Archived Editorial Blog



An exclusive Blog written by Sophie Saint 

Sophie, @saint.thrifty over on Instagram, is based in Bristol and has worked in marketing for years, giving her an insight into how brands can twist words to stimulate sales. She utilises social media to highlight the importance of being more sustainable with your wardrobe and shares style tips to help maximise what you already own. She also shares the horrific reality behind fast fashion brands and rages against the relentless greenwashing campaigns that unethical brands use to trick people into consuming

 

Secondhand September ‘someone’s trash is another’s treasure' 

I never really knew how much I loved secondhand clothes until it became a choice rather than ‘this is all I can afford’. After years of losing a lot of what little money I had to fast fashion brands and still having those ‘I don’t know what to wear’ crises (and the inevitable wardrobe malfunctions from cheap clothing), I had to take a step back to see the bigger picture.

I was in a vicious cycle of buying and having it arrive conveniently within 24 hours, but I had no idea what my personal style was. This led to hating everything in my wardrobe, having low self-confidence and body image issues… and then buying again to make myself feel better. Or find a magical piece of clothing that would make me look like the models! I was caught in a capitalist cycle of overconsumption because I hadn’t explored an alternative way to consume consciously.

Hunting for bargains was in my blood, thanks to my mother, but it wasn’t until I moved to Melbourne for a few years that the thrifting bug really took hold. In Australia, there is a chain of warehouses called ‘Savers’ that harbour a treasure trove of secondhand items. I loved thrifting so much that I would treat it like a day out and travel far and wide to various Savers to have a rifle for unique, fantastic items.

Although my stint in Melbourne ignited a love for preloved, when I moved back to the UK, I lost a bit of my identity and got sucked back into the ‘buy, wear once, buy again’ mentality. I needed to make a change, and the only way I could personally do that was if I set myself rules. And that was to stop buying new clothing altogether.

So many barely worn garments are readily available across various reseller apps. Ebay had been alive and kicking since my youth, but with the arrival of Depop and then Vinted, secondhand shopping became easier than ever. Instead of having to patiently pace secondhand warehouses and rifle through endless mountains of clothes, you could now search for precisely what you had in mind and filter by your size from your phone. Ideal for those who don’t have the time or patience to search IRL, plus it makes preloved clothing so much more accessible to those who have no charity or vintage stores in their vicinity.

At first, my reasoning for exclusively buying secondhand was because I could see there were already so many preloved garments available, and the prices were so affordable. But as I began educating myself, it became apparent that this overproduction and overconsumption was not only causing extreme damage to the world but having dreadful impacts on those in the factories making the clothes: the garment workers.

The sheer volume of garments made every day is shocking. There’s a limit to what can be resold, and the amount of waste makes the eyes water. As clothing companies continue to create extreme amounts of garments a day, the fashion industry has been voiced as the second most polluting industry after oil and gas. A ton of garment waste ends up out of sight, out of mind… in landfills of those in the Global Majority or our oceans, killing marine life and putting microplastics in our water. Not to mention that most clothing is cheaply made using inexpensive synthetic materials derived from fossil fuels. All in all, the fashion industry is one heck of a complicated mess.

While I’m not an expert on the fashion industry’s damaging impacts, I knew enough was enough - my consumption habits had to change. I also felt angry. I felt duped by these faceless brands who paint themselves to be inclusive and keen to make positive social impacts. In reality, they're solely after my money and don't care about what damage they caused or what debt we got ourselves in to keep up with the latest trends. It’s a sharp lesson on capitalism and how money reigns over human lives and our planet. Once you get that, buying fast fashion doesn’t seem so appealing.

Although it is very hard (or impossible?) to be ethical in a capitalist society, your money has power. Where you spend your money has importance. We may not be able to cause change as individuals, but the more we celebrate and normalise secondhand, the more it will stimulate change. This can be seen already in Love Island’s 2022 series, where the official fashion partner was changed from fast fashion brands to Ebay - a monumental business decision influenced by public opinion. It helped push preloved to the forefront of a reality show that has a huge amount of influence when it comes to buying clothes.

So this September, join me in cheerleading preloved. The saying ‘someone’s trash is another’s treasure’ is so true, and I can prove it. Let's do all we can to stop clothing from going to landfills and reduce the problematic overproduction by doing what we can: consuming less.

 Sophie Saint Thrifty Blog

 Photo Credit Sophie Saint.  You can follow Sophie on Instagram @saint.thrifty

 

An exclusive monologue written by Phoebe Hughes, Bath Spa Uni Graduate and Creative Arts Aficionado.

