Once you swap, the fun don't stop

Brush the dust bunnies off the clothes in the back of your closet to trade them in for new clothes at the Sustainable Fashion: Co-ed Clothing Swap on Friday.

Olivia Hawkins, co-coordinator of the event, said she didn’t think she had stuff to donate to the event when she first started looking through her closet.

“I was just like, ‘I love all my clothes,’ but I came out with two full trash bags,” Hawkins said.
Clothing swaps are an emerging fad, said Joshlyn Marino, co-coordinator of the event.

“The idea is that you bring a bag of clean, gently used clothes or new clothes that you no longer want and you get new clothes – so you just switch them,” she said.

Brittany Stone, co-coordinator of the event, said for the past week she has worn clothes in her closet she was thinking about donating.
“I’ve worn a different piece of clothing for the past week, and if I like it and feel good then I’m keeping it, and if I don’t then I’m giving it away,” she said. “It really makes me think because then I’m like, ‘Oh this is weird here,’ ‘I feel weird’ or ‘This is too bright.’”
Marino said through her research she noticed a trend of clothing swaps only involving women.

“Whenever we looked it was all just women and we were like, ‘Well, there’s more than just women on this campus,’” she said.
The event is free, but participants are asked to give a suggested $1 donation. The funds raised will cover the costs associated with hosting the event.

Funds leftover will be donated to local organizations, including the Barrett Foundation, a nonprofit organization helping homeless women and children by providing them with food, clothing and shelter, and UNM acrobatics club to purchase equipment needed.
Sustainable fashion isn’t really talked about in the sustainability program, Stone said.

“We mostly talk about sustainable food practices, energy, transportation and everything but we don’t really talk about the stuff we use everyday,” she said.

Marino said the idea is to keep recycling clothes because we have a lot of excess clothes that we don’t wear.
“I know I’m guilty of that,” Marino said. “I have plenty of shirts that I have in my dresser and I have had for years and I’m like, ‘I’ll wear that some day,’ but for something like this you can go and give away those clothes that are still basically brand new and get something that you can wear more often.”

Bringing back community awareness to shopping is one of the main points of the events, Stone said.
“Young people like us go shopping in groups with friends, and often it’s like in big huge department stores where you don’t talk to anybody and it’s really impersonal,” she said.

Creating open dialogue is one of the goals of this event, Stone said.
No mirrors will be provided for attendees to create an environment where they can rely on each other to find out how a piece of clothing looks on them, Marino said.

“You are going to form these bonds, or at least that’s the hope,” she said.
Using mirrors creates a barrier between people, Marino said.

“By relying on mirrors, you separate yourself from everyone else around, so it would be very individualistic, because you would go in and pick out the clothes you want, and this (clothing swap) is hopefully to go in and start talking to people,” she said. “It should be more of a bonding experience.”

The clothing swap is part of the group’s final project for their communication and journalism class, Humans, Culture and Environment.
Marino said the project is an eco-culture jam.

“Culture jams are something that disrupts normal flow of culture, and an eco-culture jam focuses especially on the environment,” she said. The event is intended to also create a community, Hawkins said.

“Our main focus is how hyper-individual we are and how we have individual cars and all of these things that separate us from having a meaningful connection to the people that surround us,” she said. “This is kind of one of the ways that we are breaking out of that mold to try to really have to rely on the people.”

Hawkins said the clothing swap has a similar concept to a farmer’s market.
“You have a much higher percentage of having a conversation with people at farmer’s markets and making friends there than you do at just going to Albertson’s,” she said.

A survey, which will be distributed to participants when they exit the event, will gauge the success of the event and see if there is interest for any future events like it, Stone said.

The results from the survey will determine if the group creates a club revolving around this topic, Stone said.
Swapping clothes redefines the way we think about shopping, Hawkins said.

“It’s just a really great way to reshape the way that we think about purchasing clothes, you know, that we don’t really need to go out and buy these brand new things that we just discard the year after,” Hawkins said. “This is just a great way to reduce, reuse and recycle.”