We have borrowed books from libraries for hundreds of years… so what else could we borrow? With Love From… founder, Lizzie Dibble, has brought rental fashion to a local level and offers us a new way of consuming.
Guest blog by Pamela Green, volunteer for With Love From…
As Sustainable Fashion Week (26 Sept – 4 Oct) approaches, along with Halloween, bonfire night, and (is it too early?) Christmas, many people’s thoughts turn to parties. And shopping for party clothes. Let’s be honest, who doesn’t love an opportunity to slide into something fabulous and dress up? The excitement you feel getting an invite to a fancy “do” and the thrill of the chase to find the perfect outfit.
But excitement can frequently turn to anxiety as you face the endless schlep around the shops and eventually the “how much?!!” moment for an outfit that, let’s face it, you’ll only wear once or twice and that will end up sitting at the back of your wardrobe. So, you maybe look at something just as fun, but a lot cheaper, knowing you don’t need it to last. If you get 2 wears out of it that’s great!
And that’s where a fundamental problem with our current fashion system lies. The hard facts are that fashion – especially fast fashion – is extremely harmful to people and planet. Approx. 70% of clothing today is made from synthetic fibres like polyester, which is basically plastic. And we all know plastic is made from fossil fuels.
Each year, the UK generates around 1.45 million tonnes of used textiles, with nearly 350,000 tonnes ending up in landfill instead of being recycled or reused. Piles of clothes can be seen polluting beautiful beaches in places like Ghana. Shockingly, one bin truck full of textiles is sent to landfill or incinerated EVERY SINGLE SECOND. Think about that. And the worst culprit is occasion wear. That fancy dress or suit you bought for a special occasion that you wear maybe twice and then (best case) take it to the charity shop or (worst case) just bin.
One answer to this ever-growing problem is With Love From… a free to use, shared wardrobe concept, currently available in Oswestry Library, where you can borrow clothes like you do library books!
Set up by Lizzie Dibble (above) in 2024, With Love From… is soon to open a second shared wardrobe in Shrewsbury library, and we have ambitions to be in many more! All you need to access the wardrobe is to have a Shropshire library card.
The shared wardrobe is full of donated unwanted occasion wear – dresses, suits, skirts, fancy tops, you name it – which people can then borrow FOR FREE like a library book. We also offer kids dressing up bags, again at no cost.
Oswestry Library.
By keeping clothes in circulation and by re-wearing, we stop clothing going into landfill unnecessarily. And by stopping clothing going to landfill, we can start to reduce carbon emissions. Extending the lifespan of an item clothing by just nine months can reduce its carbon footprint by up to 20%; similar research suggests that an extra 18 months of wear could roughly double that saving. By simply by sharing our wardrobes, donating those party clothes we no longer wear and keeping them in circulation we can slow down the fashion cycle, reduce waste and protect the earth’s precious resources.
With Love From … is on a mission to bring joy to recycling, re-wearing and re-using. We want people to have fun browsing through our clothes, hats, and bags. Our rails are full of beautiful, preloved occasion wear clothing offering everything from ballgowns to dresses for the mother of the bride to hats and handbags, available in a wide range of sizes, all available to check out like you would a book. And did we mention it’s free?! So there’s a double benefit – you get to keep more of your hard-earned cash, your budget stretches further, plus you can get to wear something different to every event you go to!
Essentially you can pop into the library for the latest Richard Osman and come home with a fabulous frock too – at NO COST! All you need is a Shropshire library card, and all we ask is that items are returned in the condition they were borrowed in.
If something does happen to the items while they are on loan, we collaborate with local repair café teams where possible and if items are beyond repair, we put them into a collection for our sustainable fashion workshops where they are customised and upcycled.
Since January 2025, of the 750 items donated to Oswestry library shared wardrobe, 423 were checked out, 99 were renewed and 77 of those were purchased. Pretty impressive.
Going forward we want all UK libraries – not just in Shropshire – to engage with us and help spread the word and get people borrowing not buying.
One final fun fact – there are enough items of clothing in circulation right now to clothe the next SEVEN generations of humans. Let’s stop piling stress and pollution onto this precious planet of ours; so please, borrow DON’T buy!
©Pamela Green, volunteer
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