Ever wandered around a UK high street, or even some of the country’s bigger supermarkets, and felt simultaneously abuzz with glee and utterly despondent? Cheap clothing is all around you. A pair of jeans will set you back a mere £7, a stylish jacket a trifling £15 and you can buy several T-shirts for only £10. And you won’t look cheap because the value retailers, as they are called, have become adept at copying what’s hot in high fashion and bringing it to you for a fraction of the price within days.
But here comes the ‘despondent’ part. There’s something that doesn’t feel quite right about a pair of jeans that costs as little as £7. If they cost so little to buy, how much did they cost to make? From growing and harvesting the cotton to dyeing and sewing the fabric. Above all, how much did the person making them get paid? And how many hours does s/he work a day? Christian relief and development agency Tearfund has estimated that only a tiny 0.5 per cent of the retail price of a pair of jeans actually goes to the worker. And this doesn’t even begin to factor in the issue of child labour.
Now that the floodgates have been opened, the depressing facts start coming thick and fast. The lifetime of an average garment is only three years says UK environmental charity Waste Watch. And 80 per cent of Britons have bought at least one item they have never worn, reports Oxfam. Once you are sick of them, or they fray, then what? Will you give your pair of denims to someone else, put them in a clothes recycling bin or simply throw them out, along with the 900,000 million other clothing items that get thrown away and sent to landfill in the UK every year? And, even if you do put them in a recycling bin, it is not a guarantee that they will be reused. With the quality of garments going down all the time, it turns out that only half the textiles we throw out are actually recyclable or reusable.
So what can we do about our cheap fashion addiction? And how can we help our already overstretched and fragile planet? Well we can start swapping. And this can be done in a variety of locales and ways: at home, online, at intimate gatherings of friends or even at wildly fun and anonymous parties.
Swapping, or ’swishing’ as the phenomenon is also known, is the new night out, and “so much more fun than normal shopping” says Virginia Rowe, founder of online mag & eco boutique StyleWillSaveUs.com and regular swapper. It is also the perfect antidote to the so-called ‘credit crunch’ and looming recession, and to that mass of unwanted (and often unworn clothing) that is filling up our landfills. (Waste Watch reports that synthetic and other man-made fibres do not decompose at all, while woollen garments do but produce methane in the process, an extremely damaging greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming.) And, the thriftier among you will be delighted to hear that you will save oodles of money in the process.
Ultimately, clothes swapping is about treating your clothes with the love and respect they deserve. If everyone in the UK bought one reclaimed woollen garment each year says British fibre reclamation company Evergreen, it would save an average of 371 million gallons of water and 480 tonnes of chemical dyestuffs (that might make more sense if you knew that the average UK reservoir holds about 300 million gallons). So do yourself, your friends and the world at large a favour-make sure the next home your old or unwanted clothes and shoes go to is a loving one. It will make all the difference.
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