The Best Clothing I've Ever Had

Disclaimer: This post may contain affiliate links, which means I may receive a commission for purchases made through the links. I only recommend products I have personally used or recently purchased, but not yet used.

Reason 1: Reduce Your Clothing Footprint.

Like most industries, the clothing industry is incredibly wasteful and problematic. Think about how often you throw your clothes away or donate them to Goodwill or clean out your wardrobe. Do you know where those discarded garments go after you’re done with them? Do you care?

I’m not throwing shade in asking those questions, mainly because my answers to those questions are “no” and “not really”. I’m only making the point that the system in place to clothe our bodies is structured so that we don't care much about a large part of the clothing production cycle. That’s what it means to be in an industrialized consumer society. We concern ourselves with the new things we buy, and it’s someone else’s job to manage the things we discard.

Producing clothing at an industrial level, however, has significant environmental and human consequences for the people involved in production. And if we’re able to make choices in how we interact with the production process, perhaps we can make choices that have a lower negative impact.

It’s hard to understate the negative impacts industrial cotton production has had on global societies and environments over the last several centuries. The impacts are significant, and we are still living with the consequences. Here’s my favorite example:

What do the two most successful football clubs in the UK over the last three decades, Manchester United and Manchester City, have to do with fish die-offs in the Gulf of Mexico?

The answer is cotton.

Manchester City was once known as “Cottonopolis” because it was the global hub for selling U.S. cotton in the 19th century. The Brits had outlawed slavery in 1833, but were very happy to broker cotton grown and harvested by enslaved people in the U.S. It made a minority of people incredibly wealthy. That generational wealth was, decades later, used to fund the salaries of top footballers who played for clubs named after the city that brokered the world’s cotton.

The region of North America where all this cotton was grown had to be transformed from old-growth forests and wetlands to agricultural fields. But before that landscape transformation, the human populations had to be removed. Enter the years-long political and physical warfare between colonizers and Indigenous people that culminated in the Trail of Tears.

When you remove millions of acres of plant communities from a region, you fundamentally change the ecology of that space to the point where the land ceases to function in ways it has for thousands of years. In the southeast region of the continent, this meant that the land was transformed from having robust, fertile soils that remained on the landscape to increasingly less fertile soil that was washed away into the watershed. Forests are important carbon sinks because trees use CO2, but also because they physically hold carbon-rich soil on the land via their root structure.

To grow crops in less fertile soil, one must increase nutrient inputs to that soil. However, within the same season, the same soil is washed downstream at higher rates, carrying nutrients into aquatic environments. Soil fertilizer does the same thing to aquatic organisms that it does for terrestrial ones, and suddenly you’re dealing with algal blooms in the Gulf of Mexico that have never been seen before.

Algal blooms are harmful for several reasons, most notably the dramatic reduction in oxygen in the water. Exploding populations of algae consume a higher proportion of oxygen, leaving less of this essential nutrient for larger aquatic species. Hence, massive suffocation events like this:

Long story short, there’s often a steep and unrealized cost to things that, if we are going to live in good relations, we should be aware of.

Merino wool is produced in a very different manner, with an arguably smaller negative footprint. You essentially grow sheep and harvest their hair. You do need land to grow sheep, but the transformation of said land doesn’t involve clear-cutting forests to the same degree, nor the soil nutrient inputs needed to grow cotton. Merino sheep, live all herbivores, also produce soil fertilizer (their poop), which returns a portion of the nutrients they extract to the soil.

Lastly, wool is more biodegradable than cotton, and some clothing can even be composted. The production loop of merino wool clothing is more transparent, less complicated, and arguably smaller than industrial cotton.

Reason 2: Less Laundry, Smaller Wardrobe.

I don’t mind doing laundry. I find the process enjoyable sometimes, but I’d love to reduce the frequency of laundry. My water and electric bills would be less, and I’d have to spend less money on detergent.

For most of my post-puberty life, I get one, perhaps two, days’ worth of wear out of my shirts and underwear before they need to be laundered. This means I end up doing laundry once a week to avoid offending the people around me with my body odor. The rate at which I traditionally do laundry forces me to have a stable of clothes that I can rotate through, which amounts to drawers and closets full of shirt, underwear, and pants options.

Since investing in merino wool clothing, I’ve reduced my wardrobe by an order of magnitude (from dozens of shirts to fewer than ten) and my weekly laundry routine to a monthly one. And if that sounds impossible, check out this video where I wear a single merino wool T-shirt and underwear for an entire week straight.

This sort of thing is possible with merino wool due to its moisture-wicking and anti-microbial properties. I’ve come across very few people who “expire” faster or more noticeably than I, so if I can wear the same shirt and drawers for a week without consequence, then you probably can too.

I’ll talk more about performance in the next section. Still, on a three-week trip across the U.S., Europe, and India, I was able to fit my entire wardrobe into a medium-sized packing cube and only had to launder the clothes once (I ended up laundering them a second time due to a sandstorm).

I cannot speak positively enough about the reduction in logistical stress that having a smaller, high-performing wardrobe affords you when traveling and at home. The peace of mind and time savings you get with merino wool clothing are incredible and well worth the high cost of each item.

Reason 3: Superior Performance

Perhaps the most surprising feature I’ve found with merino wool clothing is how well it performs in extreme heat. During my three-week trip in May, I experienced temperatures ranging from the mid-forties in Wyoming to 113 degrees in Rajasthan. I couldn’t have been more comfortable with the clothing I was wearing, and I think it’s remarkable that I could travel across such a wide temperature range in the same clothing.

I knew merino wool performed well in cooler weather, but I had never seen it tested in such high-heat environments. While in India, I was surprised by how much less I sweated, or rather, how much less sweat stayed on my body, compared to previous trips. I attribute that to how effectively wool wicks moisture away from your body and allows said water to evaporate into the atmosphere. Rajasthan, India, is undoubtedly a dry heat. Still, even in Atlanta, where temperatures were in the mid-eighties with relatively high humidity, I never had to wipe my brow because it was sweaty.

The added benefit of fast moisture wicking and evaporation is that merino wool clothing doesn’t smell. Odor-causing bacteria need moisture to proliferate and can’t in dry environments. Add on top of that the natural anti-microbial properties of wool, and you’ve got garments that are deeply inhospitable to the bugs that make us inhospitable to others’ sense of smell.

I flew over 19,000 miles on this trip and never once felt that my clothing made the travel uncomfortable. The times I noticed my clothing the most were either in the mirror or while changing shirts or pants during long layovers, and enjoying the feel of soft, cool wool on my skin.

In addition to the feel, the style and colors of the primary brand I wear, Unbound Merino, enable me to create multiple outfits from a basic set of colors that all complement each other well. Not including the synthetic material field work pants I packed, I was able to wear a new outfit for two weeks straight.

Merino wool dries quickly, resists wrinkles, doesn’t smell, and packs light. This last point made it possible for me to travel for three weeks with a carry-on suitcase and backpack, which, theoretically, saved me hundreds in checked bag fees.

There are numerous reasons to incorporate merino wool into your wardrobe. I don’t want to buy any other clothing for everyday wear or travel.

The Wild Kitchen and Sheep Hair

The most apparent connection between my new clothing material of choice and the Wild Kitchen is the massive reduction in footprint that merino wool provides. One common rebuttal I’ve heard about more people harvesting wild food for their diet in the U.S. is the lack of space there is to do so at scale. Fair enough, although industrial food arguably requires more space under a single purpose versus the multiple purposes one can have with wild food, but I digress.

Any reduction in the broad and polluting impacts we have on our environment moves in a direction where more animal relatives can thrive. A diverse and thriving ecology is inarguably healthier, more productive, and more resilient to disturbance than the monoculture landscape of anti-Indigenous civilizations.

Being able to compost my clothing brings me immense joy, in addition to the benefits I’ve mentioned in this article. I also may be a weirdo who gets excited about the idea of composting my old clothes.

Nevertheless, fewer landfills mean more opportunities for that land to be used in ways that provide reciprocal benefits, rather than just millennial holding grounds for toxic materials we couldn’t be bothered to think too strategically about.

Additionally, merino wool clothing makes an excellent base layer material for hunting.

CONSIDER THIS

Pricey, but worth it!

If you’re considering investing in merino wool clothing, I’d recommend starting with a simple t-shirt. They are usually the cheapest item to buy and something you’re likely to wear most frequently.

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Finally Tenured!

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Thanks for reading!

-Jonathan