For many, the closet clear-out is a January rite of passage, but social media trends geared towards minimalism and ‘underconsumption’ are spurring even more to declutter.
The problem is: what do you do with the clothes you don’t want anymore?
There’s no good place for them to go. While the ecosystem for reusing high-value and luxury items is solid, fashion still doesn’t have the right infrastructure to deal with lower value textile waste, says Francois Souchet, managing director of advisory firm Swanstant and former lead of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Make Fashion Circular initiative. Meanwhile, textile collection, sorting and recycling is heavily flawed and stalled by a lack of support. In reality, the trend towards decluttering — and the cottage industry cropping up to encourage it — only highlights the gaps in fashion’s circular ecosystem. However, well-intentioned, closet clear-outs result in more used clothing filling resale sites, thrift stores, donation centres, garment markets in the Global South and landfills.
“There is no one-stop-shop solution right now, so the process requires a lot of personal research,” Souchet notes. “How do we make sure that decluttering doesn’t lead to more problems?”
Recent tie-ups between social media platforms and digital-first retailers are designed to remove the friction from shopping. But sustainability experts say that friction serves an important purpose.
Closet clear-outs characterised by angst
In late 2023, The Or Foundation launched its Speak Volumes campaign, calling on fashion brands to disclose their production volumes, a necessary step towards understanding the full scale of overproduction. On the flip side is overconsumption, which is why the non-profit recently invited consumers to take part in the campaign, too, by counting the number of items in their wardrobes. For many, this will be the first step towards decluttering, but that isn’t the main aim of the challenge. “It’s a cheeky way of saying to brands: ‘If I can do this, why can’t you?’” explains fair fashion campaigner Venetia La Manna, who says she found the challenge both confronting and constructive. “Seeing the piles and piles of clothing on my floor was quite overwhelming; 179 garments is a lot for one person to own. It’s held me very accountable — I don’t want to go over that number now.”
British Vogue senior sustainability and features editor Emily Chan also took to the challenge, and counted a total of 167 garments (not including underwear, nightwear, swimwear, sportswear or accessories). “If I manage to find new homes for all the pieces I’ve planned to shed, the figure will be closer to 90,” she writes, noting that the lack of satisfactory avenues for textile waste leave many declutterers in limbo. “I put off doing a closet clear-out for years because I was worried about my cast-offs ending up in landfill. In the end, I gave a lot of my pieces to local friends via Whatsapp, as it was less time-consuming than listing everything online. I’m still selling a few of my more valuable pieces online and will donate a selection to the charity Give Your Best, while the rest will go to Thrift Plus [a service that resells unwanted clothes on behalf of its users].”
It’s not unusual for closet clear-outs to become a source of angst for the more conscious consumer. “The whole process is deeply associated with guilt — the guilt of the initial acquisition and the acknowledgement that it could become someone else’s problem,” says Sustainable Wardrobe author Sophie Benson. “Because of the increasing awareness and responsibility I’ve attached to the latter point, clearing out my wardrobe is a much slower process now.”
Imperfect infrastructure
Despite the growing popularity of closet clear-outs, and the cottage industry cropping up to facilitate them, even the most discerning consumers can struggle to find the right home for their unwanted pieces. Luxury consignment is reserved for top-tier brands, while resale platforms like Depop, Ebay, Thredup, Poshmark and Vinted — which either collect items to resell, or give users a platform to sell to their peers — can be time-consuming and ineffective.
When items don’t sell — a phenomenon any regular declutterer will be familiar with — there are some measures platforms can take to push them. Vinted offers paid features to boost visibility, including ‘wardrobe spotlight’ and ‘item bumps’. Sign of the Times discounts items until they sell, stopping them from getting lost in the algorithm by redirecting them to its outlet page. But no one has really cracked this yet.
