'Don't feed the monster!' The people who have stopped buying
new clothes
Fashion
A growing movement eschews fast fashion in favour of
secondhand clothing. Is this the biggest personal change that can be made for
the environment?
Paula Cocozza
@CocozzaPaula
Tue 19 Feb 2019 06.00 GMT Last modified on Tue 19 Feb 2019
09.13 GMT
Sarah Fewell, who runs a business selling secondhand and
vintage clothes on the website Depop that now has 10 million users.
Lauren Cowdery is flicking through the rails of the Cancer
Research charity shop in Goole, east Yorkshire. “Too bobbly!” she tuts at a
ribbed top. “This skirt is big but it would be easy to take in … ” Cowdery
appears to be shopping, but she is merely browsing. She is on a mission not to
buy any new clothes, even ones that have recently belonged to someone else. “I
think you have to pull back and ask: ‘Do I need this?’” she says.
Cowdery is one of a growing number of people who love
clothes but try their hardest to resist buying them for reasons of
sustainability. According to the charity Wrap, which promotes sustainable waste
management, the average lifetime for a garment in the UK is just 2.2 years. An
estimated £30bn of unused clothing hangs in UK wardrobes, and yet still we shop
for more. “Each week we buy 38m items and 11m items go to landfill,” says Maria
Chenoweth, chief executive of Traid, a charity working to stop clothes being
thrown away. “We don’t have enough resources to keep feeding this monster.”
Chenoweth believes that consumers are switching to
secondhand shopping, or adding a pre-owned element into their purchasing
habits. She points to a 30% rise in turnover at Traid shops in 2018 compared
with 2017. When she was a teenager in the 80s, her father banned her from
jumble sales in case people thought the family was poor. She disobeyed him, and
dragged her sacks of clothes through her bedroom window. Now, Chenoweth
considers it “a huge gesture of activism to buy secondhand”, a necessary choice
for those who “do not believe in damaging the environment and perpetuating this
consumption and waste”.
So how hard is it to make the transition to a more
sustainable way of shopping? In the UK, clothing has the fourth largest
environmental impact after housing, transport and food. More than half of
fast-fashion items are thrown away in less than a year, according to McKinsey’s
State of Fashion report last year. But is buying secondhand really an antidote
to fast fashion?
In Goole, where Cowdery works as a marketing officer for the
Junction Theatre, there are ample local distractions for a lunch break: Dorothy
Perkins, New Look, Peacocks. Cowdery used to buy things “because they were
there”. In the evenings, she went on Asos. “I’d think: ‘Oh brilliant, a
discount code! Free shipping! I’ll order stuff! Hmm … It doesn’t fit very well,
but I can’t be bothered to send it back … I’ll keep it.’”
Each month, Cowdery bought two or three things. “At £20 a
time, that starts to build up. There’s a wardrobe of stuff. Things with the
tags still on … I took a look at myself and thought: ‘What are you doing?’”
‘It changed how I thought
about clothes’: Lauren Cowdery of the Leeds Community Clothes Exchange:
Curious about a post she saw on Facebook, one weekend
Cowdery dropped into the Leeds Community Clothes Exchange, a local swap shop.
Four years on, she is one of its three directors, helping to oversee the 2,000
items – “designer stuff, vintage stuff, handmade things, wedding dresses” –
that pass through the doors of the Woodhouse community centre each month.
Cowdery and I meet in one of those lunch hours that used to
be spent shopping. Her skirt, top and cardigan are all from the Clothes
Exchange; her boots are from the Autism Plus shop in Goole. “At the exchange,
it’s one for one on everything,” she explains. There are no value judgments. A
garment is saleable if all its buttons are present and there are no stains.
Some prom dresses return again and again. “People take them, wear them, bring
them back.” Regulars set aside pieces for each other. The fitting room is a
place of encouragement.
As her involvement in the clothes exchange grew, Cowdery’s
visits to Peacocks dwindled. Now, its shop floor struck her as “an explosion in
a jumble sale”. She began to delete unopened emails from Asos and Topshop. She
swore off buying new clothes for a year. “I thought I’d reach the end and
think: ‘I’ve done that. I’ll move on,’” she says. Instead, “It changed how I
thought about clothes.”
