Fast Fashion

There are so many ways that we can do our bit to create a smaller footprint on this earth. I bang on about regenerative farming ALOT as you know, but this is another thing we need to be aware of - Fast Fashion and the damage it can cause.

When I was a kid, Christmas was pretty special, because we would just about always get a new outfit. One outfit a year! In between times we wore hand me downs or second hand clothes. I can remember being so excited when Mum would bring a bag of clothes for us to go through and find what we liked. Then as I got older I learnt to sew and that was amazing. My sister and I would make our own clothes, trying to be a little bit trendy. And then when we went to boarding school, life really opened up and we would borrow clothes off our friends.

So naturally as I got older and got a job, one thing I spent money on was clothes! I do remember though that I often chose expensive labels as I knew they would last longer (not because I could afford it!). Now, I see my daughter and her friends and they are always buying new clothes. Online shopping just makes it so much easier!

There are so many problems with fashion today. There’s a lot in the media about fast fashion and the ethics of fashion. Basically slave labour is used in a lot of cases, even with (or especially with) well know fashion brands. This site, Ethical Clothing Australia lists some brands that you may want to check out. I noticed that Nobody Jeans is on the list and I absolutely love my nobody’s – in fact I don’t know that I would buy any other jeans again!

People buy cheap clothes and because they are cheap they don’t last – they either end up in land fill or second hand shops. This does extend the life of the clothes but more often than not they are only fit for rags, thus eventually ending up in landfill soon after. How were those cheap clothes produced? With cheap labour, slave labour.

Re-use and re-cycle. Don’t just throw things out, fix them. This is a bit tricky because a lot of things are poorly made, and we also don’t really have to skills today that our parents or grandparents may have had to fix clothes. My biggest problem is finding the time to do it! 

This is another reason to choose better quality, it may cost more initially but it will save money in the long term through better longevity. Shop at op shops, by buying second hand, at least you save things from going into land fill, for a while. I’ve heard of people that only choose natural fibres so that they can put their old clothes in the worm farms – you may need to pick out the buttons or zips! There are so many costs when it comes to clothes. The cost of the raw materials, the damage to communities through cheap labour, and of course how to dispose of them when there are so many clothes made each year.  

I’ve been trying to find clothes at op shops, but don’t always have much success. However, I will try to source any new clothes from ethical manufacturers or locally made clothes, and I’ll keep checking out the op shops as I can. This theory of buying better quality to last longer, to fix or re-use can be used for all our consumables. The idea of a throw away society has got to stop.