Photo Credit Dave Challenger

FROM A 20-SOMETHING-YEAR-OLD GUILTY CONSUMER

 At the end of the day, I am just a consumer. 

I’m a selective buyer, carefully putting the pressure on myself to find the right colour shade of green.

I want the fabric to not cut down any trees and the person who hems the skirt should be tipped for their part in painting the art.

Behind the scenes across the world, where clothing is glued together by the slums and factories that call themselves ‘ethically and sustainably sourced’.

The brands that are a mirror to royalty but smell of poverty, greed, influencers, charity donations, the fake it till you make it ones.

The panic of going into a crowded high street or doubt of order online buy now pay later that took away my night out because the dress didn’t fit and I wasted my monthly pay day.

So I want to know why I put this pressure on myself to keep buying clothes when all it does is stress me out?

Does it not worry you when you fact check the label that says made in Bangladesh or Macedonia?

And meanwhile I am not behind the scenes, I am safe on stage. 

My house in woodland Greece hasn’t been burnt down and I’ve managed to avoid the puddles of the New York Subway so that I can pick up my oat milk latte in my bamboo cup thinking that right now I am a saviour.

A saviour or a survivor?

Post pandemic and we are jetting off again with a suitcase of stress from 10pm BBC Points West so I have to plug myself into another app just to meditate.

Those that are not directly affected, doesn't make them immortal to the consumerism but perhaps just a diagnosis with obliviousness.

We bubble wrap the situation by avoiding meat, eggs and dairy, but it still makes us fart out the problem.

I like those shoes for Aunty Sonia’s wedding but I won’t wear them again for 5 years. 

Is the problem how to be a healthy consumer? 

Is the problem a creeping sand timer that says the 2050 climate crisis code red?

And is wearing my own wardrobe a solution?

Is the solution re-wearing clothing I own and saving thousands of corrupt companies causing more drama in my life?

Either way I do what I can.

Just do what I can but within the conscious reasons and try to not condemn my guilt.

Cheer up, it will be alright and you deserve to wear something that makes you happy. 

You deserve to look like a glittery star or feel yourself in your favourite pyjamas.

So when I stopped.

When I began to think about the destruction of continuous clothes shopping, I discovered something else.

My wardrobe is my own choice to feel free and own my look, nobody else has power over this choice.

So if my clothing is my own magic power, then I should care for this power.

Editorial feature blog

 

An exclusive piece written by Alexie Kalenga

Alexie Kalenga is a marketeer, model and sustainable fashion enthusiast. Her expertise lies in purchase intension and retail consumer behaviour. Her passion for helping people understand all aspects of sustainability flow through to her passion for saving the environment

“It’s going to charity”

The scene is set. All the latest trends have filtered down from the runways to our fingertips.
We are inspired by top-to-toe fuchsia pink seen by the Kim Kardashian and Balenciaga collaboration, and the denim micro mini brought back by Diesel at SS22 Milan Fashion week.
Hence, it’s time for a new wardrobe!! With an overload of constant inspiration, we crave new clothes, yet we have NO space. So, we decide to do something good for the environment, and for our community too. Afterall, it’s going to charity right!
Did you know that one in three young women in the UK think that a piece of clothing is “old” after they’ve worn it once or twice.
When you decide to make a charitable donation, do you ever consider where your clothes eventually end up? We tend to imagine that the clothing charity process is quite simple: you drop off your bag full of clothes at your local Oxfam or British Heart Foundation, a fairy-like volunteer whisks them off to the nearest rack, someone buys your pre-loved and boom, your clothes have new lives in new homes, right?
In part, yes, however there’s quite a complicated process that actually occurs behind the scenes. Here’s a glance into that process. Unfortunately, not every piece of clothing makes it onto the shop floor. Results from Statista showed that UK households bought around 57.63 billion British pounds worth of clothing in 2021. According to clothes aid, we the UK public, send over 700,000 tonnes of clothing to textiles banks, clothing collections and charities every year. To put that into perspective, it would be enough to fill 459 Olympic-size swimming pools!!! Get your rubber arm bands ready and imagine diving into that.
 However, 350,000 tonnes, which amounts to £140 million worth of used wearable clothing goes to landfill in the UK every year. Here you’re thinking, the math doesn’t add up, where do the rest of our clothes go? Well, according to Brooks, “as little as 10-30% of what is given to UK charities overall actually ends up being sold over the counter.”
 
