Thoughts on Slow Fashion Four Years On

 

This March it will be 4 years since I decided to stop shopping Fast Fashion and start making meaningful purchasing decisions. I originally started this journey as an experiment that I only wanted to undertake to avoid hypocrisy. 

When I started my blog in early 2017, I had no intention of changing my purchasing habits, but I wanted to write about current affairs and topics that I found interesting in relation to the environment. I had also recently started my career in marketing and realized the importance and impact of our purchasing decisions on the world. 

You think well, there’s seven billion people in the world and who are you? You’re just one little dust mote among that seven billion and so it really doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do, but that’s simply not the case. It’s the wrong model, because you’re at the center of a network. You’re a node in a network, of course that’s even more true now that we have social media. You’ll know 1,000 people at least over the course of your life and they’ll know 1,000 people each and that puts you one person away from a million and two persons away from a billion. That’s how you’re connected and the things you do, they’re like dropping a stone in a pond, the ripples move outward and they affect things in ways that you can’t fully comprehend and it means that the things that you do and that you don’t do are far more important than you think.

For someone who had been submerged in nihilism for the past 25 years coming to terms with the impact of my purchasing decisions and the acknowledgement of that, if I wanted to start this blog I would have to change that, was quite difficult. What started out as  a hobby to occupy my need for creativity and expression, turned into something that has since challenged my whole world view and sense of self. 

This may sound slightly dramatic, but, if you understand marketing and consumerism it really isn't. Most products are sold by creating not only a false sense of need for that particular product but often a sense of identity that the purchase of, say, a dress will give you. When you start to pull back from this and question it you are disconnecting from the items people use to give themselves a certain identity or express their inner sense of who they want to be onto the world. 

After four years of only buying either secondhand, sustainable or slow I can say it has impacted me more that I would have thought at the beginning of my journey. It has made me not only consider my purchases, but consider my own sense of who I am and who I would like to be in the future. Now I make decision on what I buy carefully, never impulsively and always with a thought for the impact that me buying this product will have on the lives of the people in the supply chain.

Of course there have been challenges along the way, there are still items I have to buy in shops I don't agree with. There have been multiple times that I am tempted to buy something new because I have seen it on an 'influencer', not to mention continued frustration with trying to thrift things I can never find. However, four years after starting this journey into slow fashion and conscious consumerism I have to say, I don't regret one second of it. 

Read more on my first year in slow fashion here.