Words: Katie Malone
Re-fashion Our Relationship with Clothes
SUSTAINABLE FASHION AND THE IADT SWAP-SHOP Out of the large wardrobe that you own, what do you actually wear and how often? Now, picture your wardrobe, multiply this with your family, your friends, and their friends. This adds up to masses of items of clothing barely worn. Currently, we own four times the amount of clothes our parents would have, and that is only a small insight into one individual’s social network. What does this look like on a global scale? 80 billion pieces of new clothing are purchased each year - with this inflated expenditure on clothing happening annually, it seems that the more we consume, the more we waste. The Copenhagen Fashion Summit of 2018 reported that the fashion industry is responsible for 92 million tons of solid waste dumped in landfills each year. How have we ended up in this position? The fast fashion industry. Fast fashion is a term used to describe the readily available, inexpensively made fashion of today. The fast fashion model is a scheme curated
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by the fashion industry and its associated brands, which lures in its consumers by constructing the illusion that you will feel innately happier and more fulfilled by purchasing and consuming fashion trends. This image can be bought at a cheap price, but at what cost? The mechanisms of the fashion industry are seen through multiple marketing strategies perpetuated by the industry – such as the reconstruction of the clothing seasons, which were originally two seasons; a summer and a winter season. This has intensely multiplied on a large-scale to our current position with 52 fashion micro-seasons visible in the market. This reimagined season model is one of the many tools used to entice its customers to keep up with the fast-moving trends and consume more frequently. The construction of 52 micro-seasons drives the production of inexpensive clothing. How? The prices are kept down by outsourcing production to low and middle-income countries.
