Ecofashion & Vintage

From Nifty to Niftier

IleneLeave a comment

In 2012, I was a “nifty” woman awarded the label of a top 50 women in technology on twitter by Webbiquity.com – hey that’s pretty cool. But today, my disabled body cannot find a way to arrive on time, maybe 50 minutes late, but not an award-worthy statistic. 2017 Nifty Fifty Flake. Making lemonade from the lemons that fall far from the tress and slooooowly attempting an ascension to the locally driven retail and internet word search puzzle grabbing customers to my Etsy site. I rise or try to anyway, to arise to the transcendent world of low tech ecofashion. I recently wrote a post on my Etsy shop about the waste in the fast fashion industry, which I had no idea existed until I researched the surface of what I’m trying to accomplish by selling vintage goods. I knew it was good for the environment but I had no idea about how good.

Here’s the post for your reading pleasure and feel free to visit my shop at www.etsy.com/post/yeuxdeux.

Hello, my fellow self proclaimed eco-fashionistas, please read on and give yourselves another pat on the back for buying vintage from a small purveyor. Your proud and your clothing says more about your real love of our planet and not just of great old fashion.
Imaging it’s about 7:30 on a regular weeknight and you walk from the offie to a working dinner with some clients. As you toss your 40’s baby blue crushed velvet jacket over your chair and sit down while placing a napkin over the lap of your favorite new old 50’s dress. You can also be aware of the ooh’s and aah’s, since we all know vintage when worn well brings us many questions and can be great conversation starters as well. And now you can also tell all those complimenting your gorgeous and unique, well fitted outfit the facts about today’s new “fast fashion,” akin to fast food, and the waste of the fashion industry since the second world war, especially in the United States.
Here’s some fast facts for you – and not just to make you feel good about buying good vintage, wearing it, gifting vintage and antique pieces, but about not filling our land with more waste from the now second largest polluter and waste maker of all manufacturing industries.
  • As much as 15% of fabric ends up trashed in the process of making clothes. (US EPA, 2016)
  • 11.1 million tons of clothing are thrown away per year and the average American trashes 63 pounds of textiles per year. (US EPA 2006)
  • The average T-shirt wastes 700 gallons of water in manufacturing (US EPA, 2017)

Petroleum-based polyester and poly blends comprise most garments manufactured today in fast fashion found in stores like Target, H&M and others. The fabric proves very hard to recycle without losing quality and therefore goes mainly to the dump along with 15% of the other wasted materials mentioned above, winding up on the manufacturing plant floor. We won’t discuss the overseas manufacturing of garments in China and the Philippines where blue jeans create a special kind of illness uno themselves to the human capital creating the tight pre-washed garments that make your ass look great!

And for the back pocket of your jeans, here’s the fast fashion facts you may want to take with you to continue that dinner conversation you started back in the introductory paragraph of this blog post:

  • US consumers buy 20 million garments per year
  • That means every man, woman, child, and not to mention pets in some cases buy 63 garments per person per year.
  • That means everyone buys at least 1+ garment per week.
    The US EPA 2017
Would you rather read an exciting new sky blue 1940’s jacket hand-made in gorgeous crushed velvet just came into YeuxDeux Vintage and is available for your re-use and environmentally savvy shopping – arriving in less than a week and ready for you to wear, or would you rather force yourself to get in the car, waste time and gas, buy something not quite so dazzling and at the same price, and chance that someone else at the table ran over to H&M for a cheap version of the same thing you ran over to H&M for at lunch to impress the customers at your table that evening?
More impressive is your still going to have this jacket in your wardrobe for years to come, and perhaps even have it for your daughter or niece or nephew to wear years from now when they steal it out of your closet?  I present to you the facts, my economically savvy and ecologically friendly favorite Etsy buyers. Isn’t that why we love vintage on another level – the real notion that we’re saving the future of our planet with fashion gifts from the past.