Cowdery still loves clothes – especially anything velvet –
but she has found a safe way to consume them. The clothes exchange enables her
to refresh her wardrobe without adding to it. She can be acquisitive, as long
as she relinquishes in equal measure. Where she once bought three pieces a
month, she now swaps 10 to 15 – mostly things she picked up at the previous
exchange.
Clothes come and go at the Basingstoke home of Sarah Fewell,
too. In fact, so many parcels come and go that she knows her postman by his
first name (Jay). Fewell has always loved cutting up old clothes, sticking on
studs, even at 14 when most of her friends were into Hollister. But now she has
turned her passion for preloved clothes into a sustainable version of fast
fashion.
Fewell runs a shop called Identity Party on the website
Depop, which since being established in 2011 has offered its 10 million users a
blend of eBay-style trading with Instagram-style posting. Her brand is “a lot
of 80s, 90s, quite bohemian, grungy”. She especially loves “selling things with
animals on, a good old ugly jumper and anything by St Michael.”
Two years ago, in the second year of a politics degree at
Goldsmiths, University of London, Fewell was browsing the charity shops when
she saw “a really nice dress that wasn’t for me”. She already had a Depop
profile, having sold some unwanted clothes, so she bought the dress, listed it
as “‘very Phoebe from Friends” and it promptly sold.
She bought and sold relentlessly during her third year.
“When I left university, I thought, I don’t want a real job.”
Now with Identity Party, Fewell has professionalised her
love of vintage.
She doesn’t totally eschew new clothes for her own wardobe;
they make up about 10%. She buys gymwear new, for instance (“It would be a bit
gross to wear secondhand gym clothes”). She even bought some on Black Friday:
“That’s maybe contradictory of me to engage in Black Friday, but I just wanted
gym clothes.”
People used to watch
hauls on YouTube and be like: ‘Yeah, great.’ Now they are a lot more aware
We are sitting in a cafe in a shopping mall in Basingstoke.
Fewell, who is wearing an Identity Party top and jeans and an eBay jacket, runs
through her working week: Monday, she posts; Tuesday, she photographs;
Wednesday she uploads. A fourth day is spent scouring the charity shops of
Basingstoke, Newberry and Reading. A fifth and a sixth on further photography
and posting.
Fewell’s days are long. But all the hours spent cutting out
shoulder pads and removing used handkerchiefs from pockets have made her one of
Depop’s top sellers. Since that first dress, she has sold more than 3,000
items, and her customer base includes her own friends, who no longer find
secondhand shopping “a bit niche”.
“A lot of people are getting really sick of fast fashion,”
Fewell says. “People used to watch hauls [mass trying-on sessions of newly
purchased clothing] on YouTube and be like: ‘Yeah, great.’ Now if you click on
a haul and read the comments, everyone’s like: ‘Oh, there’s so much stuff, it looks
really bad quality.’ People are a lot more aware.”
In 2017, when she posted that first dress, Fewell “wasn’t
very conscious” of the sustainability benefits of secondhand clothing. “I
wasn’t really thinking: ‘I could push this message.’” After a couple of months,
“it got added in there”. Now she trades her “handpicked vintage gems” as
sustainable fashion. Facts about clothing waste are printed on the reverse of
her business cards. When a piece of clothing doesn’t suit a customer, she urges
them to sell it on, to close the loop.
But does Fewell ever look at the floor of her parents’ spare
room – now her stock room – at the sea of pink plastic packages waiting to be
driven to the post office, and think that buying and selling secondhand
clothing may not be the height of sustainability? In some ways, Depop mirrors
fast fashion: consumers buy cheaply and often. Fewell points out that the bags
are made of recycled plastic; she would like to afford biodegradable ones. “The
downside, environmentally, is postage and packing,” she admits. “But people are
always going to want to buy clothes. Buying secondhand is probably the best way
they can do it.”
The key, says Stephanie Campbell from Wrap’s Love Your
Clothes campaign, is “to keep clothing out of landfill”. Each year 430,000
tonnes of clothing are disposed of and not recycled in the UK. Meanwhile, the
number of new clothes sold is rising: 1.13m tonnes in 2016, an increase of
200,000 tonnes on 2012.
Zoe Edwards, who 11
years ago pledged never to buy new clothes.
