buy less buy better — ALL POSTS

As a model, it’s a privilege to be able to connect with designers, sewers, and all the moving parts that go into making beautiful clothing. Tamara Davydova and I worked together years ago and kept in touch because of our shared love for sustainability. Tamara decided to create her brand Minimalist, and went steps further beyond sustainability to incorporate circularity into her business model. On a recent trip to NYC, I got to catch up with Tamara and hear all about her studies of circular fashion, what she thinks about sustainability and how she plans to evolve Minimalist. Here are some of the things we talked about below.

1) Can you tell us about your own personal journey in the fashion industry and how you ended up having your own brand?

I graduated from the Parsons School of Design with a BFA degree in Fashion Design. Over the course of my 20-year career, I led design teams and worked alongside designers including Michael Kors and Monique Lhuillier. In 2021 I launched my own ready-to-wear brand MINIMALIST -- designed with the principles of circularity.

2) Sustainability is an incredible goal, but circularity goes further. Can you tell us what this distinction means to you and how you strive to achieve circularity with Minimalist?

At MINIMALIST we design for circularity. That means using sustainable, certified materials and creating timeless, high quality products that will last. With circularity the ultimate goal is for the garments to be fiber-to-fiber recyclable, closing the loop and eliminating landfill waste created by the fashion industry.

3) What are some of the obstacles you’ve come across by owning your own business and how do you overcome them?

I’ve been fortunate to have support and encouragement along the way from industry peers and from family. That said, there have been many challenges and learning curves on this journey. As a creative I wanted to learn more about the business side and took entrepreneurship courses to learn how to launch a startup.

4) What is one of the “dirtiest” parts of the fashion industry and how does Minimalist combat this?

We are focusing on choosing the most sustainable materials that exist today. Fabric dying and trim finishes are big polluters. At MINIMALIST we select certified materials, such as Standard 100 by OEKO-TEX, for fabrics and trims to ensure that we design out waste and pollution from the start.

5) What does transparency mean to you and why do you think this is so important?

At MINIMALIST each product has a list of “ingredients” listed to ensure our customers know what’s in each garment. When I design I carefully select each component and think of it as an “ingredient” in the same way you would want to know what’s in your food. The fewer the ingredients, and the higher quality the ingredients, the better. It’s important to raise customer awareness to be able to distinguish between greenwashing and what’s truly sustainable.

6) What are some tips you have for people looking to implement conscious habits into their daily routine?

Buy less, but better! Check your labels for ingredients and buy truly sustainable products. It can be confusing and there is a lot of greenwashing, but a little research goes a long way.

7) There’s always a bit of a debate about the prices of sustainable fashion. Oftentimes, they’re quite higher than fast-fashion because of the quality of materials, the workers’ wages, and so-forth. Can you talk about the price point for sustainable options and how you see that developing in the future?

Sustainable products can be more expensive, however the consumer's thinking needs to shift to understand that it’s better and ultimately cheaper (because it will last longer) to buy a couple of high quality products, than a bag full of fast fashion. Think farm to table vs junk food. The good news is that consumer demand for sustainable fashion is growing and this is putting pressure to drive a systemic change in the industry towards sustainability.

8) In the climate change movement, who inspires you? Do you have any favorite resources you use to learn more about sustainability?

I met so many inspiring people along the way. There is a company in NYC called Fab Scrap. They tackle textile waste in NYC. We are working with them to ensure that we don’t create textile waste in our R&D process.

9) What are the next steps for Minimalist? How do you see yourselves evolving in the next five years?

We are thrilled to be pioneering the circularity movement in fashion. We are looking into the options of a resale or take back program where our customers can send the garments back to us for resale or recycling once they are done with them. At MINIMALIST our goal is to offer a 360 circular experience for our customers.

Being in the fashion industry exposes you to the newest and best clothing that naturally has the effect of making one obsessed with always being on trend. My parents, both having worked in the business industries luckily kept me in reign from my sporadic shopping sprees with constant reminders of saving my income for tax season and investing whenever I could. In the beginning of my career, especially when I had no experience of saving or paying taxes, I would spend hours on end on every site, searching for the latest and newest trends and how I could get my hands on them, sometimes at whatever cost.

