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“I’m so excited to show you what I bought / First I got this top: so cute. Then I got this top: I’m obsessed. / Flats are on trend. / This gold bucket bag was $13.”
Clothes roundups, product unboxings and try-on videos: social media is awash with the latest trends.
Raquel Calandre, a Year 11 student at Santa Sabina College in Sydney’s Inner West, describes the pressure to keep up.
“I go to a lot of parties and every time I go out, I think ‘I need a new dress.’ There’s that trend where you can’t post something with the same outfit twice.”
Enter ultra-fast fashion: it’s affordable, accessible and, as Year 12 student Lucy Gee describes it, it’s everywhere.
“On buses, in buildings, it’s always evident. Trends come and go so quickly. I guess it’s a natural human instinct to follow those trends and it’s so cheap and convenient.”
But last year, the moment of reckoning came for these climate-conscious students.
“We can sell really cheap clothes just like fast fashion and we can also be really, really affordable.”
And so the most loved clothing store, “Santa Style”, was launched.
The shop is now a fixture on the Santa Sabina College campus in Sydney’s Inner West.
Raquel Calandre explains that the price of donated money, often designer clothes, ranges from two to twenty dollars.
There is also an online shop.
“We can take something that you’ll never wear again and donate it so someone else can wear it. And I can buy something here that someone else won’t wear again. We’re not wasting things, we’re actually reusing them. [And] I can actually afford things here rather than buy a dress for $100 and wear it once.”
This month, Year 11 student Emma Wong visited other schools in the area to promote the idea.
“They don’t need to be a big company like Vinnies to do this… you can really start small to have a huge impact.”
According to a report released last month by the Australia Institute, Australians are the world’s largest consumers of clothes, shoes and bags on a per capita basis.
Every year we purchase an average of 56 new items.
And the average value of these items is just $13, much lower than in the UK, US, Japan and Brazil.
More than 200,000 tonnes of clothing ends up in landfill every year, the equivalent of the weight of almost four Sydney Harbor bridges.
It’s an issue that Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek is trying to address through the National Clothing Product Stewardship Scheme, which officially starts this week.
Speaking at the launch event in Sydney earlier this month, Minister Plibersek said curbing clothing consumption “is an incredible challenge for us as a country”.
“It’s a really serious environmental problem, and it’s a really serious environmental problem, especially because we’re seeing a very high volume of very low-cost fashion.”
In the last 12 months, 62 retailers have voluntarily signed up and from July 1st will be required to pay a tax of 4 cents for each new item placed on the market.
Funds will be redirected to training businesses to improve product design, reduce waste and educate consumers.
Nina Gbor, director of the circular economy and waste program at the Australia Institute, says it’s a good start, but argues the tax is too low to change brand behaviour.
“It’s very pleasing to see that the government is doing something about clothing waste in this country, but unfortunately it’s not enough. We need more than 50 cents per garment.”
Ms Gbor is also calling on Australia to take a similar approach to France, which is seeking to impose a $16 tax on the sale of ultrafast fashion items and ban advertising of such products.
Dr Eloise Zoppos is the Director of Research and Engagement at Australian Consumer and Retail Studies at Monash Business School.
According to her, sustainability is no longer a trend, but “a consumer movement”.
“What we are finding, both in our research and in the broader trend across Australia and the world, is, in particular [amid] With the cost of living crisis, people are looking for new and different ways to adopt sustainable behaviors and truly shop according to their values. Research conducted in early June found that almost half of Australian shoppers say sustainability is an important factor when making a retail purchase. So we’re seeing clothing swaps, we’re seeing more and more people buying second-hand or buying used goods from online marketplaces, for example.”
Online, there’s a growing wave of content creators rallying against fast-fashion.
Melbourne resident Maggie Zhou is among them.
“So, in 2019, I decided to do it. Previously, I had worked with fast fashion brands, accepting gifted products and wearing their new clothes.”[It was] so funny, so brilliant and really seductive but after a while it left a bad taste in my mouth. It can be difficult. There are so many trends out there, but I really try to slow down my consumption and only buy what is necessary.”
Most of the clothes in Zhou’s wardrobe are already loved, but she’s adamant you can still get that dopamine hit by shopping secondhand.