The Case to Kill Fast Fashion

So…what exactly is slow fashion, anyway?

As a longtime lover of secondhand fashion and vintage style especially, it has recently come to my attention that there’s a pervasive fog around the idea of “slow fashion”, if there is awareness of the concept at all. Since it looks like the deafening roar of make-more-buy-more-you-need-Kylie-Jenner’s-new-makeup-line-now isn’t going away anytime soon, I thought I’d take a moment to yell into the void about a quite viable alternative – enter slow fashion (slowly).

Slow fashion is modeled similarly to the movement for slow food – and if you don’t know what the hell that is either, fear not! I’m going to try to make this as foolproof as possible.

Slow fashion is a response to the currently predominant fast fashion culture wherein trends (and thus products) are churned out at breakneck speed and consumers have to constantly buy new items to keep up. You may be thinking, “Good heavens, why on earth wouldn’t I want to jump into that rat race and be run over daily by the fashion industry’s whimsical notions of what is ‘in’?!?” Excellent question! As wonderful as that sounds, there are greater implications of this kind of culture and consumption at a larger level. And this is where we dig into the real meat of the matter…

The ethics! Aha! I know you’ve been missing those since that one third of a chapter of business class in college you took where you talked about whistleblowing for fifteen minutes! But alas, the implications here are rather grander in scope. You see, fast fashion is responsible for a deplorable amount of carbon emissions, not to mention the questionable materials used for the poor quality clothing that is only made to be worn up to 5 times (hint, hint: tiny pieces of plastic that end up in the ocean and eventually on your plate as part of fish/crusteaceans' consumption!). To put it in perspective, the fashion industry creates as much carbon emissions each year as all the planes flying in the world. Or, as the entire country of Russia. Whichever comparison floats you boat or is more relatable…and if that just doesn’t seem like much, or you don’t have a very strong sense of how big Russia is, consider that to make one cotton t-shirt, 2700 liters of water are required—or the amount of water that one person consumes in two and a half years.

So! The world is going down in flames, you’re tired of chasing trends that look stupid after 2 months anyway, and you don’t know what in the blithering heck you’re doing with your life!! Worry not…I can help you with at least one of those.

I know you distractible trawlers don’t have the attention span for any more pithy content in this serving (kids these days amirite??), so you shall have to eagerly anticipate the next installment – HOW TO START SLOW – out next week!!

Til then, be easy, buy less, and take time to smell the roses!

With style and spunk,

Jules