#44: Slow fashion

 The price of fast fashion

I came back with a good haul from a local charity shop recently – a pair of jeans, a dress and two books (above) for less than the price of a one-way bus ticket to the nearest shopping mall. But I confess I had also visited that shopping mall a week earlier and came back with three Primark T-shirts, made in Bangladesh.

Fashion is apparently one of the most environmentally damaging industries; according to Fashionopolis by Dana Thomas, every year 80 billion new garments are made and 2.1 billion tonnes of clothes are thrown away.

Lauren Bravo’s ‘How to Break Up With Fast Fashion’ recommends repairing, recycling and holding your head up high as you go into the local high street Mind or Oxfam. She highlights exploitation in the worldwide fashion chain exposed by disasters such as the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in Bangladesh in 2013, in which 1,134 people died. Cracks in the building had appeared the day before but workers were told they would lose a month’s salary if they did not go back to work next day. According to Wikipedia, wages were about £25 a month.

This started as a light-hearted blog post about how to do charity shop clothes shopping. But I’ve been so horrified by learning about the exploitation involved in the fast fashion industry, that I’ll try ‘slow fashion’ for a year. No Zara or Primark, or clothes made in Bangladesh, China, Vietnam or India.

I include charity shops in slow fashion because clothes are being kept out of landfill, and there is a bit of added ethical value in the form of charity income.

Meanwhile, here are my tips for charity shopping:

1. Don’t go for something specific. If you’re looking for just the right pair of jeans, or loose shirt, or hat, forget it. Grab what you like when you see it. It might be an overcoat in summer, or a formal shirt when you might never give another presentation. But if that shirt skims your waist or makes you walk tall, snap it up.

2. Check weak spots. Armpits and collars. I’ve even been known to give clothes a quick sniff.

3. Feel noble. Remember, you’re not a cheapskate. You are environmentally and politically conscious.

4. Haggling. Mmmm. I’ve been on the verge of it sometimes (especially after finding a sailor T-shirt in Farnham Mind for £4 (‘new’, said the label) which turned out to cost only £5 in the local Sainsbury’s. Still, it feels a bit dishonourable.

5. I’m not sure that neighbourhoods matter. South Kensington Oxfam did give me a shirt I’m still wearing for interviews five years later, but it’s only M&S. And in Palmers Green, probably only average on the yummy mummy scale, I found a 60-style denim suede miniskirt in Leonard Cheshire I don’t think I’d have found anywhere else.

6. Don’t be a snob. There’s no reason why charity shops can’t give you as much as the most arid shopping mall, for 1/10 of the price.