by Chief impact officer of The Vestiaire Collective Dounia Wone visiting Stung Meanchey Municipal … [+]
The Vestiaire Collective, a luxury marketplace that claims “the best selection of designer clothes on the Internet”, has taken the radical decision to ban all fast fashion from its platform. The second-hand online retailer said the move was in line with its brand philosophy of implementing a slow growth strategy to win the market, while emphasizing its ethical beliefs.
For the first time in recent memory, a market has taken a stand on a social issue, though many companies have responded to the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, landmark legislation that granted women the right to abortion. Vestiaire said it would have been hypocritical to continue offering fast fashion on the platform when it’s no secret that the global fashion industry is one of the biggest polluters in the world, while depriving workers of a living wage.
Alais Diop, global head of public relations for Vestiaire Collective, said its members were all on board with the initiative. So where will fast fashion go once it’s thrown away, and now that it can’t have a second life on Vestiaire Collective? The obvious answer is where it’s been going all along – the dumps.
Of the 100 billion pieces of clothing produced each year, 92 million tons of fashion waste ends up in landfills, according to earth.org. To put that into perspective, it’s the equivalent of a garbage truck full of clothes dumping its cargo into a landfill every second.
Last year, slow fashion brand Archive said it would limit customer shopping visits to the platform to 12 times a year, or once a month, to help with sustainability and safeguarding the planet. It is unclear how consumers will react when told how and when they can shop.
Vestiaire said it could not, in good conscience, continue to offer fast fashion when there was no solution for the company’s old clothes. The e-commerce site wants consumers to know that people around the world are suffering while making their clothes. Vestiaire said it would stop sourcing from brands such as H&M and Shein, where items such as dresses and skirts retail for just $9 respectively.
An advertisement for The Vestiaire Collective shows how invested its members are in fashion.
Retail analyst Carol Spieckerman, president of Spieckerman Retail, has been following the markets since their inception about five years ago. The concept of a market is not new, she says. Every society since the beginning of time has had bazaars and trading centers where city dwellers would go to barter with traders the price of their worn-out clothes, household goods, and toys.
Spieckerman said members of any society don’t want to be told what to do, even if it’s for the greater good. H&M has introduced a sustainable collection every year since 2015, and Shein often holds special sales of gently worn clothes that its members resell on its retail platform.
However, experts said a token sustainable collection does not skim the amount of pollution the fashion industry releases, while the remaining 90% of a brand’s inventory is made in third countries. a world where workers are exploited, outdated factories are unsafe and a barrage of pollution is unleashed, contributing to the global climate change crisis.
Sales in the second-hand fast fashion market have been buoyant, H&M said, noting that items in the durable capsules typically sell out within hours of going on sale. H&M said that when consumers feel good about the products they buy and are convinced that their purchase does not harm the environment, they buy more. Consumers, whose tastes favor rock star-inspired fashion, are spoiled for choice at H&M.
Fast fashion has been under attack for several years, ever since environmentalists revealed the vertical and the extent to which clothing manufacturing contributes to the global warming crisis. Retailers don’t want to tackle the world’s problems or control suppliers and factories. But when celebrities and influencers started speaking out about fast fashion’s record on the environment, consumers and retailers started listening.
Fast fashion has been a driving force in initiatives that chronicle the industry’s ills. Still, it’s safe to say that no industry in today’s world has entirely clean hands. Gas, oil rigs and transatlantic pipelines are wiping out endangered species in Alaska and beyond, harming the environment.
Archive Projects at the London College of Economics launched an initiative called Change, which explained how complicit the fashion industry was in polluting the world and the environmental cost of making clothes.
French fashion brand Sandro has joined Archive, a digital resale-as-a-service company, to launch its second-hand program in the United States. Software as a service is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. More and more retailers are turning to SaaS to provide recycling opportunities for consumers, earning them cash or store credit while keeping them as consumers on the e-commerce site.
There is no magic pill to stop the fashion industry from making big profits on the backs of poor and often uneducated workers, when in reality, money speaks louder than equality.
