Nothing New November & the Launch of Our New Blog

This year, Sustainable Style is launching this brand new blog as a way to engage with and educate the St Andrews student community about the many issues surrounding sustainable fashion that are so very important to us. If anything, the extended break we had away from St Andrews gave us a chance to really consider and prioritise what we as an organisation wanted to focus on. It seemed that all we were known for were our big thrift fayres, and that all we were doing was organising these big thrift fayres. And while there was certainly nothing wrong with that, I think we all felt we could be doing more. All it seemed we were doing was encouraging people to consume more clothes they didn't really need, to buy a secondhand H&M jumper because it was there and it was cheap rather than out of a desire to think and act sustainably.

    And that's where Nothing New November, the campaign we're launching this month, comes in. We as a community are pledging to not purchase or acquire any new item of clothing for the entire month of November. We know this pledge may look different for everyone, but what we really want to focus on is considering our consumptive practices and how we could possibly be cutting back, even in shopping secondhand. There are all kinds of facets to this issue I could really get into here — the gentrification of charity shops being a big one — but hopefully we'll be able to share more in depth about these issues in the future on the platform we're establishing here.

    Over the next few weeks, we're hoping to encourage you to love the wardrobe you already have, make it last through mending and other upcycling techniques, and to see donation as a last resort when it comes to how you evaluate your clothes. Sustainability, especially it comes to fashion, is a personal journey; we're all starting this month off coming from different places and levels of interest. But we are so excited to be in this together, and to really use this time to love what we have and only focus on what we truly need.