The clothing market is one of the world’s biggest manufacturing and selling businesses. Just like you can not stop eating because it is a part of your daily habit, people can not stop buying clothes due to fashion trends.
Unfortunately, the fashion industry contributes around 10 percent to global emissions, which is quite alarming. It is also in the 3rd position regarding global carbon emission. At this point, we should be discussing ways to control the fashion industry instead of promoting it further. One alternative is slow fashion, which we will discuss more in-depth.
What Is Slow Fashion?
Slow fashion promotes sustainable fashion, and it is the total opposite of what fast fashion is. Slow fashion as a movement promotes clothing and manufacturing that do not affect the ecosystem we live in along with all other organisms we share it with. Slow fashion includes all the local artisans who use eco-friendly materials which intend to preserve crafts and the environment.
The slow fashion movement was initiated in 2007 when an activist named Kate Fletcher wrote about the effects of fast fashion on the environment. Although for years, the movement wasn’t in the limelight until a tragedy occurred in 2013 in a textile factory in Bangladesh. The building collapsed, which caused a massive loss of multiple human lives, which caused a huge debate when the analysis of the workplace and environmental aspects of fast fashion was concluded. After this incident took place, customers became more aware of ethical fashion and why there is a need to control the enormous fast fashion production and supply.
Advantages Of Slow Fashion And Why We Should Promote It
Slow fashion is the demand of the environment; it is so obvs that in the next ten years, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere will be more than 25% of what it is now. Plus, land and water pollution due to the same will be unimaginable. Adopting slow fashion has multiple benefits; let’s see some of the advantages of slow fashion:
Reduced consumption
When you adapt to slow fashion, you take down your consumption. People have started to buy clothing articles more mindfully; you start to buy less frequently. The baseline of reducing consumption means buying less frequently and avoiding promoting fast fashion. The main focus of buyers while adapting to slow fashion should be to buy clothing items that may last longer and are eco-friendly.
Buy Qualitatively Not Quantitatively
The first thing we should avoid is buying clothes as per changing trends. Clothes which are made up of cheap quality material are mostly harmful to the environment, which is why the retail price is low, and due to the cheap rates, these clothing items sell out fast. In contrast, slow fashion promotes sustainable clothes that are made up of organic materials, which could be easily decomposable. Be thoughtful while buying random clothes; think about how often you’re gonna wear them and will it be easily decomposable.
Reduce your Carbon footprint
Cutting down the consumption means you are minimising your ecological footprint. Slow fashion helps us save resources, lower our CO2 emissions and thus negatively impact the environment and climate change. Read this other post about the fashion industry’s role in the climate crisis and how carbon labels in fashion could help minimise the entire industry’s ecological footprint.
Save Up Some Extra Cash
With multiple advantages of slow fashion, you’re gonna like this one most. As slow fashion teaches you to reduce your consumption, it also saves your money at the same time. You will say sustainable clothes are more expensive than the ones in fast fashion, but in the long run, they’re gonna save up a lot of your hard-earned money. Simultaneously your wardrobe will only have clothes of your interest that you wear in your daily life.
There are multiple minor to major reasons to promote fast fashion. Plus, promoting a slow fashion movement means promoting eco-friendly, sustainability, minimalism and many other sister movements. The main motive of all these movements is to conserve resources and secure the ecology. While practising the slow fashion movement, you will encounter multiple other movements like sustainable, vegan fashion, etc.
There are many more ways of promoting slow fashion, and after reading this article, you may be aware of the advantages of the slow fashion movement. Make sure you apply slow fashion to clothing articles but also on other fashion accessions like promoting buying thrift bags, shoes, etc. also, even if you are buying new accessories like a convertible backpack, tote bags, shoes, belts, etc., make sure you are looking out for that material to be eco-friendly.
Methods To Join The Slow Fashion Movement
As said multiple times in this article, slow fashion is not just a trend when many environmental hazards are occurring; we need to think of solutions. With the growing concern regarding increasing carbon emissions, we are at this position where the necessity to follow fast fashion movements has become critical. As we discuss quite a lot about problems and what they are alternatives. Let’s see some of the ways that can help you join slow fashion:
Do not throw away your old clothes
Talking about slow fashion and sustainability also means taking care of pre-owned clothes. You should not throw away your old clothes easily; instead, repair them and wear them. You can also donate them to people who need these clothes. This way, you are decreasing your clothing dumping rates and reducing land pollution, which helps to cut off the population rate in other sectors like water pollution, air pollution, etc.
Support Thrift Clothing
In the trend of buying new clothes at an expensive rate, people are also supporting thrift clothes. Thrift clothes are basically second-hand clothing, and you can also call them pre-loved clothes. These are basically clothes owned by some famous influencers who hardly wore them for an event or two and then passed them on to other people around at affordable rates. People sometimes pass their less worn clothes too, so those clothes do not end up in landfills or generate carbon emissions.
Buy Less Frequently
The first step toward supporting slow fashion is to buy less frequently. While buying anything, we should be mindful of its uses and versatility about it. Suppose you are buying a clothing item that you can only use for a season; you will get fewer chances to wear it more often. Remember buying more only means you will be wearing your old clothes less, and then after a specific time, you will dump them either into the landfill or burn them down. Both the methods cause pollution of different kinds, so remember to buy qualitatively, not quantitatively.
Check the tags before buying.
The main goal of buying sustainability is to promote eco-friendliness more. Slow fashion is an initiative towards a sustainable environment promoting minimalism and a sustainable lifestyle, which is why you need to shop smartly like an aware customer and check the tags attached to the clothing article. Check the material used during manufacturing and how organic the article is. Whether it is bio-degradable or not because at the end of the day, the entire movement is to promote eco-friendly products.
Slow fashion is a way to reduce your over expenditure on clothes; at the same time, you will reduce your carbon footprint. Be open-minded while buying your fashion article but also keep them eco-friendly at the same time. The end goal of this article is to generate awareness about the slow fashion movement and let potential about what they are doing wrong. Caring for your own fashion sense and style is a unique characteristic, but if you are acting and buying pollution, it is not good for anybody.
Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash
