Danielle Cosentino used to give bags of unwanted clothes to her cousin every year.

While her cousin loved the free stuff, Cosentino grew tired of buying so much and wearing so little. She had become caught up in acquiring trends through fast fashion retailers only to realize she was locked in a loop of buying cheap clothes, having them degrade quickly, then having to buy more.

“I’ve always been told if you haven’t worn it in two years, then it should go,” says Cosentino, a massage therapist and nutritionist. “And I felt like that would be half my closet.”

A variety of studies and sources go even further than that, estimating that most of us don’t wear 70 to 80 per cent of our clothes.

Averaging out census data over several years, Canadian households spend roughly $300 a month on clothing, according to Statistics Canada. If most of that will be barely worn, our closets are essentially graveyards of disposable income.

Cosentino wanted to change. She hired Jaclyn Patterson, a personal wardrobe stylist and founder of  Shopwise, an online sustainable fashion retailer that focuses on “slow fashion.”

Cosentino began evolving her shopping habits and treating her wardrobe like a long-term