I partially knew that some clothes were made of plastic, but I hadn’t thought about the pervasiveness of this. I assumed that the ‘artificial-feeling’ clothes like shiny fashion clothes or acrylic decorations were the plastic components, but didn’t realize how it is literally interwoven in even clothes that are partially natural, and I thought even the synthetic fabrics were some different kind of chemical not considered plastic.
Clothing brands who proclaim to recycle, to use recycled materials, or to have low environmental impacts are merely greenwashing us into engaging with a system that is fundamentally unsustainable no matter what surface-level “sustainable” changes are made. To buy into fast fashion is inherently upholding an unsustainable system: even if you buy a “sustainable” clothing item, the whole premise of fashion is that fashion begets fashion: the perception of being “fashionable” means that everyone else has to keep up, and it creates a toxic cycle.
Society defines fashion — both consciously and subconsciously — based on what we see others wearing, so any time someone wears something new, they are triggering a cascade of defining new trends or illustrating what is fashionable. Our desire to uphold particular appearances demands novelty, and even if “sustainable” fashion becomes a new trend, it means that all the old clothes become waste. Thus we cannot engage with greenwashed, “sustainable”-labelled fashion until it is genuinely sustainable and truly circular: otherwise we are just amplifying the problem by adding more clothes to the piles, and the slight, minor reductions become meaningless. If your recycled clothes look nice, they inspire others to buy similar styles which may not even be sustainable at all.
I think we need to reconsider the societal value placed on clothes. Why are branded ripped jeans fine, but it looks bad when my shirt has a hole in it? Why are we told that we need a new fancy dress for every event? Why are women especially judged for their clothes or for looking “trashy”?
Fashion is one of the few industries I do have hope for. Clothes make us into literal walking billboards, and the nature of visible clothes means that we have the opportunity to make a statement about what we do and don’t believe in with each outfit. Wearing clothes that don’t align with fast fashion can be subtle (when finding gently-used, brand-name clothes in thrift stores), or it can be dramatic, like wearing clothes that are entirely counter to “normal.” Outside of the circles of a particular brand-obsessed American stepsister I have, secondhand clothes shows huge promise. Initially it seemed that students on the NYUAD campus would look down upon the ideas of secondhand clothing, some for cultural reasons and others from class status and beliefs about needing to display wealth. But in 2019, a group of five of us students involved in campus sustainability launched the Swap Shop, a campus-wide clothing exchange. Each person dropped off their clothes the week before, and we tallied them up in a spreadsheet so they had a virtual “token” count and could take that many items of clothing on the day of the event. We made sure to market this not as a sustainability initiative, but as one for fashion and budgeting as a fun event with lights, live music, decorations, and a lot of marketing buildup. Over the two rounds of Swap Shop, 800+ clothing items were diverted from landfills. The idea is to ultimately make this a permanent room on campus, trust-based on one-to-one exchanges. This was hugely successful, and really transformed cultures of clothes on campus: now there are dozens of clothes for sale on campus Facebook groups every week. Thus, exchanging clothes means that none of us needs to buy new, firsthand fast fashion, and it could hypothetically be entirely cut out, at least until these generations of clothes become unusable.
Some friends and I had a small-scale exchange earlier this year, and this let us get rid of clothes we don’t wear without parting with them in the emotionless way of giving them to a stranger. As the reading said, “clothes that hold high physical and emotional durability would in turn increase demand for repair service.” The notion of emotional durability shows why prom and wedding and party dresses are inherently unsustainable: they are ascribed too much cultural and emotional significance to be worn again.
My favorite shorts in the world cost 1 USD from a tarp on the ground on the side of the road in Kenya, where a huge proportion of “donated” clothes end up. My host sister in Kenya told me about the process a couple years ago: clothes are “donated” in developed economies, then sold in huge shipping containers to middlemen in places like Kenya. These bins are rated based on nation of origin, with China being ranked 3rd category because sometimes people put “dirty towels,” the US in the 2nd category, and a lot of European countries in 1st. The crates are bought in their entirety, and then sorted through: a lot are low quality and are simply burned, which is toxic to the people around. The salvageable clothes are then sold, but a lot of donations are dirty, torn, or otherwise damaged. Many of these clothes were “donated” with the intention of providing free clothes to the “starving child in Africa” stereotype. Some people seem alarmed that they are sold rather than provided for free, but the practice of selling them helps build an economy rather than dumping excess and upholding joblessness– still, it is an unsustainable system because it upholds privileged and unfair practices of unloading waste “away”– dumping clothes that people don’t want on the land (and lungs) of people who aren’t able to reject them.
We should set up exchanges with people whose clothes we like, buy from secondhand stores, challenge notions of “fashion” by refusing to wear single-use outfits at fancy events, and learn how to sew buttons back on, teach strategies for repairing tears, and use natural dyes to completely change the color of clothes we can’t un-stain.
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