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What are the clothes you are wearing today made of? Where does it come from? What hands are behind him? How much did the people who sewed it receive in payment? How many liters of water did you use to make it? How long will it last in your closet? We have to ask the dress questions. We need to break this complicit silence that has flooded our wardrobes with cheap, boring and highly polluting pieces. Turning a blind eye has made us feel less guilty, but the absence of guilt doesn’t relieve us of responsibility.
How can a commodity like a T-shirt, which uses 2,700 liters of water (the same amount a human would drink in 900 days) and which was designed, cut, colored and sewn by different people, live miles and miles away cost as much as a sandwich away from the point of sale?
The fashion industry is the second most polluting industry after the automotive industry and is responsible for 10% of global CO2 emissions due to the energy it uses in production, manufacturing and transport.
When washing clothes, 500,000 tons of microfibers end up in the sea. 85% of the textiles produced annually end up in landfills and the burning of products from previous seasons is a common technique in the world’s most expensive fashion. Luxury brands have burned their products that have not sold for more than $30 million just to avoid putting them on sale and to prevent their symbolic value from diminishing.
So why do our clothes seem blameless when we examine our ecological footprint? Why aren’t we ashamed of having a closet full of clothes we don’t use or need? We ignore fashion’s alarming numbers and look benevolently at our clothes because we are stunned by a series of images of fantastic possible lives and enthusiasm for beauty that discipline our gaze and silence every trace of criticism. The desire to be pretty at that dinner or to look good at that party is worth more than any moral worries that you may feel when you see the price of the article of clothing you want and see that the tag says ‘Made in Indonesia’.
Idalia Candelas
We must slow down the consumption of clothing! Shrink the closet and ask yourself uncomfortable questions that make us give in to other consumer practices. Do I really need another pair of jeans? What is behind the desire to buy something new? Fashion has long ceased to be the buying and selling of clothing, but a large identity supermarket. And it seems identity is in crisis: On average, people bought 60% more clothes in 2014 than they did in 2000.
We need to buy less and buy according to other logics.
For example, do you understand what has this jacket that has remained intact in the closet regardless of time, wear and tear, trend changes and is still the favorite? The fashion industry needs to be more focused on making clothes popular and durable, “instead of being fast, emotionally redundant and easily interchangeable,” as Tamzin Rollason of the Center for Urban Research aptly put it. Using clothes for a long time is one of the most crucial ways to achieve fashion that is less harmful to the environment.
We should engage in bartering more and more each time, buying used clothes with our old clothes that someone else isn’t wearing anymore; entrust us to the repair and transformation of those dresses or trousers that we do not wear or that have been damaged and that could have other possible versions. Really sustainable fashion can only be fashion that is made without new materials.
Buying second-hand clothes should stop being an exclusive practice for vintage lovers. It would have to become a normalized, ethical, cool practice that integrates everyone into society. It’s a mission to breathe new life into this tidal wave of clothing that is sweeping our society and ending up in huge landfills!
We also need more people learning how to sew their own clothes. And doing so with this commitment to “do it yourself” and “made to measure” challenges both the tyrannical fashion production system and the sizing system that increasingly conjures up the difficulty of loving our bodies as they are. The manufacture of our clothing is a way to know for sure the origin of our pieces, it breaks with chains of poor pay, with garments that come from China and gives back to the body the virtue of its roundness and flesh, since it is the dress , which must bend to the body, and not the body, which must be trained to embed itself in a dress.
Clothing, as seen in movies where even the dullest supporting character appears, should have in their credits (labels) the records of all the hands that worked on their making, so that when we ask this garment, who made it? we can tell the story of those who made it, of those who cut and sewed it, perhaps with so many names and lives revealed in this garment, a path is opened to appreciate clothing as something precious, something seeing that exists to honor and not as something disposable.
We need to question our new clothes, our wardrobe, our old clothes, and use them to find ways so that our desire to dress well isn’t an accomplice to a true disaster.