Making a Statement with Recycled Fashion

Fashion, according to the powers that be, is a statement. Problem is, a lot of modern fashion requires that the statement be disturbingly unethical. It’s all very well rocking the latest hats, coats, scarves or bags –but when they’ve come from disadvantaged people, who are being hauled over the coals by faceless multinational corporations, the price one is paying to look cool is probably way too high. Fortunately, the modern British seem to be growing a conscience – along with an appreciation of what really is cool. And that’s where recycled fashion comes in.

What is recycled fashion? Recycled fashion, basically, is cool stuff, re-used to outstanding effect. It works on two levels, one ethical and one to do with style. First up, recycled fashion is ethical because it’s being bought from companies that don’t take advantage of poor people in third world countries. Even if they do use third world labour to produce their recycled fashion (recycled fashion still needs labour, because the original materials are reworked into new things), the companies doing the selling operate fair trade policies that allow their workers a decent wage and quality of life. Result? Buying recycled fashion brings good money to poor workers and withholds money from undeserving multinational conglomerates.

Second, recycled fashion is way cooler than bog standard high street fashion. Every piece of recycled fashion is individual to the point of being unique: because recycled fashion items are made from other stuff, there’s no uniformity to their production. The qualities and peculiarities of the old material inform the new object – and that makes for fashion that really is unique.

Fashion, as has been pointed out before, always strives for uniqueness and never usually makes it. Why? Because fashion is all about creating a herd, to which people can belong. Members of a herd are identical, rather than individual. Because wearing of any fashions, despite the fact that fashions are sold as things that make the wearers unique, inevitably make wearers herd animals, they end up being about as unique as breathing. Recycled fashion, though, really is unique – because no two pieces are identical. Recycled fashion is fashion with a conscience and an attitude.

Recycled fashion isn’t just clothes, either. Think wine glasses made from recycled beer bottles; jewellery made from recycled everything; even toiletry bags made from recycled bits of old packaging. The only things pieces of recycled fashion have in common with each other are their uniqueness, their beauty and their aggressively ethical genesis.

In a world where fashion in general is plastic, boring, non-unique and often extremely ugly (not to mention cheap and quickly replaceable), recycled fashion offers a genuine alternative. Recycled fashion lets people be truly unique whilst still making a statement that other users of recycled fashion can identify with. Rather than trying to unite people under some designer logo, recycled fashion is uniting them under an ethical banner. Now, if people have to belong to herds (and they do), isn’t it about time they picked one with a conscience?