BEHIND THE APP
Love the clothes you already own
Save Your Wardrobe: Organiser
Outfits, Clothes Care & Repair
Do you know the impact your wardrobe has on the world? According to the fashion sustainability organisation Global Fashion Agenda, a whopping 73 per cent of the world’s clothing ends up in landfill.
Save Your Wardrobe wants to be part of the solution. This AI-powered app will reconnect you with the clothes you already own, making fashion more sustainable. Not only will it teach you how to get the most from your purchases, it will show you the brands that are contributing to the environmental effort.
“There are two things we really wanted to convey through the app,” says Save Your Wardrobe co-founder Hasna Kourda. “The first one is being a fashion citizen, instead of a fashion consumer.” By this Kourda means not just buying the latest fashions, but taking responsibility for what and how you purchase.
The app creates the option of being sustainable, rather than buying sustainable.
– Hasna Kourda, co-founder Save Your Wardrobe
With Save Your Wardrobe, you can digitise you wardrobe by taking photos of each item you own. The app then uses artificial intelligence to catalogue and curate recommendations of new outfits to wear – it’s just like the opening scene of classic ’90s film Clueless. The aim is for you to rediscover your clothes, rather than buying new items.
Kourda says the app is “democratising sustainability and making it not just something for a small group of people”.
Save Your Wardrobe gives you tips for loving fashion while staying sustainable. It guides you to locations where you can donate unwanted clothes responsibly, provides insights on reducing water consumption, shows you which brands have a green conscience and has a catalogue of services for restoring, repairing and altering the clothing you once loved.
“The app creates the option of being sustainable, rather than buying sustainable,” says Kourda, a value which she says was instilled in her from an early age when she lived with her grandmother in Tunisia.
“For my grandmother, items could have different lives within the same lifetime,” she says, describing how her grandmother would even turn old clothes into huge carpets.
As well as helping people find new ways to wear their clothes, Save Your Wardrobe is also educating people on the facts about our fashion consumption. For example, did you know that the fashion industry is the third highest polluting industry in the world?
“I realised very early on that the impact of fashion consumption wasn’t just local, it was actually very global and involving many countries and economies,” says Kourda.
Even clothing which is donated can have a large environmental impact. “Tunisia is a big hub for European countries for sorting second-hand clothes,” Kourda explains. “The clothing that doesn’t make the cut of being sold either ends up being incinerated in other countries or being put in the ground [into landfill].”
I realised very early on that the impact of fashion consumption wasn’t just local, it was actually very global.
Kourda recognises that we all need to buy new items eventually. That’s why she’s working on bringing a feature to the app that’s specifically designed to address this. Users will be able to save shopping links to items they would like to buy in their Wish List. “We hide the link until you prove that you’ll make the most of it,” Kourda explains.
The idea is to make people really consider whether they need to purchase an item by encouraging users to style it with what they already own. “We call it ‘try before you buy’,” says Kourda.
There’s a movement from Gen Z wanting and requesting for brands to take more responsibility.
While Save Your Wardrobe is encouraging individuals to address their individual footprint, Kourda is keen to point out that “retailers need to take a step back and refigure their business models” to adopt these principals also.
“There’s a movement from Gen Z wanting and requesting for brands to take more responsibility on how they produce and sell items,” she says.
“We give you actionable insights to extend the life of your garment, and understand the impact that you can have individually, but also collectively on the planet and on the industry.”