Redial! Remember when we touched upon the complicated selection process at charity shops a minute ago? When your clothes aren’t bought in shops, they are more often than not sold to textile merchants, who then sort, grade, and export the surplus garments. So, a lot of our donations do not make the cut and if they haven’t been sent to a landfill in the UK, they make an international trip. Final destination, the warmer and sunnier climate of Sub-Saharan Africa. The magical moment of your donation is turned into a commodity. Since the 1980s and 90s, second hand clothing from Western Countries such as the UK has gained a significant market share across Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. However, today we’re going to zoom into Ghana’s capital Accra. Van Lunn and Binotto said that “in the West, clothes are disposed of when they are no longer considered useful, desirable or valuable.” In fact, over 15 million used garments flood the streets of Accra every week from Europe, North America, and Australia. This weekly influx of clothing fuel Accra’s markets and create a micro economy that supports over 5,000 retailers, all selling unwanted clothing from the west. Now, I know what we’re thinking, “that doesn’t sound too bad, at least the clothes are creating jobs…” However, the people who sell these clothes, many of which are women, earn an average of £3.70 a day; and they unfortunately are the last point of contact in this transaction.
In Accra, the used clothing market seems to be quite profitable with an average of 60 cargo ship containers full of clothes arriving every week, and this market is said to have created over 2.5 million jobs, but it is equally quite risky. You never know what a container will include until you open it up. With the ever-changing fast fashion micro-trends and a lack of quality in modern day clothing, what was seen as lucrative business venture for many in Accra, is not anymore. Some clothing arrives with rips and tears, missing buttons, sweat stains and even blood stains. With that being said, close to 40 per cent of the clothing arriving in Ghana are of such low quality they are deemed worthless on arrival and end up dumped in landfill. In the lively Kantamanto Market, within Accra, about 6 million clothing items are dumped as waste every week. Sadly, these clothes are dumped in overflowing landfills, that are now ingulfing neighbouring slums where people live and work and raise their children. And as if that isn’t enough, when monsoon season hits, tropical storms sweep enormous volumes of clothing into the city’s sewers. These heaps of now wet garments suffocate the drainage systems which create drain blockages and folding. What follows next is stagnant waters, and a breeding ground for rodents, insects, and diseases.
 
So, you’ve got all of this information now, and it’s a little bit overwhelming, right? What can we do to create solutions rather than encouraging a problem?
 
Well, your first solution is lying in your old biscuit tin, at the back of a dark cupboard somewhere. That’s right, it’s your sewing kit. We probably have one for that just in case moment and this is your reminder to use it. If something gets a hole or a tear, sew it up. You don’t need to be at a seamstress level to do this. Perhaps you don’t know where or how to start, that’s okay, just YouTube it like the rest of us or join a sewing social media or real-life community. Which brings us to the second point. Join a sustainable fashion community that works for you. Whether it is sewing, knitting or even upcycling, join a community where you can learn a new skill and create something for yourself. Yes, it will take time, but trust the process.  All good things take time, and you are worth the time. The third piece of advice revolves around time. In a fast-paced world that feeds off fast fashion, why not take a breath and shop slowly. It may not sound that exciting, but you won’t regret it. Slow fashion is a movement motivated by taking the time to look for quality pieces that last longer. Look for long lasting staple pieces and take the time to define your own signature style. It’s time to give your clothes a longer life in your home.
 
Now, this piece is not meant to discourage you from donating to charitable organisations. These organisations support a lot of communities and families. Let the stories of Ghana and many other countries encourage you to opt for quality and be a catalyst for you to redefine and create your own unique style.

 

 editorial feature blog 

Photo Credit @tasha.h_film. You can follow Tasha and Alexia on Instagram @alexie_kalenga

 

An exclusive piece written by Marcelo Marino

Marcelo Marino is an Art Historian and the Director of “Estudios de Moda” (Fashion Studies), a series of books on Fashion History and Fashion Theory published in Spanish in Buenos Aires and Madrid by Ampersand.

"Fashion is not always about the future"

Talking about the future of fashion has always been a fashionable obsession. Fashion, by definition, is expressed as an idea of future. One collection succeeds another, one style replaces the previous one, the new becomes old. Even each year has a Pantone-designated colour that displaces the previous one. The colour of 2022 is called “Very peri” and that of 2023 will be “Digital lavender”. Both are from the purple family -two different shades of purple- and for me there are no big differences between them. What will make “Digital Lavender” the new trending colour will be the speeches and narratives around the idea of the new colour the year and suddenly, the poor “Very peri” will be forgotten. The truth is that both shades of purple somehow already existed, always existed, and will continue to exist.

