Thousands of garments are stored on a three-tiered conveyor system at a sorting facility for ThredUp, an online thrift store. Matt York/AP
My personal law of physics dictates that if you compliment something I’m wearing, I will automatically tell you where I got it and how much I spent on it. Most of the time I probably sound like a pauper’s Ariana Grande: “Oh, this sweater? Gee, thanks! I just found it on the street.”
As someone who gets almost all of her apparel secondhand — in thrift and consignment stores, on sidewalks, at clothing swaps — disclosing the cost and source of an outfit has come to feel like the fashion equivalent of salary disclosure. I’ve been shouting mine for the better part of a decade.
More recently, it’s become a way of wearing my politics quite literally on my sleeves. As the realities of fast fashion’s terrible effects on our planet become ever more studied and ever more apparent, a penchant for used goods has started to feel more than just budget-savvy. It now feels urgent, necessary, and non-negotiable.
Our planet is hurtling towards disaster, and our collective appetite for cheap button-downs is one reason why.
We’re buying more than ever from a market that values quality less than ever, and a ravenous appetite for growth is slated to produce 100 million tons of clothing annually by 2030. The fashion industry is responsible for 8 to 10%of global carbon emissions, to say nothing of its water use and exploitative labor practices in countries across the globe. Faced with the sheer scale of this nightmare, why ever buy anything new?
Even the most well-intentioned sustainability initiatives produce little by way of scalable, affordable, well-made clothing.
Dana Thomas, a prolific fashion author, recently cited a Stella McCartney shirt as the closest thing she’d found to a sustainably-constructed clothing item. The price tag? $550.
From a supply chain standpoint, though, that price isn’t unheard of. “It’s labor and parts,” Kibbe said, “[because] you source fiber from small farms, who are paying a lot more not to use pesticides, and you’re paying fair wages.”
In some cases, fashion brands hawking that ethos are found guilty of “greenwashing” — the movement’s most powerful pejorative — using buzzwords like “organic” and “natural” to reap the market benefits of an eco-consciousness they can’t actually prove they’re practicing.
It’s worth noting that sustainability isn’t always a clear-cut claim. Everlane — often cited as a leader in affordable sustainability — rates as “Not Good Enough” on the watchdog app Good on You due to a lack of clear evidence surrounding water use reduction and living wage protections. An Everlane spokesperson defended the brand’s efforts, noting a recent partnership with bluesign to help audit chemical use in its supply chain. The spokesperson told Insider that, when it comes to living wages, Good on You “doesn’t have the information about how robust the audits we do are,” but also acknowledged that the company could be more transparent about these efforts.
Resale still comes with a whole lot of baggage.
While certainly more affordable than a Stella McCartney, Everlane’s $18 cotton tees still aren’t as easy on the wallet as, say, the $5 option from H&M. So if the most sustainable and affordable way to shop is to buy and resell clothes that already exist, why isn’t resale the norm?
