Read on Twitter
keep reading for some thrifting discourse! i am a privileged person who thrifts; let's talk about it? https://twitter.com/yourdrunk_aunt/status/1344070210672705536
so i want to start off by saying lived experience is not something i have. secondhand items are highly stigmatized in the country i grew up in, and extremely fast fashion was very prevalent as an alternative. there is maybe 1 actual thrift shop in the capital city of my country
full disclosure: i was a depop seller in 2018, when i was 16. an org by my house took clothing donations and sold them for around $0.60 per piece for funds. i would mark the clothes up and sell them to US customers for $20+ and donate the profits back to the org.
i'm ambivalent about the work i did. most of the affected communities were migrant tech workers from SE Asia. but i think a lot about how most clothing-donation orgs' mission is not serving lower income communities.
im not talking about thrift shops, im talking abt clothing donation drop off boxes run by nonprofits, which often simply resell the clothing they get wholesale for $$.
is there a clothing shortage? no. 90% of donated clothing does NOT end up in thrift shops. in fact much of it is sold to the global south where it disrupts local clothing markets. https://abcnews.go.com/WN/truth-donated-clothes-end/story?id=2743456
so much so that the US demands the right to dump its secondhand clothing as a bargaining request in its international diplomatic deals w East African countries https://theconversation.com/americas-petty-policy-on-used-clothes-for-africa-95132
i earnestly agree that depop resellers take more "high value" items and leave lower income thrifters with no opportunity to have nice things at a lower price point.
but because there's No Shortage Of Used Clothing, i join others in calling for people to stop donating their clothing to these nonprofits and rather donating to free clothing drives for low income folks. clothing shouldn't be a luxury!
i have a problem with promoting people buying from sustainable, "ethical" brands. no amount of eco-organic-recyclable-biodegradable-no microplastics anything will ever be more sustainable than reducing new consumption.
unfortunately "slow fashion" today basically boils down to "expensive enough that people physically cannot buy a lot
". however, to slow the consumption cycle, we can also look towards older, higher-quality secondhand items
". however, to slow the consumption cycle, we can also look towards older, higher-quality secondhand items
(side note i literally never want to hear ethical being used as a blanket phrase again, (no hate to anyone!!!!!!) but we all have different ethics and if i have to read the phrase "ethical vaccine" one more time im gna lose it)
thrifting does reduce consumerist guilt, but although we have a fundamentally different relationship to clothing than we used to have, as long as it's not actively harmful i dont see the issue with it tbh. self expression etc
ok im getting tired but everyone should read jose's thread if you didn't yet it's very good!!!
