Fabrics in everyday life
These days I'm working on my book about businesses. One of the businesses I researched makes products from organic cotton. As I was writing up their story, I was thinking about fabrics, everyday life and sustainability.
My previous entry includes what I call a "sufficiency list", a playful list I sketched many years ago to write down the objects that I need in my life as I was on a path of living with very few objects for ecological, spiritual and aesthetic reasons.
I noticed that many of those objects (e.g., clothes, towels, blanket) are made from fabric. Contemplating fabric was not the first thing I did when I stepped on my sustainability path. At that time, I evaluated my consumption in general and the waste I was producing. Due to my autoimmune skin condition, I always preferred to wear cotton and linen, and due to my person preference I never wanted to have a lot of clothes. In general, my wardrobe was largely "sustainable" for reasons other than ecological. Since my childhood, the reasons were my health, sensory processing sensitivity (so a psychological reason), and personal preference.
One practice that is common in sustainability movements, and that I did not engage in, was shopping second-hand. I've mentioned reasons for this in my autoethnography several times. Shopping second-hand is overall a very good sustainability practice. But personally I very much dislike shopping and prefer to buy very few items, made from the materials I like to wear. I then use those items for a very long time. When they wear out, I try to buy exactly the same items. I feel that shopping second-hand is too time-consuming and it would be hard to find exactly what I want to wear: the same thing every day to normalise a much more casual approach to clothes even in more formal situations such as teaching and attending events.
A few years ago I started to wear organic cotton, but my preference towards it was more intuitive and experiential rather than informed by data. Organic cotton objects would wash better and last longer. They felt better, and my skin would not react to this fabric.
I live with some objects that are made from artificial fibres, and they do not feel good. I use those objects because they are functional but I would much prefer to use something made from biodegradable materials. It would be nice to wear only biodegradable items, and perhaps this will happen on my sustainability journey.
After speaking to the businessperson who runs the company I mentioned above, I began to think more about the objects I live with. This fellow human brought my attention to the violence we do towards the soil and beings when we produce conventional cotton.
What makes it possible for me to wear almost only organic cotton is having a uniform that is extremely simple. I wear sweatpants, a vest top and an oversized shirt every day.
Organic towels can be more expensive, but I keep them for a very long time and learn to love imperfections such as small holes and stains.