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What are the clothes you're wearing today made of?
Where does it come from?
What hands are behind him?
How much did the people who sewed it receive as payment?
How many liters of water were spent to make it?
How long will it last in your closet?
We have to ask the clothes questions.
We must break this complicit silence that has flooded our wardrobe with cheap, bland and highly polluting pieces.
Turning a blind eye has made us feel less guilty, but the absence of guilt does not exempt us from responsibility.
How can an object of use such as a t-shirt, which required 2,700 liters of water, (the same amount that a person would drink in 900 days) and which was designed, cut, dyed and sewn by different people who, moreover, live miles away and kilometers away from where it is sold, cost the same as a sandwich?
The fashion industry is the second most polluting, after the automotive industry, and represents 10% of global carbon emissions due to the energy it uses in production, manufacturing and transportation.
Washing clothes releases 500,000 tons of microfibers into the ocean.
85% of the textiles produced each year end up in landfills and burning products from past seasons is a very common technique in the world of the most expensive fashion.
Luxury brands have burned their products that did not sell for more than 30 million dollars simply to avoid putting them on sale and prevent their symbolic value from diminishing.
So why do our dresses seem stripped of all blame when we examine our environmental footprint?
Why are we not ashamed to have a closet full of clothes that we don't use or need?
We ignore the alarming figures of fashion and look benevolently at our dresses because we are anesthetized by a series of images of fantastic possible lives and exaltation of beauty that discipline our gaze and silence any hint of criticism.
The desire to be pretty for that dinner or be handsome at that party is worth more than any moral concern that assails you when you see the price of that desired garment and see that the label says 'made in Indonesia'.
Idalia Candelas
We need to slow down the consumption of clothing!
Decrease the closet and ask ourselves uncomfortable questions that lead us to indulge in other consumption practices.
Do I really need another pair of jeans?
What is behind the desire to buy myself something new?
Fashion long ago ceased to be a purchase and sale of clothing to become a large identity supermarket.
And it seems that identity is in crisis: on average, people bought 60% more clothes in 2014 than in 2000.
We have to buy less and buy under other logics.
Understand, for example, what does that jacket have that, regardless of the passage of time, wear, changes in trends, has remained unscathed in the closet and is still the favorite?
The fashion industry needs to have a greater intention of making clothes loved and long-wearing, “rather than being quick, emotionally redundant and easily replaceable,” as Tamzin Rollason of the Center for Urban Research aptly described it.
The long and prolonged use of clothing is one of the most decisive ways to achieve a fashion that is less disastrous for the environment.
We should give ourselves more and more to the exchange and thus buy with our old clothes, used clothes that someone else no longer wears;
give ourselves over to the repair and transformation of those dresses or pants that we do not wear or that were damaged and that could have other possible versions.
Truly sustainable fashion can only be fashion that is made with zero new materials.
Buying second-hand clothes should stop being an exclusive practice for vintage lovers.
It would have to become a normalized, ethical, cool practice that integrates everyone in society.
It is a mandate to breathe new life into that tidal wave of clothing that floods our society and ends up in huge landfills!
We also need more people to learn how to make their own dresses.
And that with this commitment to "do it yourself" and "made to measure" challenges both the tyrannical fashion production system and the sizing system that increasingly conjures up the difficulty of loving. our bodies as they are.
Making our clothes is a way of knowing for sure the origin of our pieces, it is breaking with chains of poor payment, with garments that come from China and giving back to the body the virtue of its roundness and its flesh, since it is the dress that it has to bend to the body, and not the body that has to be trained to embed itself in a dress.
Clothing, as happens in movies where even the most bland extra character appears, should have in its credits (labels) the record of all the hands that worked to create it, so that when we ask that garment, who made it?
we can tell the story of those who have made it, of those who cut it and sewed it, perhaps with so many names and lives exposed in that piece of clothing, a path will be opened to begin to see clothing as something valuable, something that exists to honor and not as something disposable.
We have to ask questions of our new clothes, our wardrobe, our old clothes and thus unravel ways so that our desire to dress well stops being an accomplice to a true catastrophe.