“Right now, reused, recycled clothing is the only truly ethical clothing.”
Daryl Hannah in Peppermint Magazine Issue 4

Inspired by an interview in the recent issue of Peppermint magazine, in this post I will address the commonly held belief that second hand goods are the best sustainability solution.

The fashion industry is guilty of some pretty dirty tricks – I could write a book on these alone – but it sometimes gets a worse rap than it deserves. Nobody is having a go at fairtrade organic chocolate companies for selling us something we don’t really need but ecofashion is criticised on the basis that the very premise of fashion is not sustainable. Under the current model of the fashion industry I couldn’t agree more. There is high energy input, unnecessarily long miles, underpaid labour, badly regulated use of toxins, next to no concern for the end of the product’s life, trends designed to make what you bought last year ‘unfashionable’ this year, the perpetuation of poor body image, absurdly high retail mark-up, commonplace plagiarism of design work…the list goes on.

Still, you are probably wearing clothes while reading this and probably not some sort of utilitarian sack. While fashion can be a top down, personality crushing, credibility grab this is not what is for the majority of people. Fashion can communicate, connect and create culture. Clothes are necessary for shelter, protection and comfort; many serve specific functions and many affect the wearers mood and experience of the world.

None of this necessitates that our clothes need to be new or made of new materials so it’s no surprise that sustainability-minded-persons are dubious about environmental claims made within the industry and decide to boycott by buying only second hand clothing. The inputs and energy that go into creating a new garment can never compete with the minimal required for a second hand garment. We think, “Hey, we’re doing the world a favour by buying a second hand t-shirt because nobody wanted it and it would’ve ended up in landfill.”

The philosophy of much green thinking since phrases like ‘carbon neutral’ came about seems to be ‘I want it to be as if I never existed’. Second hand clothing neatly fulfills this illusion, we can discard unwanted clothes guilt free when we feel they are a gift to a charity and we can buy used clothes without guilt because they seem impact-free.

The reality is not so simple; second hand clothes stores, the larger of which are usually charity owned simply cannot deal with the volume of clothing donated to them. These charities can’t afford the amount of storage space that would be needed to cope with the influx of donations. A great deal of volunteer labour goes into sorting the saleable from that which will be sent to landfill, often these choices are made based roughly on current trends. Our thriving ‘vintage’ clothing industry exists because savvy folks find the best stuff from charity op-shops and resell them for more money. Some of these boutique style vintage stores even import stock (eg. Military apparel, vintage Levi 501s) from the US or elsewhere. So with storage, mileage, and the fact that twice as much ends up in landfill as on the racks anyway, second hand clothing is not as neutral as we imagine.

My own ethical philosophy is not that we should sit still eat little and conserve all energy, all we do and use requires inputs of energy, labour and materials. I am much more concerned with the beneficial properties of what we use and do. The main area of concern with reliance on second hand clothing is this: the notion that anything is suddenly a green option once it has been previously used. Obviously it’s best for things that exist to be used as much as possible to make their initial energy input worthwhile but if everyone who cares about sustainability buys second hand and everyone who doesn’t care continues to buy goods that were designed without a wholistic sustainable approach we are left in very much the same situation as before: a world clothed in poor quality garments made by underpaid labour from non-recyclable, non-biodegradable materials. The end point is still landfill and the overall volume of new clothing produced has not been substantially reduced. All the problems with the fashion industry would still exist because there is not a market demanding they change their ways.

Consuming less is the most important thing people in the ‘developed’ world can do to help achieve sustainability. A system where people don’t have to feel guilty about discarding clothes (no matter how infrequently they have used them) and can buy as many as they want to meet their consumer desire ‘guilt free’, is not one that will change consumer behaviour for the better. Reuse, recycling and resale of clothing performs an important role:
• people can develop a timeless personal style with access to pieces that may not currently be ‘on trend’
• unloved clothing can be rehomed to someone who will treasure it for longer
• any reuse is better than going directly to landfill
• we are able to learn which construction methods, fabrication, styles etc are the most enduring
• people may find existing clothes that meet the needs they would have met by buying new ones
These benefits alone do not provide a comprehensive, long term solution to the sustainability of clothing use and production.

Which brings me to the number one reason reuse is advocated rather than meaningful change to the new apparel industry: ease. It would be much easier to reuse everything we already have and never make anything new than it would be to develop better solutions. The task ahead of the fashion industry is monumental in scale. It is likely to involve,
• diversification of agriculturally obtained raw materials and improvement of organic growing methods to maximise yields, conserve space and work in harmony with wildlife and natural systems;
• development of man made fibre technologies to reduce energy consumption and chemical input, provide novel valuable textile benefits, focus on end of product life by being fully recyclable or fully biodegradable;
• (re)localisation. Textile and fashion production returning to each community to produce clothing that is locally relevant and sensitive to actual demand;
• Creation of infrastructure; council based textile collection for reuse, recycling and composting.
• Revaluation of human skills, creativity and labour. The industry must be financially viable and people must be rewarded fairly for their work and time; neither of these can be forsaken for the other.
• Grassroots maintainance of textile skills; people must be able to mend and simply alter their clothes, traditional techniques (culturally specific types of embroidery, quilting, knitting, crochet, weaving) must not be lost

It is my strongly held belief that these tasks are vital to a future in which people wear clothes. They will not be able to be undertaken if designers and manufacturers with an ethical focus are not supported.

Woods and Fields advocates a blended wardrobe of second hand clothes and new clothes from ethical sources. We advocate the development of textile skills so that you bond with your existing wardrobe through mending and alteration. We advocate choosing clothes that flatter your body and personality, that you will love long term. This sort of wardrobe building does not work out any more expensive than regular mid-market chain shopping and, importantly, you are not paying an unrealistically low price because someone along the line is subsidising your purchase with their underpaid labour or because the materials are sub-par or because environmentally beneficial systems have not been put into place. All of our labels have been chosen for being big steps in the direction towards the vision we have described; we aren’t there yet but we’re paving the way.