It’s National Clothes Swapping week (and London Fashion Week)! And what better way to celebrate than rummaging through your wardrobe and getting involved. One of the best thing about swapping clothes is that you’re giving new life to old things. Oh, and others peoples stuff always seems better than your own. Here are 7 wonderful ways to get swapping this week and throughout the year.
1. Although Netcycler is not a service exclusively for clothes, this smart swapping service uses an algorithm to make sure that all people involved in a swap are left happy.
2. Swishing. This exceptional social clothes swapping event is brought to you by Futerra, a sustainability communications consultancy (and good friends of Green Thing), a swishing party is a clothes swap between friends. Anyone can run their own swishing party. Last week, there was even a Twishing party, where people swapped clothes over Twitter. Good green fun.
4. Undress for Uganda. A clothing swap for a great cause. In addition to guests bringing clothes to swap, participants bring a fiver to participate and all items are sold for a fiver. The money raised goes to Child’s i Foundation, a charity that supports mothers and babies in Uganda.
5. For anyone that doesn’t want to swap but may want to rent or borrow, Wear Today Gone Tomorrow is the service for you. Rather than buying an expensive item that would get relegated to the back to the closet because you just couldn’t find an occasion, this service let’s you play dress up when you’d like without costing a fortune and there isn’t the need to make something new.
6. ThredUp is a new service aimed at little ones. “Clothes don’t grow, but kids do” is the motto for this wonderfully simple service. Get a box filled with someones preloved clothing. Then fill a box of your child’s gently worn clothes and send back in for someone else to receive. Easy.
7. Swapping is the new shopping, according to PoshSwaps.com. It’s an online community where people can swap, sell or buy vintage and second hand clothing.
Know of any other great swapping services? Share them with us in the comment section below. Happy Clothes Swap week!
Ps- If you’d feeling at all inspired by all this talk of clothing swaps, why not get involved in Saved? Send in an old T and buy a preloved one.
Katherine Hui is currently the Social site editor at Green Thing, a web-based public service in London that inspires people to lead greener lives through creative content.
Before this, she worked as the Development Manager at Social Innovation Camp, an organization that encourages people to use web and mobile-based technology to mobilise social change. She oversaw 300 ideas submission and helped build 20 prototypes – five of which have gone on to get further funding or investment.
Katherine’s came over to the UK form Canada in 2007 for an MSc program at the London School of Economics. Before arriving in London, she managed a small environmental start-up in Vancouver called the Canadian Climate Change Alliance.
Katherine is football mad. She is a loyal supporter of Arsenal FC, plays for Islington Borough Ladies FC and coaches for Gunners in Islington in her spare time. Her second favourite hobby is kite surfing and she can sometimes be found chasing the wind.
