Waridis thoughts: sustainability starts in your closet

“I was questioning myself about how we can save the earth when we are producing, selling and buying nonstop. What came to my mind was that for human beings, a disaster has to happen, for us to act on problems that were there all along.


Now the topic of sustainability in the fashion industry is coming up very strongly, and in my opinion, big fashion companies take advantage of that and misuse the word sustainability. They create this so to say sustainable lines with organic materials and better working conditions, but the clothes are still being mass produced, and mass production is the main problem.
In Africa, we are always sustainable in making clothes, because we use what we have. We never had the resources to mass produce, we still don’t, and we should stay this way. Africa has never been about mass production but more about limitation. We have to work with the materials we get; this leads to African fashion being about uniqueness and sustainability. African designers are embracing all the leftovers that are poured into the continent. So Africa is always recycling and upcycling materials in the most sustainable way. One person’s trash can be another person’s treasure.

Making an impact on our environment starts with every one of us, in our home, in our closet. So what each one of us can do, to be a little more conscious: go to our closet, really look at our clothes, see what we have and how much we have. Think about how much clothes we have bought in the past years and that what we have now should be enough. Look at each blouse and each pair of pants, and be creative about how we can re-wear our old clothes instead of continually buying and searching for new stuff and supporting huge fashion companies that are polluting our planet. We should always keep in mind we need our planet more than it needs us.”

-Waridi Schrobsdorff

Picture via Unsplash by socialcut