A potential solution is swap shops, which are an extension of peer-to-peer resale growing in popularity amid the cost of living crisis. London’s Loanhood, co-founded by Jade McSorley and Lucy Hall, hosts regular free events across the capital, partnering with local councils, charities like Love Not Landfill, and businesses such as Selfridges and Yoox Net-a-Porter. Attendees can bring five items per swap, which they exchange for one or two tokens depending on the resale value. “It’s mostly the mid-level stuff that’s just taking up space,” says McSorley, plus the occasional Ganni dress or Dolce Gabbana bag, if people grow tired of waiting for online resale.
Items that aren’t swapped are carried over to the next event, or donated to local churches, fashion students and theatres. Less than 10 per cent of Loanhood’s total intake goes to trade, entering the textile waste stream and likely being exported, notes Hall. “It’s not always easy to redistribute products. People are just inundated with stuff.”
Some brands have also tried to get involved in swapping. British brand Toast runs regular swap shops, dubbed Toast Exchange, where customers can trade their old Toast items for other people’s. There is a higher threshold of quality control, and items can only be swapped for those of a similar value (at other swap shops, people can ‘stack’ multiple lower value credits to get something of a higher value).
Then, there are donations, which conscious consumers are actively trying to avoid, following reports that the majority of donations are exported rather than resold. Many charity shops are also flooded with fast fashion overstock thanks to brand partnerships and further low-value items donated by overconsuming individuals. “In my 20s, I would just put clothes in a bin bag, send them to a charity shop and consider that my good deed for the day,” says La Manna. “I wouldn’t do that now — I just know too much.”
Plugging the gaps
The paralysis consumers experience trying to rehome their items highlights significant gaps in the current circular fashion ecosystem. This “uncomfortable reality” raises the question of whether there is a responsible way to clear out your closet, says content creator Andrea Cheong, author of Why Don’t I Have Anything to Wear? and creator of the ‘Mindful Monday Method’, which helps people shop with the planet and their mental health in mind. “The first step of my method is a wardrobe audit and I ask people to really analyse the pile of clothes they don’t want. You learn how to shop from your mistakes. If you don’t learn something from it, that pile will never go down.”
Experts say the best way to stem the flow of decluttered clothes is to prevent overconsumption upfront. For consumers, this often starts with unsubscribing from brand mailing lists and unfollowing brands on social media, as well as influencers who peddle overconsumption. For brands, it means making better quality products designed with end of life in mind, taking responsibility for your items post-purchase and putting a stop to aggressive sales tactics. In order to build better infrastructure for circularity, brands also need to support globally accountable extended producer responsibility (EPR) regulations, adds La Manna. “Once we have the necessary legislation in place — and potentially caps on the number of clothes the biggest brands can produce annually — we will ultimately have fewer clothes being bought and disposed of by citizens.”
In lieu of big-picture infrastructure to ease their angst around decluttering, activists and conscious consumers are turning to small changes. One way is to, instead of purging, cycle old clothing items into storage so you can keep shopping your closet down the line. La Manna often shares “old outfit of the day” posts on her social media platforms, finding new ways to rewear old fast fashion items she would otherwise donate. Benson says she tries to find new homes for unwanted items in her local community, responding to more targeted calls for donations, like the charity Give Your Best, which won the Ebay Circular Fashion Fund for its efforts connecting pre-loved clothes with people experiencing clothing poverty.
In a bid to scale these efforts, community-based solutions are popping up. Former Extinction Rebellion activist Sara Arnold is part of the team behind OurCommon.Market, a European Cultural Foundation and Naturesave Trust-backed initiative, which aims to build a fashion ecosystem outside of the growth paradigm. This includes an online ‘common room’ where citizens can share fashion knowledge and an ‘atlas’ of commons-based initiatives for people to support in their local areas. In terms of decluttering solutions, it incorporates everything from mending and upcycling workshops to clothes swaps.
“Commons are micro-economies where people come together as a community to problem-solve the issues in their area,” explains Arnold. “Many of these initiatives don’t exist online, so we’re building the commons with local ambassadors. It really just comes down to building connections and slowing down.”
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