Slow fashion: winning the race for hearts and minds?

Twitter, we have found, is not only a wonderful way of interacting with customers, but is also a great medium for connecting like minds, who will frequently signpost followers and friends to articles and websites of mutual interest.

As our regular readers will know, one of our passions is for 'slow fashion' and so it was natural that we should follow Slow Fashioned on Twitter. Being sometimes lazy frockers, we are grateful to other tweeters for highlighting relevant links and, thanks to @slowfashioned, two media articles caught our eye yesterday. Both are well worth reading if you are a fellow proponent of slow, sustainable fashion.

The Guardian focused on the growing inflationary pressures on fast fashion, as identified by the ONS, under the headline Rising cost of clothes could signal end to 'cheap chic'.

The days of "cheap chic" and throwaway fashion could be numbered, because the cost of clothes is rising at its fastest rate for nearly 15 years.

The "fast fashion" trend, where T-shirts sell for £2 and jeans are priced at less than a fiver in supermarkets, is being battered by big increases in the cost of cotton, labour and transport.

Some especially scary statistics cited in the article came from research at Cambridge University which found that:

"...as clothing prices have come down, the number of garments bought has soared fourfold. The study found that the average British woman buys half her body weight – 28kg (62lb) – in clothing every year".

Eek! It's surely time to hit the production and consumption brakes before we have no more land to fill with textile waste comprised mainly of throwaway fashion  (one million tonnes a year and rising).

Another short but incisive article on the Atlantic website, Slow Fashion: Reconnecting Production and Consumption, also had us nodding our heads in agreement as it pointed to the unhealthy disconnection between production and consumption, mourned the loss of community and deplored the replacement of tradition with profit. It gave much food for thought about the undesirability, and ultimate unsustainability, of the fashion for 'fast' everything.

Awareness of the environmental impact of human activities is growing. For food, it means buying more organic, local, and seasonal products. For fashion, it should mean more organic, local, and less seasonal. A piece of clothing should last for decades. Like a recipe passed down from generation to generation, we should pass our clothes down to our grandchildren.

Amen to such sentiment! As the slow fashion movement gathers pace, thanks to a combination of consumer awakening and economic constraints, the growing prevalence of articles like these demonstrates that the times may well be a-changing for the better (and slower).

And it's always reassuring to know we are but one voice among many for whom slow is every bit as beautiful as small. We've said it before and we may as well say it, and link to it, again: Landfill fashion: what a waste.