I’ll always love the thrill of shopping, but I care about the planet, too. Where do I begin?
I love fashion. I love going to catwalk shows. I love getting dressed up. I love the illicit thrill of some frippery I can’t really afford, accompanied by the rustle of tissue paper in a crisp shopping bag – a sound bested only by a champagne cork popping. And that’s not even the half of it. More than anything, I love the thrill of the high street chase. I love stopping a woman on the street to ask where her dress is from, and hunting it down and ordering it from my phone at the bus stop. I have been known to go weak at the knees over new suede boots and I will never, ever have enough earrings.
But you know what else I love? Living in a climate that doesn’t fry me alive. Oceans with fish and icebergs in them rather than plastic. Mars is a long way – and besides, Elon Musk? No thanks. Which means I need to love clothes in a way that doesn’t create huge amounts of waste and use a disproportionate amount of the world’s carbon budget. It is obscene that 300,000 tonnes of fashion waste goes into landfill each year. It is the opposite of progress that the average number of times a garment is worn before it is retired has dropped by 36% in the last 15 years. (In China, that figure is 70%.) Loving clothes shouldn’t be a system based on throwing them away. Fashion isn’t rubbish.
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