Build a more sustainable wardrobe with these incredible stylists

Hiring a stylist for sustainable fashion advice can help you build a stylish and environmentally-conscious wardrobe, where you invest in quality and sustainability instead of opting for fast and temporary fashion trends.

Here are a few reasons why consulting a sustainable stylist can be beneficial:

1. The sustainable fashion world can be overwhelming, and a stylist specializing in sustainable fashion has knowledge of ethical and eco-friendly clothing brands and stores, materials, and production processes. They stay updated on sustainable trends and can assist you in making conscious clothing choices.
2. A stylist can help you find clothing that suits your personal style and identity, your body shape, and color preferences. By selecting items that fit you well, you’ll wear them more often and make them last longer.
3. Working with a stylist can make you more aware of your own purchasing behavior and its impact on the environment and the people involved in clothing production. This awareness can lead to changes in your buying habits and more responsible choices.
4. A stylist can assist you in creating a capsule wardrobe, consisting of a limited number of timeless and versatile clothing items that can easily be combined with each other. This helps you buy less clothing and derive more value from the items in your closet.

For this blog, we spoke with several stylists who are part of the COSH! community. Let us introduce them and ask for their advice.

Meet Lynn from The Acquired!

Lynn is the founder of The Acquired, the digital wardrobe assistant that helps you organise your wardrobe. She came up with the idea of designing a wardrobe app when she bumped into the negative impact of clothing on the environment. After all, we all throw away too many clothes and, according to Lynn, do not use our wardrobe efficiently enough.

The Acquired works according to three simple steps:

1. Download the app and create a free account.

2. Create an inventory of your clothes.

3. Start putting together outfits, get daily outfit recommendations and gain insight into your closet usage.

Need help capturing and listing your times? You can easily book a digital styling session for quick and efficient guidance.

How do you engage with your clients?
For me, it’s completely about you and your wardrobe. That’s also how The Acquired app is structured. You can fully map your style profile and upload your wardrobe items to get outfit and (later) shopping recommendations. For those who like personal support, we offer digital sessions. During a session – which is sometimes preceded by closetediting via The Acquired Method – a client gives a quick tour of the wardrobe. We go over many worn items and go-to outfits together, so that we get an idea of the client’s personal style. Based on that, we go over the items we can add to the digital wardrobe. Then we go through the items the client doesn’t know how to style and help them integrate them into their wardrobe. Together, we come up with unique ways to wear the pieces they already have. This makes you feel like you just went shopping, albeit in your own closet! When necessary, we will suggest new pieces to upgrade your go-to looks.

Of course, you can also come with a list of questions, for example about a particular event, or we can create some more everyday looks for work/​weekend to take the stress out of getting dressed.

What is important to find out what your own style is?
To know your own style, it is especially important to know yourself well. This is the only way to filter out the outside noise of trends and social media. Indeed, it is important to be able to distinguish between what you like and like in another person and what you like. Moreover, it is also a process that takes time and changes now and then, as your life is also subject to change. I like to compare it to a marathon. You don’t run that all at once either. Both The Acquired as a tool and myself as a stylist can help you in this ​“training process”.


What item cannot be missing from one’s wardrobe?
There are a number of pieces – I call them the universal essentials. They are the perfect building blocks for your outfit but just because they are essentials doesn’t mean you can’t adapt them to your personal style. A black blazer for someone with a classic style looks completely different from a blazer for a sporty or feminine style.

Do you often give advice based on fashion trends?
Fashion trends are often already in your wardrobe, as many trends come back – or even never go away. Every winter, for example, leather is a ​“trend” and in summer you can expect pastel colours. I mainly give advice in how to decide for yourself whether or not to do something with a fashion trend and how to apply it to you and your wardrobe. For example, if a bright colour is in and you like it, but you have more of a neutral wardrobe, you can integrate it perfectly via a cool handbag, shoe or even a nail polish or lipstick.

