waste

According to Fashion Revolution, one garment is only worn 4 times on average. Why do we buy clothes that we barely end up using? Why are we throwing so many clothes away that are still in perfectly fine condition? One reason why fast fashion is terrible is that it makes us think that wearing something only 4 times is okay – or they make make clothes such poor quality, impractical to use or only serve a very short-term trend that it doesn’t feel good to wear them more than 4 times.

Fast fashion sucks – and this time I’m not even going to talk about the ethical violations and the environmental issues in production that are woven into the fast fashion industry, though they are obviously a big reason as to why fast fashion is terrible. This time I’m going to rant about how fed up I am with clothes being useless.

Case study: this top. I bought this second-hand a couple of years ago because I thought it looked nice. But oh boy have I learnt through the years that this just does not work as a piece of clothing.

First of all, it’s see-through. That was a huge trend a couple of years ago (is it still? I haven’t been inside a fast fashion store for a while…) and so many clothes were made out of see-through fabric.  I feel uncomfortable with my underwear showing, so whenever I wear this top, I need another top underneath. So actually whenever I’m wearing this, I don’t really need to be wearing this, because I’m already wearing another top anyway.

Secondly, this is 100% polyester. It looks like such a nice and breezy shirt for a warm summer day. But since it’s 100% polyester, it’s literally like just wearing a plastic bag on yourself. Guaranteed sweat! No matter what the weather, this shirt will make me sweat because the material doesn’t breathe at all. Not only is this uncomfortable but also this means that after each time I wear this, it’s in need of a wash. More laundry means more water is used, and unless you use a microfibre-gathering washing bag, this also means more microplastics in our water streams.

Even though it’s recycled, it’s still plastic!

So why do I own this shirt that is uncomfortable to wear and has no good attributes apart from the fact that I think the print on it is nice? We’ve been taught to expect less of our clothes – all it has to do is look nice. If it breaks apart after a couple of uses, it has already served its purpose. If you sweat in it, that’s probably your fault for having sweat glands, not the fault of the manufacturer who thought it would be a good idea to use the equivalent of a plastic bag as a shirt. I’ve had enough of this. I want clothes that feel good and that will last many years of use. The fashion industry used to make those types of clothes, but with clothing production having doubled in only the last 15 years, the fashion industry is under pressure to produce more and more clothes at an increasing rate – unless we as consumers begin to demand less quantity and more quality.

I have recently been faced with a lot of evidence of how people buy way too many clothes. For instance this news story says that in Finland in the last year people have bought more clothes, but used less money on them – showing that fast fashion is still going strong. I have also very concretely seen the consequences of people buying way too many clothes. Last month we organised an installation made out of textile waste in the centre of Jyväskylä. We received textile waste from a recycling centre and I was surprised when I looked at what this “waste” was like. Almost all of the clothes were in fine condition – most were just basic or boring clothes that clearly haven’t interested buyers. Some of them had a stuffy smell, so it could also be that the recycling centre couldn’t sell them, since they don’t have the resources to wash the clothes. I was shocked at how all this clothing was on its way to be burnt. And that is by no means the fault of the recycling centre – they just get too many clothes and they are unable to sell all of them. I had a big bag full of these clothes after the display was done and I didn’t just want to throw them away – and I have realised that trying to recycle these types of clothes really isn’t efficient (there’s just far too much clothing waste, and often mixed textiles can’t be recycled anyway). So I decided to reuse them myself and am currently making a bean bag chair filled with these textiles.

Photos by Jyry Soininen

The textile waste display was organised as a part of Pro Ethical Trade Finland’s (Eettisen kaupan puolesta ry) #Lempivaatteeni (#MyFavouriteClothes) campaign. The campaign promotes love for our clothes and challenges the current state of fast fashion. Hopefully we will learn to demand more of our clothes and not buy something that we won’t like using just because it looks decent and will learn to love our clothes and wear them often and use them for years. If we do this, textile waste won’t be such an issue.