The Love

"Circular fashioni.e., clothing that re-enters the market or is upcycled into something new, rather than being thrown awayis undeniably the future. ThredUp preducts the resale market will hit $64 billion by 2024, and that the online secondhand market will grow 69% by 2021." : Vogue https://www-vogue-com.cdn.ampproject.org//the-year-in-/amp ... #sustainablefashion #reduce #reuse #upcycle #repair #rent #reporpose #7rs #buylesschoosewell #circularfashion #circulareconomy

Eek!! Christmas prezzies are arriving! And fashion books are the best....my sis-in-law always knows what I want to read @girlovesvintage The rapid turnover of new "it" items is largely tied to class and the maintenance of it. Hoskins says, "Without class there would be no fashion industry as we know it. Clothing is a key way for the rich to signal and reproduce their power." Similarly, Annie Phizaklea's book "Unpacking the Fashion Industry: Gender, Racism, and Class in P...roduction" follows how fashion in history - and appropriately navigating its complex social signals and nuances of belonging and identity - signalled position in society. #class #racialinequalit #genderdisparity #capitalism #fastfashion #sustainablesunday #rethink #reuse #reduse #buylesschoosewell #fashionrevolution #fashiontakesaction #stitchedup

"There is a stigma to wearing old/ second-hand clothes & millions of tons of garments are discarded every day....reusing 1 kg of clothing saves 3.6 kg of carbon dioxide, 6,000 liters of water, 0.3 kg of chemical fertilizers and 0.2 kg of insecticides." https://t.co/lOe5aiWUwa

There are a few mixed feelings I have with this: 1) Hurray. Transparency, as recently discussed during @fashiontakesaction 's WEAR seminar with Ilishio Lovejoy and Nazma Akter, is a key tool for increasing accounability and corporate responsibility. If you don't know where things come from, how they are made, and where they go, you can't pinpoint the problems or fix the atrocities. No hard data = no workable policy changes = no lives, wages, or environmental standards bettere...d. 2) Hmmm. How will this merging of clothing to tracing systems intersect with neoloberalist capitalism's insatiable thirst for more data? Will this simply assist the corporate grab for data that is essentially used to more intimately understand consumers' buying habits and be used to....sell people more stuff? 3) Meh. It's a technocratic (comfortable) solution that can give consumers a false sense of security that *something* is being done, while leaving the actual (and uncomfortable) issues - overconsumption, over-accumulation, and overproduction - untouched. I get it. It could be a very important tool in closing the loop and reclaiming garments previously untraced while providing consumers with the transparency they want. It will be useful for vital policy changes to workers' well-being and resource use. But the discussions we need are not just about closing the loop, or even separating production from using raw materials....it's that we consume too much and companies make too much. We are allowed to get excited for improvements to the system we inherited and are existing in, but we must always balance that by asking if the system and mentality we've adopted is worth the adjustment. Thoughts? https://www.microsoft.com/incultu//eon-connected-products/

"Fast-fashion production is a transnational process with extreme labour and environmental impacts that fall largely along racialized and gendered lines. However, it is important to understand that these impacts are not unforeseen externalities but are designed into a production system that functions primarily by finding and producing cheap anywhere it can. If one keeps in mind that brands’ ability to secure cheap labour and resources is absolutely essential to their survival and ability to pocket profits that exceed their previous yearly revenue, these persistent problems make sense. As we live in a highly-saturated global fashion reality, for large brands to find new consumers is increasingly difficult. It’s easier to slash production costs, then mass-produce to dominate consumers’ attention. This model is the root of the problem."

New blog post up with an interview with Connie Howes, owner and designer at Poème clothing, Victoria: http://thelove.ca/poeme/