How can you combine attention to sustainability with personal style?
When you buy clothes that really fit your personal style, you will wear them longer and more and thus automatically be more sustainable with your wardrobe. Then again, if you choose quality items from more sustainable brands, you are already very sustainable.

How could people organise their wardrobes more efficiently and sustainably?

• Identify the garments you wear a lot and take extra care of them.

• Sell or rent the garments you don’t wear and put them on an un-wish list to avoid buying them again.

• Use a digital wardrobe app on your mobile to shop your wardrobe and get creative with your garments. You can literally carry it in your pocket while shopping so you avoid unnecessary purchases. 

This is Christina from Contour Lab!

How do you reconcile body positivity with more sustainability? That question occupies Christina Hadinoto of Contour Lab on a daily basis. Contour Lab is a digital shopping consultant for fashion web shops, which incorporates body type and other physical characteristics into your online shopping experience. Based on a questionnaire, Contour Lab automatically filters and sorts the items that best fit your features.

Contour Lab is a little atypical in that it is a virtual shopping consultant working with body type styling techniques. So how exactly does body type styling work with Contour Lab?
We start from the individual: what does he or she look like in terms of body type and other external features? In terms of body type, we mainly look at the proportions of shoulders, waist, and hips. That combination determines your body shape, which is often expressed in letters: A, H or O. These correspond to pear, apple, hourglass and so on. With each of those body types, certain ​“styling rules” apply to balance your body. For example, your body is not ​“balanced” when your shoulders are the widest point of the body, and you wear a round neckline on top. For people with broad shoulders, something with a V‑neck is therefore usually recommended, as it shows more skin and you optically break up the body that way. If you have broad shoulders and would wear a round neck, you create a large optical area of fabric, giving the impression that your shoulders are wider than they really are. Of course, you should take these styling rules with a grain of salt, because you should obviously wear what you feel comfortable in as an individual. If you have wide hips and want to accentuate them, then go for it! 

Besides body type styling, you also have seasonal type styling, which involves colour advice based on skin tone, hair colour and eye colour. By combining these factors, we then arrive at a certain seasonal type. Within each season, there are warm or cool undertones, which means that a certain colour palette suits one seasonal type better than another. For example, I am an autumn type and I am slightly darker, but I do have warm undertones. That means I look better with bright colours than with pastel colours. When it comes to styling and shopping advice, this is also the way Contour Lab works. Based on individual characteristics, we make a personal selection, just like a shopping assistant would do on the physical shop floor. 

Are there any items that balance all body types well?
Undoubtedly the wrap dress. That one has a fit where you have to wrap the dress around you, combined with a V‑neck, and it is actually flattering for everyone. A wrap dress also usually has some kind of ribbon or cord, which accentuates your waist, especially if the dress has an A‑line shape and goes out a bit more. The only additional thing you could do, for example if you have a pear shape, is to choose a wrap dress with puffed sleeves, drawing attention to the top of your body. By doing so, you create a kind of hourglass figure and thus balance the body even more. 

Does Contour Lab take trends into account?
Of course, we are dealing with an industry in which trends do matter by definition, which is why they are intrinsically built into Contour Lab. Based on your physical characteristics, we recommend certain trends that are contained in the shop’s collections. So it’s also not the case that every trend is necessarily flattering for every body type. If you have a straight figure and are petite, i.e. smaller than 1m64, the oversized trend is not always flattering when you combine many oversized items in one outfit. We won’t recommend those items at the same time, but we will recommend other trends, for example, a great pair of wide-leg trousers combined with a puffed-sleeved blouse and a jacket over it.

How can you combine the search for personal style with sustainability?
I think it is important for consumers to be approached inclusively, and that is what drives Contour Lab. Such an approach increases satisfaction and that leads to more self-confidence when wearing a certain outfit. That creates more body positivity, which also makes consumers less likely to return items. So you can reduce carbon emissions from returns, which really benefits the planet. The data we collect with Contour Lab can be fed back to fashion companies so that they can take fit or size into account before selling. That way, they can reduce their surpluses and thus their carbon footprint.

