I still find the hum of a foot-pedal sewing machine incredibly therapeutic. It’s a sound I associate with my father, once a garment-maker in London’s East End. From my earliest childhood, Dad instilled in me the value of a piece of clothing and the art of its creation, as well as the need to reduce waste in its manufacture.
In those days that was not because he knew anything about the harmful environmental impact of the clothing industry, but because the less material he used as a piecemeal tailor the more he was paid.
Today, too few of us are aware of the damage the fast-fashion industry causes the planet. Looking momentarily beyond the industry’s often pitiful labour conditions, to produce just one T-shirt in a factory in an emerging economy and transport it overseas in a container ship to a store in the UK consumes the equivalent of 2,700 litres of fresh water, enough for the daily needs of 1,600 people. Producing a pair of jeans requires 8,000 litres of water.
That is why, to encourage a more sustainable relationship between consumers and our wardrobes, Oxfam ran our Second Hand September campaign. For us, the promotion of pre-loved clothing is absolutely crucial if we are to support the planet, and we are already seeing exciting results as consumers shift away from damaging notions of disposability around cheap, fast fashion.
Our research reveals that two-thirds of people in the UK own secondhand clothing, while one in 10 say the majority of the clothes they buy in the next year will be pre-owned.
The interest is huge. So much so that Oxfam and our partner Vinted were privileged to open this autumn’s London fashion week with our Style for Change show. It featured celebrities, including Deborah Meaden, Vick Hope and George Robinson, modelling pre-loved clothes that went straight up for sale on the Oxfam and Vinted websites.
Given the scale of fast fashion – a $100bn industry that today pumps out more than 80bn pieces of clothing a year and is responsible for more damage to the environment than international shipping and aviation combined – I look back at my dad’s labours as a garment-maker and they appear almost bucolic.
Because work was paid per item, Dad would bring pieces of fabric home to stitch on his machine at night outside the bedroom I shared with my siblings, and we were lulled to sleep by its rhythmic spinning.
Over breakfast before school, I’d watch his hands move, almost balletically, as, in his own words, he made history with each piece of clothing he created for someone to love and appreciate. He was typical of the Bangladeshi men who came to the UK to work in what these days we would call a sweatshop.
Ultimately, they all would lose their livelihoods as fast fashion took off and the UK textiles sector moved at scale to low-cost manufacturing hubs overseas. Ironically enough, that included Bangladesh, the country Dad had left behind and where, in 2013, more than 1,100 garment-workers died in the Rana Plaza disaster, a tragedy that briefly defined the ills of fast fashion.
Clothes lovers may think that protecting our planet from the behemoth of fast fashion has to be politically complex. But politics can also be simple.
By even occasionally opting for pre-loved, we are taking action to redress the balance of power between the fast-fashion industry and ourselves as consumers, demonstrating our demands for change whether in environmental standards or labour conditions by literally wearing our values on our sleeve.
So come join the movement, and make a genuinely meaningful fashion statement this season.
Halima Begum is chief executive of Oxfam GB
