VIVA: The Perils and Potentials of Shopping Someone Else's Closet
This excerpt is from the Viva article on 12-04-2023 and was written by Julia Gessler
"Rose Hope, of Karangahape Rd darling Crushes, which sells a small, curated assortment of pieces and runs regular clothes-swap events, said that the amount of sorting they have to do “to find anything decent is really understated”, citing the glut of products from behemoth brands like Zara and Shein over the last five years.
Rose describes the wave of fast fashion as colossal, a blend of garments, social media and young people feeling the pressure to purchase another kind of currency: relevancy. “We know that the average person only wears an item of clothing seven times,” she adds, “but now that clothing is even cheaper, [you] never have to recycle an outfit. With the cost of Earth’s resources to make any garment, the exploitative labour and the waste being created in a climate crisis, ‘looking cute’ has never been so dangerous.”
For Rose, it feels intimately tied to the malleable idea of value. “We’ve essentially been brainwashed into thinking a T-shirt should cost $5 and that translates to secondhand clothing, too. The expectation of keeping up with those fast-fashion price tags can be hard to grapple with.”