Since 2008, I have been thinking carefully about what I buy and what I wear and in 2010 and 2011 shared with you everything I have bought to wear. At the end of 2010, I wrote these 12 resolutions which have since become my 12 Rules To Dress By when I started to realise that even though awareness was rising about the issues in the global fashion industry most of us don’t have a clue how to think about making our wardrobes sustainable. When I speak to friends and colleagues there doesn’t seem to be a great feeling of responsibility about how we shop and how we dress. Many feel that it’s a girl’s fashion issue, yet we all wear clothes no matter our sex, age, or how stylish we consider ourselves.

The responsibility to change fashion is shared between the fashion industry, governments and us. What we buy or demand makes an enormous difference to what is made. There is a whole vocabulary building up around ethical fashion, with phrases such as Pre-Loved, Up-Cycled, Organic and Fair-trade. It’s important that we all start to understand what these mean and this is the future of fashion.

I wanted to help to share these ideas, and so collaborated with Visual Communication Designer Joana Casaca Lemos to develop a poster and checklist that would make it impossible for you not to think about what you buy and what you wear. As the fashion industry is now so global, we thought it was important to develop this project into as many languages as we could, so that the message could be spread far and wide. This has not been without challenge, especially with the new vocabulary on this topic, but we hope that you share and enjoy our work. We are making it freely available so that nobody is prevented from joining in. Our aim is to make this ‘The Year of The Sustainable Wardrobe’, with each of us becoming conscious consumers and demanding that the fashion industry is changed.

Clothes are an important part of our daily life. We have the opportunity to affect millions of people’s lives and to protect our environment by how we shop and what we wear. Rules are made to be broken, but by following these you can make a difference.

Download and Print 12 Rules To Dress By Posters & Wardrobe Shopping Checklists 

Download and Print the 12 Rules To Dress By – Poster & Wardrobe Shopping Checklist (English)

Download and print the Rules To Dress By Poster and Wardrobe Shopping Checklist in Arabic – Coming Soon

Download and print the Rules To Dress By Poster and Wardrobe Shopping Checklist in Chinese – Coming Soon

Download and Print the 12 Rules To Dress By – Poster & Wardrobe Shopping Checklist (French)

Download and Print the 12 Rules To Dress By – Poster & Wardrobe Shopping Checklist (German)

Download and print the Rules To Dress By Poster and Wardrobe Shopping Checklist in Greek – Coming Soon

Download and Print the 12 Rules To Dress By – Poster & Wardrobe Shopping Checklist (Gujarati)

Download and print the Rules To Dress By Poster and Wardrobe Shopping Checklist in Hindi – Coming Soon

Download and Print the 12 Rules To Dress By – Poster & Wardrobe Shopping Checklist (Italian)

Download and Print the 12 Rules To Dress By – Poster & Wardrobe Shopping Checklist (Japanese)

Download and Print the 12 Rules To Dress By – Poster & Wardrobe Shopping Checklist (Portugese)

Download and Print the 12 Rules To Dress By – Poster & Wardrobe Shopping Checklist (Spanish)

Download and Print the Rules To Dress By Poster & Wardrobe Shopping Checklist (Turkish)

Thank you to all the translators involved in making this possible: Naima Carthew (French), Dina Yunis (Arabic), Alessandro Gardini (Italian), Satoru IINO (Japanese), Stella Stocker (German), Himanshu Ghadiali (Gujarati and Hindi), Joana Casaca Lemos (Portugese), Deniz Tekkul (Turkish) and Christina Rebel (Spanish).

Tweet your commitment – The #12RulesToDressBy by @amishaghadiali and @joana_cl are helping to make this the year of my sustainable wardrobe http://bit.ly/ukWcox

Please share your stories and experiences following these rules with me, and I will happily feature your tales on this site.

E-mail takeamoment (@) amisha.co.uk

Twitter @amishaghadiali #12RulesToDressBy 

If you would like a press release with more information about this project, please e-mail takeamoment (at) amisha.co.uk with your request.