Jesus Creed
MOORESTOWN, New Jersey – Julia Mooney stands in front of a classroom of eighth graders wearing her simple gray, button-down dress.
It’s the same outfit she wore yesterday.
She also wore it the day before.
In fact, she’s been wearing it virtually non-stop since early September.
In a project that’s drawing national attention, the 34-year-old art teacher at William Allen Middle School has vowed to wear the dress every day she teaches for the first 100 days of the school year.
Wednesday is Day 47.
Mooney is trying to raise awareness of what she calls a growing “culture of excess” in America that has filled our closets to overflowing with throwaway garments.
“There is no rule anywhere that says that we have to wear a different thing every day,” she says. “Why do we ask this of each other? Why do we require that we each wear something different every day and buy more clothes and feed into this fast-fashion culture?”
Mooney is not alone. She hoped to spark discussion among her students, friends and coworkers about the peer pressure children face to buy the latest fashions and the sustainability of their “consume, consume, consume” habits. But she hasfound herself at the center of a wider national conversation around what is known as “sustainable fashion.”
Call it the antithesis of fast fashion, the inexpensive, quickly made, trend-of-the-moment clothing that has been flooding store shelves in recent years and allowing consumers to expand and quickly refresh wardrobes.
Sustainable fashion is about wearing clothing made in an eco-friendly way, buying fewer but better-made pieces of clothing, wearing them more often, and making sure garments eventually are recycled.
“This is becoming much more of a mass movement,” says fashion consultant Greta Eagan, author of Wear No Evil: How to Change the World with Your Wardrobe. “It’s spreading beyond people who are ‘green and clean’ to the general public.”
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