Fashion CSR - From Fashion-Fickle to Stylish-Swishing
Last updated 9/16/2009 5:30:37 PM
Fashion CSR
Everyone's been there. That top which was screaming for you to buy it, despite not being your colour or your size. Which, when you got it home, made you look more Lily Savage than Lily Cole.
Which now hangs desolate and unworn in your wardrobe, price-tag still dangling remorsefully.
Having just moved house and being forced to undergo a major cull of unwanted items, I am all too aware of the ‘what-on-earth-was-I-thinking' type question that permeates the majority of my spending patterns
We are continually accosted with bargain buckets and buy-now-or-regret-later deals, we are force-fed what's-hot-and-what's-not type information by the media, and are consequently conditioned to put being on-trend at the top of our personal agendas. Even if it does mean ending up with a wardrobe crammed full of buy-now-and-regret-immediately type purchases.
In today's throwaway culture, fashion has become more about quantity than quality, about a continual turnover of cheap impulse buys, about eight vest-tops for twenty quid even though you only need one. It has become about cramming our wardrobes full of unwanted and unused items that will soon be clogging up landfills across the country.
50% of the clothes bought by British women last year have never been worn. Meanwhile, the amount of textile waste at council tips has more than quadrupled in less than five years – in the UK alone 900,000 million items of clothing, shoes and accessories are thrown away every year.
And in addition to this landfill-clogging fashion, we are impacting the supply chains that orbit the planet, and pumping even more CO2 into the environment. In short, our fashion-fickle tendencies are totally unsustainable.