Clothes: The Circular Economy We Practised Without Naming It
In the 1980s, many middle-class families in India wore clothes that followed a surprisingly disciplined life cycle. It wasn’t branded as “sustainable.” It was simply how households managed money, time, and resources—and in hindsight, it functioned like a small circular economy.
1) Made-to-measure (and made to last)
Readymade clothing wasn’t the default. Most families had “their” tailor—someone trusted, familiar, and booked well in advance. New clothes were typically stitched once or twice a year, often around Diwali or the New Year.
It was a process with its own rhythm. A month or two before the festival season, the tailor would be scheduled to come home for several days. Wages were negotiated. Cloth was purchased in advance. And then the house would temporarily turn into a small production unit: measuring tape, chalk marks, cut fabric stacks, and a steady hum of stitching.
The choices were practical. Siblings might get shirts or kurtas made from the same cloth. Cousins often showed up in near-identical material, to the dismay of the kids and the complete indifference of cost-conscious mothers. The objective wasn’t novelty. It was value.
2) A built-in reuse ladder
The most interesting part wasn’t how clothes were made—it was how they moved through the household.
A garment usually began its life as “outside wear” or formal wear. After several months, it would be reassigned as casual wear. Then it would become home wear. And if the fabric held up, it would take a final turn as cleaning cloth—wiping, polishing, dusting—before disappearing completely.
Without any lectures about “waste,” households practiced a simple rule: extract maximum utility from every metre of fabric.
3) Barter + resale: the informal second life
Then came the part that still fascinates me: resale without cash.
Every few months, a familiar figure would appear in many neighbourhoods—women who carried new steel vessels and offered them in exchange for old clothes. In some homes they were called the bartanwali—the steel-vessel barter women. There would be negotiation, haggling, and a careful weighing of what was “worth” what. Old jeans and polyester sometimes fetched a premium—not because they were better, but because they signalled modernity at the time.
What happened next completed the loop. These women would gather a collection of garments, do small repairs, and resell them—often in places like the Ravivari (Sunday) market along the Sabarmati in Ahmedabad. Clothes moved from one household to another, not as charity, but as commerce: repaired, recirculated, and re-valued.
4) The sustainability lesson (without nostalgia)
This system wasn’t perfect. But it was efficient.
It relied on local production and local repair skills. It had a natural cap on consumption because buying was seasonal and planned. It created multiple “use phases” for a single item. And it embedded resale and reuse into everyday life—without apps, without branding, without guilt.
The point isn’t to romanticise the past. It’s to notice that sustainability is often less about heroic individual choices and more about how a system is set up. When a system makes repair easy, resale normal, and overbuying inconvenient, waste shrinks almost automatically.
Maybe that’s the real question for today: not “How do we shop better?” but “How do we rebuild the loops that made better outcomes the default?”
