21–30 of 245 posts
Fascinating article if only for such an interesting glimpse into Africa and African culture and how it is being shaped by its relationship to the larger world.
I'm a guy so clearly things don't change as much but almost every piece of clothing I own is "fast fashion" that I'll wear until it's ruined. Consumers are told constantly by the media, social media and brands that they need to continuously change or be out of fashion and "cringe" or "cheugy". I think fast fashion companies in general are one of the least to blame for these trends, they seem to just copy quickly what is deemed as good but others.
Kmart in Australia is a good example. Most stores sell crappy out of date stuff so you have to shop online but Kmart has heaps of good cheap stuff under the Anko brand. From $3.70 t-shirts with a good fit, to $50.00 air fryers to nice containers to store stuff in. IMO it's a big win for most people to have cheap good stuff to buy. If it wasn't for Kmart it would be far harder to not be "cringe" while being poor. If the coolness industrial complex decides that this stuff is not good then Kmart would need to get rid of stock to replace it with new cool stuff. Is that Kmarts fault? I don't think so.
The weird part of this isn’t that fast fashion generates a lot of trash. Almost every part of the American lifestyle generates tons of waste. The strange part is that the US strong arms African countries into buying the “donated” garments from textile recyclers. I’ll be throwing my used garments directly into the landfill in the future.
The recycling industrial complex is a total mess in general. American recycling also gets dumped on South East Asia (mainly China if memory serves) where much of it is just waste. There's a reason recycling is the third R, and it should primarily take the form of other people reusing your stuff anyway - not throwing items in a specifically coloured bin and calling it a day.
> Today, the average American buys 68 new items of clothing per year. > “You wonder, do people in America have so much money that they can just wear things once and then throw them away?” I uh… I too would like to know. What scares me is that the use of whatever demographic is causing that average has to be way higher than the actual average, but this feels like it has to be bimodal. And there are lots of these numbe…
TBC, I think wearing something 3-4 times and discarding it is horrible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The recycling industrial complex is a total mess in general. American recycling also gets dumped on South East Asia (mainly China if memory serves) where much of it is just waste. There's a reason recycling is the third R, and it should primarily take the form of other people reusing your stuff anyway - not throwing items in a specifically coloured bin and calling it a day.
No, China specifically outlawed a lot of the recycling trade that was coming in, and it caused havoc to municipal recycling a few years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_National_Sword
> Today, the average American buys 68 new items of clothing per year. > “You wonder, do people in America have so much money that they can just wear things once and then throw them away?” I uh… I too would like to know. What scares me is that the use of whatever demographic is causing that average has to be way higher than the actual average, but this feels like it has to be bimodal. And there are lots of these numbe…
In Ghana, imported secondhand clothes are called obroni wawu, dead white man’s clothes. In Malawi, they are kaunjika — literally “clothes sold in a heap.” In Mozambique, they are known as calamidade, calamity, for their historical association with disaster relief aid. Fascinating article if only for such an interesting glimpse into Africa and African culture and how it is being shaped by its relationship to the large…
The weird part of this isn’t that fast fashion generates a lot of trash. Almost every part of the American lifestyle generates tons of waste. The strange part is that the US strong arms African countries into buying the “donated” garments from textile recyclers. I’ll be throwing my used garments directly into the landfill in the future.
Clearly African governments think its in their interests to maintain that trade deal - that’s probably why they agreed to it in the first place.
That's conspicuous consumption gone mad, it seems to me too many people have far too much disposable income. What is it about people that they cannot be content with their clothes in that they have to change them long before they're worn out? This is fashion gone mad. I never throw out clothes, and I can keep the same items for many years - I've still got jeans, BD dungarees, etc. that I bought over 20 years ago. Whe…
Much of this isn’t conspicuous consumption it’s a lack of reuse inside of developed nations. Low quality clothing is so cheap it’s hard to fathom, making buying new simply easier and just as affordable. “In 2019, American families spent on average about 2% of their income on clothing.” It’s vastly more affordable than “In the 1950s, the average American family spent about 10% of its income on clothing, and that money…
Perhaps not.
However where I live the amount of dumped clothing is unbelievable. Charities that once used to take almost any amount of clothing now do not. Instead, they'll take the top 10% of it and dump the rest - 'dump' here means send the rest overseas to third world countries.
Moreover, not that many years ago, these charities used to have used clothing collection bins - great big steel boxes about as tall as a person with a hinged lid at top - scattered all over conspicuous parts of the city and they have been all removed because the charities no longer want the responsibility of dumping huge volumes of stuff (as it's many times more than they can cope with and it's long past the point where if they were to accept the clothing then it would cost them money to it.
Essentially, these charities have been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of clothing. Now, they are very picky about what they will accept.
If one now wants to give clothes to a charitity then one has to take it there themselves. The charitity will then pick the eyes out of it and what it does not want the donor will have to find somewhere to dump the remainer.
Now, much clothing goes directly into the trash can thence to landfill.
If you wondered why my post was so cynical now you know.
Then we got MTV. When our mother travelled on business, we would make print outs of shoes and clothing that we wanted. God forbid someone caught you with an off-brand shoe at school now that the poorest kid under the hot sun of Saudi Arabia was fashion aware. It was wasteful, it was expensive, it was less than 5 items each a year.
I can't even imagine what it's like to buy 68 article of clothing a year. But then again a wise author once said: "Ending is better than mending."