Hand-me-down and hand-me-round: Stylish secondhand toddlerwear

It's all got a little bit serious of late, so I thought I would take the pressure off and look at hand-me-down chic. Toddler style of course, because it is our little boy who enjoys the luxury of friends who give him all their old stuff rather than us. Now I realise that just by switching from new to secondhand we won't immediately eliminate the footprint of our clothing, but giving clothes a new lease of life does make some inroads in living a lower impact life. It also leads to some rather fine sartorial combinations. As illustrated by Senan here. To the right we see the little man channelling Arthur Daley for his best used car salesman look. For this we can thank his cousin Hannah for the coat, and his buddies Sam and Cameron for the hat and gloves.

The Urban Dandy look to our left is entirely thanks to 2-year old Cameron. 3-year old Mattie gave us the Weekend Sportsman look below. These secondhand clothes save in both fiscal and environmental terms and while this may sound laughably trivial, buying no new clothes for our son does make a difference in our low impact living. Calculating the precise carbon saving is not that simple, and as you may know, I don't like to look at things through a solely carbon lens. The impact of new clothes is also far bigger than carbon: the production of clothing consumes vast quantities of other finite resources such as water. For example: one cotton shirt takes 3,000 litres of water in its manufacture.

In a recent article in the Guardian, Chris Goodall, author of Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, said that we buy an average of 20kg of new clothes every year. He claims that each item made from natural fibres has a greenhouse gas footprint more than 20 times its weight. So not buying new clothes could actually lower our family's consumption by around a tonne of CO2 a year and that means Senan's hand-me-down wardrobe plays a big part in bringing down our impact. And once he's done with them they go on to his good buddy Sam who has just turned one. So they're not so much hand-me-downs as hand-me-rounds.