Lockdown Eases But Have We Gone Cold Turkey On Shopping?
Welcome to the era of #goingnowherebutfuckitimgettingdressed (yep, that’s a real and pretty popular hashtag). We live in a time when wearing something other than pyjamas is noteworthy. During our quarantine of consumption, we’ve gone cold turkey on shopping. Will it stay that way?
We used to throw away 32 kilos of clothes every year and now we can’t even go into a shop and put our grimy mitts on all that rubbish we don’t really need. So, does this mark the death of fast fashion? Are we moving into a world of sustainable style and maybe even slow-moving design?
Life in the Fast Lane
It’s a hyper-fast, multi-tasking, no-time-to-waste world. Our attention span has dropped from 12 seconds in the year 2000 to less than eight seconds these days. If you’ve got something to say to someone, you’ve got about as much time as it takes to open a bottle of wine. Trying to communicate with your typical 30-second advert? Might as well be trying to get somebody to read War and Peace. Nobody has got that kind of time to spare nowadays.
Fast Fashion in a Fast-Paced World
Forget about the days of having nothing to wear. Even our clothes don’t have time for us now. Our problem is that we can’t keep up with our live-fast-die-young clothing. The average cheap piece of clothing is designed to last for a measly ten washes. That is perhaps why we have SO many clothes.
On average, we’re buying a new piece of clothing more than once a week. In response, high street brands are producing double the amount of clothing that they were making two decades ago. It’s a depressing supply-and-demand cycle where they provide us with rubbish and we keep buying more because our stuff starts to disintegrate on the first wash. We get a quick dopamine fix from shopping and they get staggering profits. A truly toxic relationship for the 21st century.
Us vs the World
Sure, we’re looking pretty good in our hyper-fashionable looks, but our home planet is looking much worse for the wear. Literally. We’re ending up with 200,000 tonnes of dyes in local water supplies. At this stage, in developing countries, 90% of the wastewater goes directly into rivers without treatment. Around 20% of all wastewater comes from fast fashion. Experts were telling us to stop buying and we definitely tried. A bit. Until we saw another “must-have” on Instagram. It was an endless cycle of not really trying hard enough. Then BAM. Overnight, we had nowhere to go to show off our new purchases.
Cold Turkey on Fast Fashion
We’ve all been wondering how Coronavirus will change the world. One thing that we already know for sure is that it’s affecting our looks. As we binge-watch Netflix and rock our elasticated waistbands, or attempt to start running to work off all those home bakes, we are transforming the world of fashion.
The homepage of high street brands like Boohoo, New Look, and ASOS are filled with loungewear, comfy tracksuits, and slippers. Some of the most viral videos out there at the moment are tutorials on creating masks out of an old t-shirt. We’re baking bread. We are learning to leave fewer plants for dead on our windowsills. We’re slowing down and domesticating.
What we aren't doing so much is shopping. We’re not wandering the shopping centres and mindlessly loading up on crap we will never wear. The sky over factories in China is turning blue for the first time in years. We’re doing just what the environmentalists asked us to do. Like punished children, we’re not really doing it because we want to but because we’re grounded.
Like punished children, though, might we end up learning something from the whole ordeal? Could we go back into the world happy to hug our friends and enjoy the fresh air again rather than rushing into the shops?
Without a doubt, we can’t keep living like this forever even if it is good for the planet. BUT we can start living better. Being green doesn’t have to mean being restricted. Buying less can actually feel good, especially when we end up with nicer things. As anyone who has ever woken up with a hangover knows, we humans do actually enjoy things more in moderation. Having pieces that we adore is far more satisfying than a bag full of shit you’ve forgotten about before you’ve even hung it in the closet.
Closed for Business
Factories in Bangladesh and Vietnam have unsold clothes piled up and bills sitting unpaid. Bangladesh alone has $3 billion of clothes already produced and now unwanted by the brands who ordered them. Like annoying drunk customers at a pizza takeaway, they ordered a lot then didn’t open the door to take the delivery and pay ... then they did it billions of times over to life-shattering determent. The workers, mostly women and children, who were earning a few dollars a day stitching tracksuits are now finding that their paycheques won’t be arriving.
During the COVID crisis, brands like Zara leant a sanitised hand to the European community but left workers in Myanmar without money to eat. They’re not being singled out by media outlets because they’re not the worst by any means. What they did was the norm within the industry these days. Zara is getting attention because they actually did a few helpful things too, rather than just popping up friendly social media posts.
These sorts of business practices aren’t helping our troubled relationships with big-name retailers. Experts have said that up to one-third of fashion brands will be added to the list of COVID fatalities. It was the perfect storm, really. Before we ever thought about a global pandemic, department stores were closing. Joaquin Phoenix announced he was only going to keep wearing that one tuxedo and we were all feeling the minimalism vibe.
Is This Forever?
It looks like a lot of us are online to stay. Even as quarantines loosen up a bit, physically going shopping in a world filled with social distancing rules isn’t all that appealing. The rules are many and the logistics are confusing.
Will we be allowed to touch the clothes? Will we have to wear gloves upon entering? What about returning that ill-fitting item? Will it ever go back on the shelf? Are we allowed to pay with filthy cash money dollar bills? Does anyone use even cash these days anyway?
Rather than rubbing our hands bloody with sanitisers at the entry of every single shop, a lot of us will get our fashion kicks online (which is easier now that elasticated waistbands are on-trend) and maybe even start buying less.
(Side note: If you’re a brand, here are a few things you might want to know about giving us that socially distant shopping fix.)
The Future of Retail
With so many questions about the future of retail, we asked Chu Wong, founder of sustainable fashion market place Shop Bettr what she thinks.
Brand Identity: Design-Hungry
Photo Credit: Aiony Haust @unsplash
Wong hit us with some sobering stats. In order to prevent climate catastrophe, we need to reduce human-caused greenhouse gas emissions by 7.6%. And, what does that look like? Well, with the COVID shutdown, we’ve created an 8% reduction. Seems impossibly low, doesn’t it? We are living with so much less yet we’ve barely put a dent in it.
Are we just supposed to pull the shutters on every business and lock ourselves inside or watch the world burn? Fortunately, Wong says it’s actually not so doom-and-gloom. We’ve just got to accept that lower production and consumption simply isn’t going to do the job. It’s taken a lot to get that 8% reduction and we’re not going to be able to keep it up, at least not by these means.
“The pandemic-associated lower carbon emissions were a result of lower production and came at the cost of the most vulnerable being left out to dry,” Wong says. “That's also not something we want to work towards when we build back better post-pandemic.”
“While there is a myriad of ways we can advocate for a better future, as citizens of this planet and members of the capitalist society we live in, one of the most direct and powerful ways we can influence is through our consumption.”
“Every article we read, every movie we watch, every food we eat - and yes, every item we buy - shows companies what we want and how they should behave. That doesn't mean we should go crazy with consumerism,” Wong says.
“But what it does mean is that if we HAVE to buy something - let's find a small brand that we can support, whose values align with ours, who we can really get behind. There are plenty.”
On that note, if you are looking for your next purchase look no futher than Shop Bettr. We loved working with a brand that exuberates honesty and transparency within the world of fashion, a rare sight. Shop Bettr makes it so much easier to navigate your way around sustainable fashion and Design-Hungry is super excited to have been a part of their journey.