PANDORA SYKES: WHAT’S IN MY WARDROBE?

The fashion journalist ponders how to be a more conscious consumer

Influencers thrive on the new, driving a desire to shop – but what are the knock-on effects? The fashion journalist takes a look at her wardrobe to see how she can be a more conscious consumer

MY WARDROBE is one of a much richer woman than I am. It is bolstered by press discounts, sample sales, a nous for vintage and mostly – let’s be honest – freebies. In almost seven years in the fashion industry, I have grown from a twenty-something intern excited by free socks to a woman endowed with beautiful clothing way beyond her pay grade.

For the purpose of this piece, I have totted up my shopping list over six weeks: a pair of Doc Martens, a vintage jacket, a vintage belt, a Hunza G swimsuit and two broderie anglaise H&M blouses. Not bad for a woman working in fashion, right? Nothing too expensive, and look at all that vintage! Pat pat pat goes my hand on my back.

But consumption is not just fiscal; it is ethical. I may not have purchased my new dresses from Réalisation Par, Rouje, Gül Hürgel and Rixo London – gifts from the designers, who are acquaintances of mine – but they are still a marker of accumulation, of which I have a jump-start on other people. We are all aware of sustainability: I know of the dangers of microbeads, coffee cups, plastic straws and fatbergs. I know water pollution, toxic-chemical use and textile waste makes the clothing industry one of the worst polluters in the world. But I also fall prey to the quick-click, Paypal’syour-uncle, Instagram-driven purchase. How to marry a drive for conscious consumption with our faster-than-fast fashion-consumerist age?

While I would never self-define as an influencer (I see it as a by-product of becoming a columnist at The Sunday Times Style before co-creating current-affairs podcast The High Low), I am aware that my brand partnerships (currently with high-street labels Mango and Uterqüe) and Instagram following make me a woman with the power to persuade. A woman who arguably plays a role in this consumerist age: Mediakix predicts that, in 2O18, advertisers could spend $1.6 billion on Instagram marketing alone. Whether by accident or design, I encourage people to shop.

I feel this responsibility implicitly. Now, a new mother at 31, I think more about what comes over the threshold. When pregnant, with an ever-oscillating body, I hardly shopped – I was bored senseless by stretchy ribbed dresses. Now, with a body that has almost returned to its pre-partum size, I am inordinately excited by my existing wardrobe, which has been off-bounds for the best part of a year. Now, when I get to the digital till, I find myself thinking, ‘Do I really need that? And if I buy it, am I encouraging others to buy it, too?’

Not all influencers are born the same. For every teen blogger doing a YouTube haul, there are those of us – typically, a little older – who are passionate to wear and re-wear. I still feel that power of the new – it makes me feel like a whole new woman – but I’ve never felt the pressure to buy something in order to satisfy an Insta-audience. ‘I wear a lot of old clothes. Does that make me a bad influencer?’ asks Katherine Ormerod, brand consultant and author of the upcoming Why Social Media Is Ruining

Your Life. ‘I’d rather be an honest one. I don’t spend a ton on clothes and I don’t want to pretend I do. I’m not trying to be a catalogue.‘ We both agree that, while we are enormously grateful to receive so much loot, we also feel slightly defiant about it. Gifts are an industry perk; the equivalent to a bonus in banking. ‘My starting salary in fashion was £14,OOO. It was implicit that the swag I got was part of my salary,’ says Katherine.

But there is only so much swag one woman needs. Perhaps, as I sometimes find, you’ve bought into a trend only to find that it doesn’t suit you at all (I cannot pull off a hoodie in anything other than a hung-over setting). What to do with the surfeit? There are myriad resale platforms, from Vestiaire Collective and The RealReal (for those based in the US) to Depop and 21 Buttons. I am a prolific purger and have sold via Tictail, eBay and Instagram flash sales, where I donate 5O% to charity. New website The Resolution Store offers a curated shopping experience. Launched by brand consultants Alicia Waite and Anna Sutton (the co-founder of sleepwear brand Yolke), the website hosts flash sales of pieces from influencers’ wardrobes – including mine. Its founding ethos is threepronged: recycle, revive and reduce. ‘It is an inevitable part of the job that influencers are gifted and buy a lot of clothes. I became curious as to what happened to the huge amount of clothing that was on their backs,’ explains Anna. ‘It bothered me that these clothes could be at the back of someone’s wardrobe when they could be having a life elsewhere,’ adds Alicia. Thus, The Resolution Store was born: an opportunity to buy directly into ’influencer style’, minimising waste and extending the life cycle of clothes.

For me, vintage clothes have become a more meaningful part of my wardrobe. There is no guilt or stigma attached to buying something that already exists in the retail cycle. Plus, it’s affordable (typically around the same as high street) and means I can buy something no one else will have: a pair of neon-pink Miu Miu sandals bought from a charity shop in north London for £25; a camel-coloured Gucci blazer (one of my favourite items of clothing), just £5O from Portobello Market.

But there’s also a self-imposed limit to how much I can buy, vintage or otherwise. I have a finite amount of space for my clothes, so I have to really want something to let it in. Pernille Teisbaek, one of the most photographed women in fashion, operates a ’one in, one out’ rule that I have long embraced myself. Looking at Pernille’s Instagram, you’d be forgiven for thinking she shops non-stop. But most of what you see are samples: ‘They always offer for me to keep it, but I would rather use it for a few months and give it back,’ Pernille says, and she rarely accepts gifts. ‘I don’t want to encourage people to shop more,’ she tells me emphatically. But don’t we inevitably do that by Instagramming it? ‘Of course you create demand when you wear something,’ she agrees, ‘but I think of my role as providing inspiration, like a magazine. When I share something, it’s about the styling.’

The Social Zoo [the agency Pernille cofounded] works with the Copenhagen Fashion Summit, the world’s largest summit centred on sustainability in fashion, to create awareness. Cleverly, in Denmark, influencers must pay taxes of 5O% of the RRP of any gift they receive – an inevitable leveller. ‘I’m not saying you have to be 1OO% sustainable,‘ notes Pernille, who buys most of her toddler’s clothes via Reshopper, ‘but you have to be considerate’.

The most important thing I have learnt is that a sustainable wardrobe is not just about shopping from ethical brands. Yes, there are some great ones out there – Re/Done, Veja and Rodebjer, to name a few – but they are neither cheap nor plentiful, and therefore not accessible to everyone. Having a sustainable wardrobe is as much about how you wear it as how you shop. For me, being sustainable is about extending the life of something: reselling, swapping or buying second-hand. Sustainability is not an ’absolute’ position. It is about doing the best you can and considering, carefully, everything that comes over the threshold – in tiny, meaningful ways. Since writing this piece, I’ve been more conscious of that than ever. And hey, let’s be honest – £25 Miu Miu shoes help.

The ISSUE “WE ARE ALL AWARE of SUSTAINABILITY, but I ALSO FALL PREY to the QUICK-CLICK, INSTAGRAM-driven PURCHASE”

The SOLUTION “HAVING A SUSTAINABLE WARDROBE is AS MUCH ABOUT HOW YOU WEAR it as HOW YOU SHOP”