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Five Summer Festival Fashion Trends 2021 You Could Find in the Vintage Shops
This time of the year has now arrived – sunny days, long nights, loud music, and a lot of summer festivals. Festival fashion is a big business as a lot of retailers release lines that are specially made for the occasion. Festival fashion is usually outlandish, as it includes a lot of colours, glitter, flares, and accessories. While everyone likes to look good and unique, this can be problematic, as most of the clothes and outfits are only intended for single use. It leads to a problem when about 7.5 million outfits each year are single-use ones purchased for the festivals. The result of that is that the fashion industry…
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How To Combat Plastic Pollution in Our Oceans
Fashion’s impact on our environment and its pollution is currently a trendy topic; everyone’s heard the sustainability buzzwords. However, what does it all actually mean? As much as terms like sustainable and circular fashion gets tossed around, it can be difficult to make heads or tails of them and further know how you can pitch in and help out. It is a mammoth task we’re set against. If the situation does not change soon, there will be more plastic in the sea than fish by 2050. We’re currently tossing 12.7 million tonnes of plastic pollutants into our oceans every year; and these plastics are going to take 20 to 500…
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Circularity: The Fast Fix to Fast Fashion
Fast fashion has become a detriment to the eco-system of the planet. With new clothing being more accessible and cheaper than ever, we as the consumer need to change our apathy into action. How can the industry tailor to our new needs? Circularity. Every year in the U.K alone, Britons throw away an estimated 3.1 kilograms of textiles. This places us as the 4th highest textile waste producers in Europe (circular.co.uk). However, there is a possible solution to this; use of a Circular Economy. First things first what is a Circularity? It is based off the idea of a Circular Economy. It starts with the principles and ideas that, rather…
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On trend, but at what cost?
In a world of everyone trying to keep up, the next best thing is around the corner. Fast fashion has helped fashion lovers keep up with the latest trends at a cheap price. But at what cost? Unfortunately, the planet. Stores like Missguided, Forever 21, and H&M produce on trend clothing, made of cheap materials. It has been found that over 60% of all clothing is thrown out within a year; ending up in a landfill or incineration. It’s no surprise that the fashion industry is one of the worlds biggest polluters. Time to invest It’s not that we, as consumers, are uninterested in becoming more sustainable. We just want…
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Sustainable fashion: The community you want to be a part of
2020 has been a chaotic year; politics has become so polarised, the world has gone into lockdown, and our climate is descending into madness. But in reality, this could be our future if we don’t act now. 2020 was the year to save our planet and to hold the big industries accountable. 2020 was the year to redeem ourselves, but the pandemic has diverted our gaze to the immediate threats we’re facing. It’s time to make our consumption sustainable. Climate crisis Environmental activists have been flooding the media with statements trying to draw the world’s attention to our planet’s cry for help. We are rapidly depleting our resources and most…
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Will fashion ever be truly genderless?
In this article we’ll be investigating whether or not genderless fashion is just a trend, or whether it’s here to stay. While gender-fluidity can seem like quite a recent topic, it can be traced back to 1824. Hidden in the forests of Indiana, a small town called New Harmony was founded. In this town, both men and women could wear shirts and trousers. But how could one small town revolutionise gendered clothing while the rest of the world was trapped in rigid gender-stereotypes for the next 150-200 years? How has vintage and second-hand clothing changed gendered clothing? Now that sustainability is becoming a huge part of life for all of…
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Ambiguous Vintage
‘Vintage’ can mean different things to different people and clever marketing has given it a rise in popularity in the last twenty years. Nowadays, you can find ‘second-hand’ clothes for 99p while a ‘vintage’ tag can push it towards £99. Did we trade in value for cool points when ‘vintage’ became a desirable look? When I first moved to London a few years ago, I was excited to discover events called Vintage Kilo Sales. The idea behind these events was quite simple – a local hall is filled with pre-loved items and the price of the clothes is determined by their weight. A kilo of clothes thus has a set…
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Bricks and Mortar
While online-only brands like ASOS, Boohoo and Missguided chip away at our formerly fashionable high streets, is the same true when it comes to second-hand? Do charity shops, vintage boutiques and thrift stores suffer at the hands of online marketplaces such as eBay and Depop? In 2015 the used textile market was worth close to €4 billion. Today, the volume of used or second-hand clothing is enormous and growing. And increasingly, this volume isn’t just coming from more economically developed countries, but from countries around the world. For example, 60% of Chinese consumers now admit to owning more clothes than they need, with the average number of wears per item…
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Vintage Fashion: Sustainable Style
I used to walk past high street shops and fill to the brim with excitement. There is no doubt that the feeling got my adrenaline pumping. As a British girl living on the continent, my options for shopping were limited in my eyes. I took trips to London just to go to the Oxford Street Primark. My friends and I would go mad in that shop, buying all the latest bright-coloured trendy tops. Although Primark was my favourite store, as a thirteen-year old I could easily be dragged into any famous high street shop. The whole experience was thrilling to me. A shopping trip never ended in disappointment. I was…
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Once Upon A Frock – The Green Silk Dress
There’s something magical about shopping for second hand clothes; it’s a treasure hunt for a hidden gem and when you find something, you cherish it forever. Tell us about your favourite vintage buy and how you came to fall in love with it! Every summer, I make the journey to the south coast of England to visit my great-aunt. This has been a tradition for many years. I first started going with my grandma as a child but now, being in my twenties, I travel down by myself. For a few days, we enjoy going to cafes, relaxing at her beach hut and doing arts and crafts. Last summer, I…
