sustainability, eco-friendly, environmentally-sound, organic are a few words that have been used more and more nowadays. for the most part, everyone is trying to follow along in the movement to be more sustainable and less harmful to the environment. although many people believe their doing their deed and protecting the environment by recycling and reusing and minimizing waste, they forget about a few other industries that they support; and one being the fashion industry. this page i will introduce myself and my journey to becoming sustainable within my closet.

i’m jacqueline blaise, a bubbly 21-year-old from clifton, virginia. growing up, recycling has always been a thing within my household, but we weren’t a super hard-core recycling family. we used reusable tubberware, lunch boxes, and tried our best with food waste like many suburban families do. in my youth, i discovered a passion for sewing and fashion trends. i always loved the idea of making my own clothes so i taught myself how to sew by hand and sew by machine. as time passed, i grew too busy for my passion with school, sports, and my social life until i reached high school. in high school, i began to sew again and make clothes and make car seat covers. i found my creative touch again, and it was so exciting and fun to do the things i loved to do.

then, college happened. throughout my college years, i still would occasionally revamp my friends’ and my own clothes and was well-known for it to the point i would be paid to bleach dye or distress jeans BUT my recycling and sustainability routines were completely diminished once i moved into my college dorm room. this was because JMU doesn’t have a recycle bin or many reusable containers. of course, they began to prop up recycling and composite bins around campus over the next few years, but many students didn’t know how to properly dispose of their waste, so they just throw away all their items in the trash rather than try to understand the process. me being caught up in the college student routine this didn’t bother me that much and there wasn’t much i could do about it anyways. it didn’t truly hit me that the habits i had and effected the environment in the ways that it did until i studied abroad in antwerp, belgium.

i was very fortunate enough to study abroad in belgium for majority of summer 2019. while i was venturing through europe i became accustomed to their habits and resources for recycling and reusing. when going to the grocery store, we had to bring our reusable bags or else we’d have to pay 1-2 euros per bag we used. we essentially walked or biked everywhere within antwerp, and in other cities we could use major transportation services offered to the public. at every street corner, business, building, and even our own housing we had multiple types of recycling and compositing for disposing of our waste. i began to understand that being sustainable and environmentally friendly doesn’t only refer to plastics and transportation, but everything surrounding us. it made me realize that the systems and culture we have in the U.S. is very flawed and there isn’t much of an importance towards the environment like they did in europe. supporting that, i quickly found out that it’s even more expense to live in the suburbs and countryside of cities due to the desire of having land and vegetation around them; which is backwards from how it tends to be in the U.S. since i began to take pride and love towards the european style of sustainability, i devoted myself to trying my best with being eco-friendly when i returned to the america.

for those that aren’t aware, antwerp is a world fashion capital. obviously, it’s not a leader in that industry anymore like milan, new york, london, tokyo, and paris but once upon a time this european city competed with the best of the best. antwerp has a major shopping street called the Meir, which originated in the sixteenth century as one of the most prestigious streets to live on. due to the prestige, shops began to line the streets of these areas to make it easier for the wealthy to shop and promote their business, then it began to grow into designer clothing shops and grew into the major fashion location it is today. with that being said, walking on this street you can see all types of shops like mainstream U.S. stores like urban outfitters and h&m to european stores that i can’t even pronounce. and between all these big corporation stores are edgy, vintage thrift stores completely packed with accessories and clothing items.

after meeting so many interesting and fierce europeans, i learned that they don’t even shop at the mainstream stores, which utterly shocked me. i felt this way because those stores sold clothes for dirt cheap, as in the prices we have in america were almost half off the same item in europe. so obviously being a broke college student, now being even more broke than usual since i would travel every single weekend, i would be more inclined to shop cheap but all my european friends explained how harmful the fashion industry truly is. and i never fully comprehended the impact is has until one of my larger assignments was a case study about Zara and fast fashion; that’s when it truly hit me what this industry has done to our world and environment. they explained to me that majority of their clothes come from these thrift stores seen around the city. thrift stores in europe definitely have a different connotation to them than they do in america in the sense that many of them are franchises and have the funds to advertise themselves rather than seen as a secondhand store. from all the information i gathered, i understood that shopping slightly more expensively is a huge trade-off people have to choose in order to do their duty of taking care of the environment. and i became obsessed with this concept.

choosing to thrift over shop fast fashion was my muse for this site and i hope to continue to influence others with this idea as well. while in europe, i only shopped at thrift stores and found the coolest and most unique pieces that i own. knowing that these pieces have a story behind them, kept me intrigued to keep going back. coming back to america, it’s been definitely difficult to solely thrift shop and keep up with the european standards of sustainability but it’s something that i have become passionate about and have worked to improve on. i have begun to fall back in love with designing my own pieces while cutting up my old clothes and making them into something new, thrifting the clothes i don’t care for anymore, and just making different items into something new has sparked my creativity in a brand new way due to knowing how fast fashion produces so much pollution. i strive to better myself and others around me to become more sustainably savvy and i hope this site influences others to do the same.