The same goes for fashion. Although we think that fashion is the future, in reality fashion is the past and above all it is the present in which some parts of the clothing styles of the previous years and decades are recreated.

However, the discussion of the future of fashion is always present and above all, it takes the form of the apocalyptic announcement of its end. During the first year of the Covid pandemic and with the successive lockdowns that reached every country in the world, including the great fashion capitals, the ideas of the end of fashion began to be discussed again. Actually, what looked like The End was that the process of commodification of fashion had stopped. What is normally confused with the future of fashion is fundamentally linked to its commercial aspect, the next collection, the next sales season and so on. But the truth is that during the lockdowns we were not left without clothes. Quite the contrary, we realized that we had too many and most of those clothes in our closet we don't use them because we forget they are there or because we are too lazy to refresh them and bring them back to life. Nevertheless, it was at that moment that many of us rescued an old jumper or some jeans from ten years ago and still in perfect condition. Others were more courageous and transformed, disassembled, intervened, redesigned and recreated new garments with fragments of others. I do not want to romanticize the moment of the pandemic, nor do I want to recite an ode to needlework. What I intend to point out is that something in fashion always remains alive, even if we are told that it is going to end. There is a mainstream fashion that we have all consumed and continue to consume. But there are also other individual actions that can become fashionable for us and spread collectively.

Take for example the JW Anderson patchwork knit cardigan worn by Harry Styles that recently entered the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum. That cardigan would not be in the National Collections if it had not been popularized during the pandemic by the version that a young American knitter, Liv Huffman, made of it. Harry Styles wore that cardigan to a concert rehearsal and Huffman decided to recreate it and teach how to knit it via her Tik Tok account. Hundreds of fans began to knit their own versions and it went so viral that JW Anderson released the patterns and instructions to reproduce it according to the original design. Such was the popularity of the cardigan that the V&A now exhibits, Harry's cardigan alongside the knitted one by Liv Huffman in the Fashion and Textile galleries. The full story can be seen in the documentary series Secrets of the Museum on BBC Player and versions knitted around the world can be easily traced with the hashtag #HarryStylesCardigan. Examples and anecdotes like this were innumerable during the pandemic and show that the creative power of fashion is what is important. Not all of us need to start knitting to create a positive change, but we can all find imaginative solutions to reduce unnecessary consumption.
Fashion that matters is built in the present. Approaching the materiality of clothing, knowing textiles and their creation processes, valuing quality, sustainability and good design are good guides to review our wardrobe. I do not mean that we should have a nostalgic look and recover the past to relive it in the present. Nor is it about going back to needle work or sewing and not buying new clothes anymore. Rather, it is about giving meaning in the present to what we bought in the past and giving our creative abilities a chance to build a subjectivity for ourselves. It's not about wearing old clothes; it's about developing a style that admits the incorporation of what we already have. It makes no sense to go against the grain of the times. That's not fashion either.
This new way of relating to fashion should also be applied to our purchases and as responsible consumers we have to demand that sustainability is not for the rich or a prerogative of luxury brands. All brands should offer sustainable alternatives for a wide variety of audiences. Clearly this is a utopia but when we talk about inclusive fashion brands, the question of class is as important as that of gender, identity or sizes. The great Italian fashion theorist, Maria Luisa Frisa says that “fashion has become an insular phenomenon, which is dangerously positioning itself outside of society”. This is an alert so that individually and collectively we make sense of fashion practices. The communicational power of fashion is fascinating, and we have to master it in our own ways. The “Harry Styles’ cardigan phenomenon” was a phenomenon of global communication. If it hadn't been for a Liv Huffman, that cardigan wouldn't be a museum piece today. Many media outlets highlight now JW Anderson's gesture of making patterns available but quickly forget that the main link that unites the chain was Huffman's video on Tik Tok.
Fashion is more vital than ever and truly takes centre stage in our lives. Fashion is in our Instagram accounts. We all follow at least one influencer, we watch fashion shows and adverts, we follow our favourite brands or wait for the big sign of Sale on the feed. Fashion is a complex system that connects us with the world. We have to know how to use it for our benefit and according to our wishes. And if the Pantone colour of the year for 2023 will be “Digital lavender” but you actually like the plain Green, well just choose your plain Green and make it the mark of your identity.

Marcelo Marino is an Art Historian and the Director of “Estudios de Moda” (Fashion Studies), a series of books on Fashion History and Fashion Theory published in Spanish in Buenos Aires and Madrid by Ampersand.

You can follow Marcelo on Instagram: @thebestfashionbooks and @marcelomarinow