Pretty much all of us have too many clothes. (Yes, I'm looking at me here.). It's hard to avoid. We needed something for a special event and got it. We have a favorite outfit that's gotten stained and threadbare, but we can't bear to get rid of it. We saw something really nice on sale. We have work responsibilities where it seems appropriate not to wear the same outfit too many times close together.
We have some perfectly good clothes we might wear again if we ever lost a few pounds or they came back into style. We have clothes we would certainly wear if we ever went to a dude ranch/went on a fancy cruise/took up tennis/needed to clear brush (gotta be prepared!). We have clothes that we don't really like, but they were a gift, so it seems we ought to wear them sometime. We have clothes we forgot we have.
Needless to say, this was not a problem in the Middle Ages. The only people who had what might be considered "too many" clothes were the extremely wealthy, and even they would be put to shame by the number of outfits in a modern teenager's closet. Party this was because clothes were a lot more expensive and slow to produce than the "fast fashion" one sees today.
(Fast fashion is called that both because it's like "fast food," relatively inexpensive and ultimately unsatisfying, and because new styles are constantly being introduced to keep customers constantly buying the latest fashion.)
Today clothes are sewn by machine, usually in the southern hemisphere, rather than sewn by hand (even home sewers use sewing machines—even the Amish use foot-pedal-driven machines). And the cloth is all machine-woven today, not woven by hand. All that hand labor drives up the cost and means one cannot pop up to the mall and come home a couple hours later with several new outfits
Probably the majority of the medieval population had two everyday outfits, one to wear and one to wash. They might also have a third special-occasions outfit. (The well-to-do might have two special-occasions outfits.) These clothes would be worn until they were pretty thoroughly worn out, extensively patched and sewn back together.
The wealthy would pass a worn cloak or tunic down to a servant or someone of lower social status, as an act of generosity, so even a poor person might get to wear silk or velvet at some point, even if stained and threadbare.
At some point clothes just couldn't be worn any more. At this point they would become rags. Rags were useful. They were used for scrubbing. They were used for diapers. They were used in the latrine. They were used for feminine hygiene. They were used to stuff comforters. They were used for patches to make another outfit last a few months longer. Rags would get dirty, so just wash and use again until they literally fell apart.
As all this suggests, disposing of old clothing was not a concern. It is however in the modern West. Some clothing is just tossed into the garbage. Other unwanted clothing may be dropped off at Goodwill, but Goodwill will toss anything too stained and threadbare to attract a buyer. In the US something like a quarter of everything in the landfill is clothing that's been thrown away.
Some worn-out clothing can have its fabric recycled, especially pure cotton and pure wool. It is however difficult to recycle the strands of a cotton-poly mix fabric, because the different kinds of strands require different processes, and it's nearly impossible to separate them. This is why the amount of used clothing in the landfill continues to grow, in spite of recycling efforts. (Medieval people, with no polyester, did not have this problem.)
© C. Dale Brittain 2025
For more on clothing and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms. Also available in paperback!
