Teacher wears same dress every day for important lesson

An art teacher in the US pledged to wear the same dress every day for 100 days in a bid to teach her students about sustainability.

Julia Mooney, from William Allen Middle School in New Jersey, had just completed her first week and was already making an impact and attracting attention at the school by wearing the same dress every day.

“I’m walking down the halls and they’re [the students] like, ‘Is she still wearing that dress?'” she told Yahoo Lifestyle.

Mooney wasn’t doing it just to eliminate the dilemma of what to wear every day.

She, her husband, and their three kids have been trying to reduce their environmental impact by consuming less — sewing clothing, planting a vegetable garden, and raising chickens in their backyard.

She decided that her school dressing would be both an extension of that, as well as a lesson for her new students.

“It was a nice opportunity to demonstrate to the kids how artists often blur the lines between art and activism,” Mooney said.

There were other points she wanted to make to her students.

For one, she wanted them to be more aware of the societal pressure we all feel to wear something new and different every day, pressure Mooney is not immune to.

“I like to wear clothes; I like to express myself,” she said.

“I know that we are all looking at what the other person is wearing. To wear the same thing every day is uncomfortable because we have this deeply ingrained cultural expectation to change every day. It’s weird, but because it’s weird it’s making us all think.”

She’s also keen to discuss the environmental impact of the fast-fashion industry.

By many estimates, global consumption of clothing has gone up by 60 percent since 2000, in large part because we use our clothing less before tossing it to buy something new.

Although new clothing costs less at the register than it used to, we’ll be paying for it in other ways: It takes 2,700 litres of water to make a traditional cotton T-shirt, HuffPost reports.

A polyester shirt would use less water, but its manufacture emits twice as much carbon dioxide.

The textile industry emits more carbon dioxide annually than international flights and airline shipping, according to Nature, and generates one-fifth of China’s water pollution, according to Greenpeace.

Mooney wanted to discuss how the demand for cheap clothing also creates an incentive for companies to manufacture it in countries with cheaper labor and poor working conditions.

That’s part of why for those 100 days she wore a dress from London-based Thought Clothing, which certifies its apparel as fair trade. The pebble gray Jazmenia dress was also a practical choice.

“I needed to pick a dress that was going to be versatile because I’m going to be wearing it through the winter, and when we started the school year it was 90 degrees, (32 degrees celsius)” she said.

“So I’m going to have to add some tights to it and some boots during the winter, and maybe a cardigan. I also chose a plain dress so I could maybe change it up with a scarf or something. It’s also made of a durable material, hemp, which sort of wears in instead of wearing out.”

The only minor challenge was keeping the dress clean. She hand-washed it because using the washing machine every day would defeat the purpose, and she wore an apron during art class. Still, Mooney is the mother of two toddlers, and one of them managed to get blood and juice on her on two occasions.

“I just try to get to it real quick and make sure that it’s clean,” she said.

The project inspired copycats too: Mooney’s husband and three teachers at the nearby high school followed her example.

Though some of us may still cringe at the thought of never changing clothing, Mooney reminded everyone that what she was doing used to be the norm.

“My house doesn’t have any closets,” she said. “We had to add closets because my house is from the ’30s, and people just didn’t have as many clothes back then.”

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