*My $550 pea coat that I only wore a handful of times*

Prime example of said obsessions was a few years back when I was looking for another new fall coat. At that moment, colorful pea coats were the thing everyone had. It would take over my life, mindlessly saving new items in my cart, cross-examining the prices and styles on different sites, asking my boyfriend for his opinions on which overpriced coat he thought looked best... He would tell me it wouldn’t be practical to buy a colorful coat that although was nice now, would naturally go out of style by next season, which I later learned to be true. (That red pea coat I bought on the right has only been worn a handful of times).

While most trends start from the high-end designers after each fashion week season, the industry has taken on a new approach to selling trends with a term known as fast fashion. Fast fashion gets you cheaper versions of designer goods that are available almost simultaneously as the designers release their newest collections. The time it takes for these fast fashion behemoths, Zara, H&M, and Forever21 standing out, to copy and reproduce these pieces is incredibly fast (hence the name). It makes us able to be instantly on trend affordably. As Elizabeth Cline states in her book Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, these fast fashion companies are receiving new deliveries to their stores daily, some getting up to 400 new styles per week on their websites. This makes us feel like we have to buy continuously to stay stylish and look like we fit in.

Trends however as I’m sure you know come and go. It’s in the industry’s best interest for us as consumers to buy into and become obsessed with these trends, just as I had. Naturally, consumption is a necessity for our economy. If you look at the history of fashion seasons and how we buy clothes, you’ll notice that the amount of seasons and new trends have dramatically increased. Shannon Whitehead, founder of Factory45, a sustainable start-up accelerator program notes in her Huffington Post article that there are now up to 52 “micro-seasons”! What was once a magical show, sometimes showcasing such avant-garde pieces that would be considered art more than everyday clothing has now become a driving force of consumerism available for everyone, not just the fashion folk.

Supply and demand are on the rise and our perceptions of what clothes should cost has become extremely skewed thanks to these companies overproducing cheaply made fashion. We now expect a t shirt to cost $10 or less and are shocked if it’s any more, even if it’s made ethically and sustainably with organic fabrics. We buy more of these cheap clothes that naturally feel way more disposable to us. The problem is that there isn't enough room for all the accumulating waste and something needs to change. The True Cost movie is an incredible documentary that helps shed light on the true cost of what goes into making your clothing and why prices have become so low.

The True Cost

As consumers, we have to find the middle ground or shift the demand. The market is oversaturated with items of insufficient quality and with an overabundance of trends that last mere weeks. Whether it’s a thousand-dollar coat or an H&M replica, we need to realize the difference between what we want to buy and what we’re told we want to buy. What will last in our closets for a micro-minute and what will be there for many years. Do I think it’s worth an investment of a few hundred dollars for a good, stylish coat that is made of good quality to buy? Most definitely! Buy less and buy better! Do I think it’s worth it to buy a thousand-dollar coat with a crazy pattern that happens to be a popular trend at the moment? No, definitely not because I know I'll only end up wearing it a few times. What about buying lots of less expensive coats that are made poorly with cheap materials? I don’t want to throw out or give away any more clothes, especially knowing how harmful the fashion industry is to our environment, so no.

Think about what you’re buying, the investment you can make in the quality and how often you'll wear it. Take a deep look at your closet and look at what you wear the most and try to understand why you love it so much. It’s likely not something you bought on a whim in order to try and fit in. Rather, it’s probably expensive enough that the quality lasts but something you can wear anything. We need to buy less and we need to buy better. Instead of low quality/high volume, think about high quality and low volume when you next decide to go shopping. It may take years, if we're lucky enough for it to come to this but if the demand is shifted from cheaply made clothes to higher quality sustainably made items, perhaps we as consumers can shift the market and make ethical, organic clothing an option for everyone to buy.

Here I am gathering some clothes I had bought within that past year that I no longer wore. Although it'll be much more useful if it reaches someone in need, I could have definitely saved money and know that that much more clothing wouldn't possibly end up in a landfill.

Credit: HuffingtonPost.com
Credit: Truecostmovie.com
Image credit: Truecostmovie.com