I’ve never been a big shopper. When I was younger, I dug my heels in every time my mother tried to drag me to the mall. I didn’t go through the stereotypical shopping phase despite my love of street fashion and fashion bloggers, perhaps because of body image issues, or the fact that we were never particularly well-off. This may have made this shift a little bit easier for me, as fast fashion has never really appealed outside of necessity.
The last new object that I obtained was a gift, a Calvin Klein peacoat for my birthday exactly one year ago (and it was the first new object for awhile — as a grad student, I hadn’t had much spare money to throw around on clothes, and I was learning to operate from somewhat of a capsule wardrobe). I had made a snarky comment not long before to one of my students about fast fashion practices that had prompted her to write her term paper on it, and I figured it was time to stand behind my beliefs as fully as I was able. As I can’t afford ethical firsthand fashion either (again, the woes of a graduate student — often the reason people turn to fast fashion in the first place) I found myself looking to clothes swaps and thrift and secondhand stores. I worried a bit, as I had several large events this year (my graduation, some job interviews, a few formal events, no big deal) but in the end it was totally doable — and even fun.
Here’s what I learned from a full year of no malls, no trend shopping, and a (hopefully) smaller carbon footprint.
1. I got better at styling
Trendy fast fashion shops do the styling for you. The clothes are made to be on-trend — for a moment — and look good with relatively little effort, even if they look a bit cheap. Buying secondhand meant sometimes having to adjust things for my size, for my own personal style, and for the style of the cultural moment. Vintage is always in, but different kinds of vintage are in at different times. Different cuts of jeans and skirts, different waistlines. Sometimes things had to be altered slightly or belted to make them work.
The end results, though, were always good. My style got more eccentric. I’m a tried-and-true “all black all the time” kind of gal (boring, I know) and I found myself branching out to new colors, new cuts, new shapes. I was getting compliments on pieces that had made me feel nervous and uncomfortable. I was feeling more confident about my ability to curate an outfit.
2. Trends got much harder to follow — and that’s okay
Again, fast fashion is built to follow trends. With our current internet era, everything is moving at a breakneck pace. Often, by the time you buy the clothes to fit a fashion trend, it’s already passed you by. You end up contributing to landfills or overabundance of cheaply made clothes at the same secondhand shops I’m looking at (thanks!) weeks after the clothes are launching in stores. While donating clothes is helpful for low-income people, many of them end up filling up storerooms or just ending up in landfills anyway, despite good intentions.
Not being able to follow trends felt a bit jarring to me initially, especially as someone who’s relatively social-media savvy and generally up to date on “cool new things”, but I’m also in my mid-twenties and looking to upgrade my wardrobe anyway, so it seemed like an okay shift. A younger person might struggle.
3. Clothes were often higher quality
Not always. There’s a lot of fast fashion in the thrift stores. There are also a lot of vintage pieces, and slightly more high-end pieces that were pleasantly surprising. While I’m not likely to buy a thrifted Forever 21 dress that’s already looking a bit worse for wear (though it’s still better than buying it new or letting it hit landfills) I often found some older dresses, skirts, and tops with obvious craftsmanship. My most recent find was a five dollar wool midi skirt from Scotland. The same thing new would likely cost ten times that — or if it didn’t, would fall apart immediately.
Jeans are sometimes real denim. Blazers have fun, tacky, shoulderpads. There are sometimes hand-stitched pieces.
4. Location matters…to a point
I live in a mid-sized city that’s relatively low-income. Our secondhand shops are abundant, but often full of fast fashion and had limited sizing on either end (and very limited menswear, though I feel this is a problem with fashion as an industry). Larger cities tend to have more options and better clothes within them, though their secondhand shops end up getting more expensive, which hurts the low-income people who need them most. Pick your poison.
5. You can do this online
While shipping isn’t wonderful for your carbon footprint, buying secondhand is still better than buying and shipping firsthand, so I’ll let it pass. Some people love the thrill of online shopping once in awhile, and this is a slightly less harmful way to do it (and there are sometimes good finds). There are well-known shops like Depop and Poshmark where users can upload pictures of their gently worn items to send out on their own, and ThredUp, which operates as an online thriftstore. There are also independent online reselling shops that tend to hand-pick for their own personal style.
6. It was easy
I don’t miss fast fashion. I scrolled through a desperate-looking Forever 21 sale a few weeks ago mostly from curiosity and realized that nothing caught my eye. The clothes looked somehow both cheap and overpriced (considering the circumstances of their creation). Perhaps it’s just from being broke, but giving up fast fashion felt like an obvious and effortless choice, and yet somehow it resulted in me buying more clothes (and spending less money) than I had in years past. And a bonus, they’re all clothes that I actually wear with some frequency. My wardrobe is somehow both eclectic and cohesive, I’m more thoughtful about my purchases, and I’m happier about my look.
Some things should generally be bought new — undergarments, beachwear, stockings, things like that. Those would make my venture more difficult had I not been pretty well-stocked beforehand.
Why it matters
While some fast-fashion retailers have made efforts to improve conditions for the workers at their respective factories, many of them still operate out of sweatshops, steps above slave labor. Many of these shops have unsafe work conditions, unacceptable pay, and have workers working unreasonable hours while exposed to toxic chemicals. Fast fashion is a human rights issue that those in western countries sometimes forget (or choose to ignore).
From an ecological standpoint, while exact statistics regarding waste percentages are difficult to verify, Americans dispose of roughly 12.8 million tons of textiles annually. Any effort to reduce this waste, even through just not throwing your clothing away, is a step towards progress. Ideally, we should be moving away from cheaply-made fast fashion as it’s the first to fall out of trend, and the first to fall apart, and thus to become waste. If we keep our products, or swap them instead of trash them, we’ll be reducing our carbon footprint immensely.
While it’s rarely on the consumer (or the average person in general) to worry about the global ecological crisis when the real people to blame tend to be those running large corporations (often like the ones selling and creating fast-fashion), in this instance, we speak with our wallets.
