons (and ideally love) – put back in your wardrobe
• Everything else, put in an ’excess clothes’ pile.

Go through your excess clothes and sort them into two piles:

• Clothes with a high resale value – you can sell these in the pre-loved marketplace to recoup costs, swap them, gift them, or donate them to charities for resale or to those on low incomes.
• Clothes without a high resale value – these will usually include everything that is damaged or not from a sought-after brand. These can be donated if wearable, or recycled/refashioned if not.

Now go through the second, low-value pile of clothes and pull out everything made from a good-quality fabric. Set these to one side. Ignore fit, damage, style, etc. and look at the fabrics, paying particular attention to natural fibres. In order of preference, in terms of quality and sustainability a rough guide would be:

• Denim, cotton, linen, wool, silk – these are your diamonds
• Viscose, modal, lyocell, bamboo – these are your gold
• Synthetics like polyester, nylon, acrylic – these are your silver.

Congratulations – you just boosted your fabric stash without spending any money whatsoever! Everything that you pulled out is now a fabric resource that you can use for refashioning. Move it to be stored alongside your sewing supplies (because that’s where it belongs).

A note on synthetics

In my opinion, incorporating synthetics into your wardrobe is fundamentally different when they have been refashioned as opposed to bought new. The latter contributes to consumer demand while the former stops the stuff that’s already out there going to landfill.

There is an argument, I believe, in retaining synthetics and reusing them for as long as possible (while laundering responsibly) because the absolutely last thing we want for any fabric is for it to go to waste – and this is especially true of synthetics, which take much longer to break down. So, don’t rule out synthetics if you think you can make use of them.

This is an edited extract from The Re:Fashion Wardrobe: Sew Your Own Stylish, Sustainable Clothes by Portia Lawrie, $55. Published by Search Press, Distributed by Bateman Books. Available from April 1.

Portia will also be hosting an online upcycling event and competition from April 17 – May 14 – find out more on her Instagram, @portialawrie