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“I’m so excited to show you what I got / First I got this top: so cute. Then I got this top: I’m obsessed. / Ballet flats are trending. / This gold bucket bag was $13.”
Clothing hauls, product unboxing and try-on videos – social media is flooded with the latest trends.
Raquel Calandre, a year 11 student at Santa Sabina College in Sydney’s Inner West, describes the pressure to keep up.
“I go to a lot of parties and every single time I go out, I’m like ‘I need a new outfit.’ There’s that trend where, you can’t post something twice in the same outfit.”
Enter ultra-fast fashion: It’s affordable, accessible and as year 12 student Lucy Gee describes it, it’s everywhere.
“On buses, buildings – it’s always in your face. Trends come and go so quickly. I guess it’s a natural human instinct to follow those trends and it’s so cheap and so convenient.”
But last year, a moment of reckoning for these climate-conscious students.
“We can sell really cheap clothes just like fast fashion and we can also be really, really convenient.”
And so pre-loved clothing store, ‘Santa Style’ was launched.
The shop is now a permenant fixture on campus at Santa Sabina College in Sydney’s Inner West.
Raquel Calandre says the donated – often designer clothing – is priced between just two and twenty dollars.
There’s an online store too.
“We can bring something you’re not going to wear again and donate it and someone else can wear it. And I can buy something here that someone else isn’t going to wear again. We’re not wasting things, we’re actually re-using them. [And] I can actually afford things here rather than buying a dress for $100 and wearing it once.”
This month, year 11 student Emma Wong has been visiting other schools in the area to promote the idea.
“They don’t need to be this massive corporation like Vinnies to do it …you can really start off small to make a massive impact.”
Australians are the world’s biggest consumers of clothes, shoes and bags on a per capita basis, according to the a report released last month by the Australia Institute.
Each year, we buy an average of 56 new items.
And the average value of those items is just $13 – far lower than the UK, the US, Japan and Brazil.
Every year, more than 200,000 tonnes of clothing ends up in landfill – that’s equivalent to the weight of almost four Sydney Harbour Bridges.
It’s an issue Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek is seeking to address through the National Clothing Product Stewardship Scheme, which officially commences this week.
Speaking earlier this month at the launch event in Sydney, Minister Plibersek said curbing clothing consumption “is an incredible challenge for us as a country”.
“It’s a really serious environmental problem, and it’s a really serious environmental problem particularly as we’re seeing a very high volume of very low cost fashion.”
Over the past 12 months, 62 retailers have voluntarily signed up and from July 1 they’ll be required to pay a 4 cents levy for each new garment placed on the market.
The funds will be redirected towards training for businesses to improve product design, waste reduction and educate consumers.
Nina Gbor, Circular Economy and Waste Program Director at the Australia Institute, says it’s a good start, but argued the levy is too low to change brand behaviour.
“It’s very pleasing to see that the Government is doing something about clothing waste in this country, but unfortunately it’s not enough. We need more like 50 cents per garment.”
Ms Gbor is also calling for Australia to adopt a similar approach to France which is seeking to impose a $16 tax on the sale of ultra-fast fashion items and ban the advertising of such products.
Dr Eloise Zoppos is the research and engagement director at Monash Business School’s Australian Consumer and Retail Studies.
She says sustainability is no longer a trend, but “a consumer movement.”
“What we’re finding, both in our research and in the larger trend across Australia and globally, is, particularly [amid] the cost of living crisis, people are looking for new and different ways to engage in sustainable behaviours and really shop according to their values. The research we ran earlier this month in June found that almost half of Australian shoppers say that sustainability is an important factor when making a retail purchase. So we’re seeing clothing swaps, we’re seeing more and more people buy second hand, or buy pre-owned goods from online market places, for example.”
Online, there is a growing wave of content creators rallying against fast-fashion.
Melbourne-based Maggie Zhou is among them.
“So back in 2019 I decided to Previous to that, I had been working with fast fashion brands, accepting gifted products, wearing their new clothes. “[It was] so fun, so sparkly and really alluring but after a while it left a sour taste in my mouth. It can be hard. There are so many trends out there, but I really try to slow down my consumption and only buy what’s necessary.”
Most of the clothes in Zhou’s wardrobe are pre-loved but she’s adamant, you can still get that dopamine hit from shopping second hand.