What concrete impact does Contour Lab have on returns?
When customers return an item to one of our B2B customers, we always ask for their reasons. Currently, we only take over data that can be linked to our tool, so fit in particular, but this month we are launching our colour and size advice features. Our collaboration with Marie Méro shows that with Contour Lab we generate around 19% fewer returns than when an order is not placed through Contour Lab. So in the future, we hope to also reduce returns related to size or colour.

How the reduced number of returns translates into carbon emissions is difficult to measure. This is because there is often a lot of uncertainty about last-mile delivery. With which supplier does it happen? How many stops do the trucks make? Do they drive electrically? That is extremely complex, making it very difficult to calculate that specifically for returns, according to several conversations with universities and colleges. However, I strongly believe that such research is needed, so we will continue to look for collaborations with partners to map this in the future.

Say hi to Uta from Slowsetter!

Uta is a creative soul with a more than 20 years of experience in a wide range of fields, from carpentry to interior design. Her styling service Slowsetter is committed to effortlessly blend trends with more sustainable practices, because Uta strongly believes sustainability can be stylish. Her aesthetic sensibility and deep understanding of quality, craftsmanship, and the importance of a personal touch are ingrained in everything she does.

How do you engage with your clients?
Normally I’m doing stylings for specific campaigns or for more sustainable producers’ personal branding, but I also offer styling sessions for the individual consumer. Those styling sessions usually start with one hour to get to know each other, after which we start building some outfits out of the client’s wardrobe. Often times many more outfits come out of it than they expected. 

What’s important for me in that first session is to figure out what the client wants. For example, are they looking for a new style, or do they want to know more about sustainable options? Sometimes they just want styling advice for one specific occasion, like a business trip, a wedding, or a promotional photoshoot. Other clients already have their own style and would like to know about more sustainable alternatives. This could be combined with a personal shopping trip. I also work with individual brands who would like to update their website with better images. They either have their own photographer or I reach out to one.

What’s important to consider when looking for your own personal style?
I think it’s all about feeling good in your clothes and if you know what items to pick to feel good this can be translated into your personal style. That’s why I always try to find out about your personality and your values, and give advice based on that, for example by suggesting certain colours or silhouettes. A good place to start for me is people’s daily routines. Are they on the road a lot? Do they have a lot of meetings? Do they have children they need to take care of? After I’ve assembled all this information we can start building a very personal selection. Once you find a selection that feels good it automatically makes you more attractive to others. That’s the magic of an outspoken personal style.

Do you often give advice based on trends?
What I like about trends is that most of the time people adopt them subconsciously. My upbringing for example was not particularly based on sustainability, so I was also going along with the latest trends. At one point I wanted to change that but felt like I couldn’t because there was this stereotype that more sustainable clothes are beige and boring instead of exciting and fashionable, but that’s absolutely not the case. There’s still a lot of people who believe that conscious clothing are not trendy, but you can definitely incorporate some trends into it. It’s just a question of picking the right ones. Colours are easy because they come back every once in a while, and even more specific trends or silhouettes can be turned into something very personal, or you can give them a modern twist. Some trends even last for to five years, so if you then find them in a more sustainable quality fabric, they will last even longer. It’s not about avoiding trends completely; it’s about reusing them again after some time.

Do you have any tips on how to find your personal style, but in a more sustainable way?
Don’t make it too complicated. Ask a friend or a family member which clothes they don’t wear any more. Maybe you’ll find something you like. If you keep your clothes in this cycle for long and take care of them, they will last. The COSH! platform is also a great guide for finding more sustainable options and to really learn more about certain fabrics and alternatives.

How can people organise their wardrobe more efficiently?
I think it’s a good idea to dive into your closet before every new season. When you take your clothes out of your closet, you often bump into things you forgot you owned. Instead of putting those aside, think about how you can combine them in new ways and organise your closet accordingly. 