“It’s a slow, gradual mindset change,” says Zoe Edwards, a
sewing teacher and blogger who 11 years ago pledged never to buy new clothes.
“It’s not like a switch goes on and all of a sudden, it’s: ‘Right, this is how
I shop now.’”
Edwards was working for “a very fast-fashion, low-end
clothing supplier” in London. Her job was to order the trims: labels, hanging
loops, buttons, zips. The quantity of delivered fabric always varied, so she
had to order a surfeit of trims, a routine waste that made her uncomfortable.
She had always loved sewing, selling her handmade clothes on market stalls and
Etsy. Now, her two ways of living jarred.
“I didn’t want to be part of fast fashion any more,” she
says. She quit her job, sewed clothes, sold the clothes, taught sewing and
blogged about it. In the past 11 years, Edwards has bought only “one or two
things”. Her bras are new, and she thinks she may have purchased a top from
Zara in about 2010. Even her knickers are what she calls “me-made”.
So how difficult is it to stop buying clothes? Tania
Arrayales, a self-described “fashion disruptor”, has founded an organisation in
New York called Fashion of Tomorrow to advocate a more sustainable approach to
the clothing industry. Arrayales was a founding member of Style Lend, a
peer-to-peer clothing rental site, and swore off all clothing purchases for a
year, inspired by the documentary True Cost. But weren’t there times when she
was desperate to break her self-imposed rule?
“The challenge was feeling a little bit … I wasn’t as trendy
as I used to be. I couldn’t make an impact when I went to an event,” she says.
“I didn’t have anything new and shiny. But I wanted to restructure the way my
brain saw shopping.”
“I started seeing
pieces in a new light’: Tania Arrayales, a founding member of the clothing
rental site Style Lend.
In her second year, she allowed herself to buy vintage
clothes. The year after that, she bought the odd piece of new clothing from
sustainable brands. Any time she felt her style “lack a little”, she rented
what she needed from Style Lend (there are lending sites in the UK, too, but
this is not yet a flourishing market). “I started seeing pieces in a new light.
I discovered styling,” Arrayales says.
Cowdery has noticed a similar sense of exploration and play
at the Clothes Exchange. “I’ve been more experimental, more free, with clothes.
I don’t keep things for best. I wear them. And I don’t worry about the size on
the label,” she says.
The fluidity around sizing is one of the pleasures of
secondhand shopping. Depop sellers such as Fewell list clothes as fitting size
eight to 14. Shoppers are encouraged to view their size as variable. “That’s
the great thing about swapping,” Cowdery says. No one gets depressed because
something their size won’t zip up. “You just look by eye, and ask yourself:
‘Will that fit?’”
Edwards has faced a similar confrontation with her personal
taste. Sewing requires a lot of decision-making: the colour and weight of
fabric, length of dress, shape of sleeves. She buys vintage fabric and
refashions charity shop finds, but even so, she doesn’t think “sewing is
necessarily the most sustainable way to dress yourself”. There is still the
acquisition of fabric and materials. And a tendency to prize the making over
the wearing, so that a lot of making goes on that never gets worn. “There is a big
slow fashion movement within the sewing community,” Edwards says. “People are
using their stash rather than buying new stuff.”
The volume of clothing of all kinds – new, secondhand and
handmade – is challenging. And selling on secondhand clothes has its limits. To
avoid swamping the secondhand market, or passing the problem on to others,
including developing countries where many used clothes are sold in bulk, other
technologies, such as fibre-to-fibre recycling, need to be encouraged.
“Clothing is a way to show who I am, what I feel, what I
believe,” Edwards says. “It’s a way to communicate with the world. It’s got
real social value, but it has got to be done mindfully.”
So what can a person who loves new clothes but wants to live
more sustainably do? As Edwards says, if you are spending time on fashion
sites, it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination or will to switch your
browser to eBay, Depop, thredUP, Hardly Ever Worn It or any of the raft of
“resale disruptors”. Chenoweth says that “not keeping stuff in your wardrobe is
important if you’re not wearing it”. Donating clothes puts them back into
circulation.
As Cowdery says: “Clothes have a story. If you wear
something once then throw it in the bin, it hasn’t had a story. You want to
know there’s life in these things.”
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