Hi Thaís Britta!

The Brazilian stylist discovered her passion for fashion and styling thanks to her Italian grandmother, who used to make clothes for the entire family. Thaís always looks at the big picture and provides you with the best tools to express your personality through fashion. The goal? To create a timeless and sustainable wardrobe that you can dive into with joy every day.

Ethical fashion stylist Thais Britta offers various services. Rediscover your current wardrobe with a ​‘Personal Closet Detox’. During this session, you will learn how to create new styles and unlock the full potential of your wardrobe. 

What is important to discover your own style?
It’s the same as reflecting on who you are or even who you want to be. My advice is to embrace that question mark and create the opportunity to communicate through your outfits what you want to say, what message you want to convey, ​“where you stand.”

Do you often give advice based on fashion trends? 
Actually, that’s something I do the least, but not the last. Meaning… There are different clients, some of them love fashion trends, and others don’t. My approach is completely personalized and tailored to the individual I’m guiding.

How do you combine sustainability with your own style?
I have thought about it often, and it’s a very important question. For those who are just discovering how harmful certain products can be to nature (e.g., neon colors), it’s important to become informed and stay realistic. Opting for second-hand or vintage items, or if you’re open to clothing rental… that’s also an option! Another possibility is the ​“borrow me/​lend you” system, where you can exchange clothing items with friends or family. Personally, I can say that I love colorful outfits, but I also have a special relationship with earth tones. Earth tones can be easily found in natural dyes (made from plants, flowers, vegetables). As a result, one of the current studies is focused on discovering how similar colors can be developed using synthetic dyes.

How can people organize their wardrobe more efficiently and sustainably?
I believe that giving suitable space to each garment/​family/​category/​color helps maintain an organized wardrobe. To keep it tidy, it’s also nice to invest in some specific tools to separate your clothing, especially accessories. And most importantly, parting ways with items you never use. They only take up space in your closet, creating an unconscious red light ​“problem to solve” in your brain. We may not actively notice it, but it brings confusion to your thoughts. So let’s make it easy for ourselves and enjoyable when we open that fantastic door of possibilities that your wardrobe can offer!

That being said, as more people grasp the great importance of being conscious and sustainable and its overall impact, the next step will naturally be a flow of demanding change in the right direction. This will eventually lead to a time when the fashion industry is compelled to transition on a larger scale and become more ethical and transparent.

Meet Anke from My Melonade!

Have you lost yourself a bit in your wardrobe over the years? And is it high time to take matters back into your own hands? Then the Stijl mAke course at My Melonade is just what you need. This course will help you avoid future fashion mistakes, choose outfits that truly suit you, and dress as the woman you really are. You’ll shop with confidence and know exactly what to choose.

What is important to discover your own style?
For me, discovering your own style starts with self-acceptance and self-love. Choosing what you find beautiful and, most importantly, what makes you feel good. Creating a mood board can help with this, as well as undergoing a color and style analysis. A color analysis teaches you which colors suit you best and which clothing styles complement them. A style analysis focuses more on your body shape and how to dress it elegantly.

Do you often give advice based on fashion trends? 
I prefer to give advice based on what suits the client best. I also provide tips on how to wear an item across seasons. So, no, I don’t focus on fashion trends, but rather on lifelong favorite pieces (and longer) that you can wear as often as possible. It’s a bit of magic, finding clothes that are made for you and instantly make you feel good.

You are an eco-friendly stylist with beautiful and colorful outfits. How do you combine sustainability with your own colorful style?
I started a store because I found the sustainable options a bit dull and boring at the time. I believed it could be better, and as you can see, it can be! Over the years, I have built an extensive wardrobe with a mix of designer, vintage, and new sustainable pieces. The advantage of eco-friendly clothing is that the quality is top-notch, so the items last a very long time.

How can people organize their wardrobe more efficiently and sustainably?
This ties in with tip number two for me: choose pieces that you genuinely love and find ways to wear them as often as possible. Additionally, as mentioned earlier, quality is essential for organizing your wardrobe more sustainably because the longer an item lasts, the less frequently you need to buy something new. By building a wardrobe with clothing that makes you feel good and that you enjoy wearing, you automatically need fewer items.

Meet Ashna, the Ethical Fashion Stylist

Join Ashna in the quest for a responsible, sustainable, and timeless wardrobe. With a tremendous passion for fashion and a belief that the fashion industry needs to be reorganized, Ashna has shaped her career accordingly.

As an Ethical Fashion Stylist (personal shopper), she delves into what resonates with you, helping you discover and express what truly aligns with your unique personality. Her mission is to assist people in creating a responsible, timeless, and sustainable wardrobe. Together with Ashna, you’ll explore the stores and brands that prioritize social and environmental responsibility, reliability, fairness, and transparency. It’s all about loving yourself and embracing sustainable fashion.

To discover your own style, it can be helpful to ask yourself the following questions:

1. How would you describe your personal style? For example, feminine, edgy, elegant, or casual?
2. Which colors appeal to you, and do you find these colors in your wardrobe?
3. What are you proud of in terms of your figure, hair, or face?
4. Are there any aspects of your body that you are less satisfied with?
5. What challenges do you face when styling and combining clothes?
6. Are there certain types of clothing in your closet that you tend to choose more often? If so, what kind of clothing items are they?
7. Why do you prefer these particular pieces?
8. Do your style choices need to align with certain values for work or other occasions, such as functionality, comfort, self-expression, or enhancing your appearance?

Do you frequently offer advice based on fashion trends? No, I usually start with a closet session (shopping in your own wardrobe) with clients. Through a personal intake, I understand what resonates with the client and what they are looking for. I focus on creating a timeless wardrobe with personal favorites that can be worn across seasons. It’s a bit of magic to find clothes that are perfectly suited to your body and make you feel instantly good.

How do you combine sustainability with your own style? For me, sustainable fashion is not just about buying sustainable items but also considering the vintage and second-hand options. I usually try to combine good-quality sustainable pieces with colorful vintage or second-hand items.

How can people organize their closets more efficiently and sustainably? Assignment 1 – Personal Collage:

1. Gather a stack of magazines or go digital using platforms like Pinterest or PowerPoint.
2. Set a timer for 20 minutes and collect as many images as possible that resonate with you. It can be colors, materials, nature, food, patterns, and fashion. Let your mind roam freely!
3. Create a collage using the collected images. Display it in a place where you frequently pass by at home.

Assignment 2 – Divide your clothes into 3 piles: Take out all the clothing from your closet (and give everything a good clean). We’ll divide all your clothes into 3 piles:

Pile 1: Clothes you wear frequently. These are items that you effortlessly grab and easily combine with the rest of your wardrobe.

Pile 2: Clothes you like but wear less often. These may be items you find challenging to style or only wear on special occasions.

Pile 3: Mistakes or clothes that need repairs. You don’t wear these clothes because they don’t fit your style or they are damaged. It’s time to take action! Repair the items you still want to keep, and for the rest, consider donating them to a second-hand store, giving them to someone who can use them, selling them, or organizing a clothing swap.

TIP – Work per season: Organize the piles by season. Keep your favorite summer dress separate from your thick winter sweater, for example.

Assignment 3 – Mix and match clothing items: Take a clothing item from Pile 1 (your favorites) and try to combine it with items from Pile 2 (or even Pile 3). Refer to your collage for inspiration. Consider whether you would wear these new combinations frequently. Experiment with as many combinations as possible.

MIX & MATCH: The idea behind a capsule wardrobe is to have various clothing items that can be mixed and matched. It’s not about having fixed sets; it’s more flexible than that. You can choose to create multiple capsules, such as a winter and summer capsule or separate capsules for different occasions, like work and leisure. There is no strict rule about the maximum number of items in