You should be buying used clothing as much as possible. Period. End of story.
That’s the crux of my whole argument, but I can’t end the blog post there. I’ll have to tell you something. So I’ll tell you this.
According to most online sources, Americans purchase more than fifty new clothing items per year, on average. For a lot of people, that item never gets worn, or it gets worn once or a few times, either way, it often just ends up in the trash. Then again, even if you don’t buy it, it ends up in the trash. In 2018, the EPA reported that the recycling rate for textiles is roughly 14.7%, the rest eventually ending up landfill-ed. Before you go pointing fingers at your friends and family, consider that a large some of that textile waste is material that was never sold, sometimes material that never even touched the hands of a consumer.
Clothing companies produce more than they can sell, globally companies over produce by 30% on average. I guess just because they can?
Most fast fashion companies are able to afford over-producing by such a wide margin, because they outsource their labor to “under-developed” countries, where labor laws are far more lax. In other words, many of these companies rely on sweatshops. Sweatshop is the general term for a textile factory where the working conditions are dangerous and the workers are not paid enough. Not nearly enough. Workers, mostly women and children, are paid a small fraction of what is necessary for survival. They are forced to work 14-16 hour days, without ever making enough to make ends meet. People need money to live, and these companies make a point to take up space in places with struggling economies and job markets, to ensure that better options are unavailable. People get trapped in the cycle of poverty; people need money to live, the only place to get money is the sweatshop, the sweatshop doesn’t pay nearly enough, people work longer hours, people need more money to live, people work longer hours.
At what point does this become slavery?
Furthermore, if we set aside the cost to humanity, and the actual physical waste produced, fashion industries carbon footprint is gargantuan. It takes 700 gallons of water to produce just one cotton shirt, 20% of the world’s water waste is produced by the fashion industry, and in a world where 60% of textiles are made from synthetic fibers, we also consume hundreds of millions of barrels of petroleum yearly just to produce the fabric.
The thing is, I’m saying all of this right now, knowing that this is not new information to you, most likely. However, it is information that people, specifically American people, distance themselves from too easily. We used to have sweatshops in the U.S., but we decided they were too inhumane for citizens to see or participate in. We used to have slavery, but we decided it was too inhumane for citizens to see or participate in. It’s too inhumane for us to see, and yet we all participate in these practices daily. We are just able to forget more easily, because the inhumanity is most often taking place on the other side of the world.
During my second semester of college, I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas for the first time. In this short piece, Le Guin asks the reader to picture their own perfect utopia, whatever that may mean to them. In Omelas everyone is happy and everyone has all of their needs met. No one has to do anything they don’t want to do and everyone can get whatever they want whenever they want it. Whatever perfection is to you, that is Omelas. There is only one catch: In all of Omelas everyone is happy, except for one child. To maintain the peace and perfection of Omelas this child has to be locked up, imprisoned, for its entire life. This child may not see the light, may not experience comfort, may not taste good food or experience any of the world’s pleasures. If one wants to stay in Omelas, when they come of age, they must look upon the suffering child and live with the knowledge that the child is suffering for their benefit. Utopia cannot exist without a cost.
Most Americans live in Omelas, though we may not know it. Most of us can have whatever we want whenever we want, at the expense of billions of children locked in deep dark basements. In theory, thrifting should be a great way for us to walk away from Omelas, because thrifting your clothing is the only way to ensure that you are separated from that suffering. Even if the shirt you buy from Goodwill is still produced using slavery, you are not giving money to the company that profits from that slave labor. Great. That’s great. That’s good.
However, as thrifting becomes more and more heavily associated with indie-hipster college, a new child is revealed.
Let’s backstep for a second; when I was a kid a lot of my clothes were thrifted/hand-me-downs. As a child I was, unfortunately, hyper-aware that this was a marker of my family’s poverty. I didn’t want my peers to know that a fraction of the clothes I had were new, the same way that I would blush when people would find out I lived in an apartment and not a house or that I didn’t have an iPhone or even a samsung, but instead some other off-brand model of smart phone. Now, I know that these were shallow feelings to have consistently and I can recognize now that even as a poor American, I have been more privileged than most people in the world. I was grateful in high school that thrifting was becoming trendy, because it normalized the way I had lived for most of my life, so that my used clothes were no longer a marker of my social class.
Since then, thrifting culture has been co-opted and corrupted. Trendy consignment stores are the new boutique, and the prices of second-hand clothes have sky-rocketed, even at stores like ARC or Goodwill, because the demand for used clothes has gone up among middle-and-upper-class individuals. In addition to that, due to the overproduction of fast-fashion clothing, the overall quality of clothing in thrift and consignment shops has gone down, while prices continue to rise. Now individuals with lower-incomes struggle to afford used clothing, and are most likely to be pointed towards more fast fashion stores like Walmart or Forever 21. Either way, they are allowed lower quality items at a higher price.
To be clear, again, everyone should be thrifting their clothing, I am not going to tell the wealthy to stop buying used just because it fucks with the market. It’s not a wealthy teen’s fault that companies want to take advantage of their full pockets, though I suppose it is their fault that they are foolish enough to pay higher prices just so that they can dress the way they think a poor person does. And I suppose it’s also their fault that the second-hand market is now flooded with Shein and Temu microtrends they were likely consuming before the hipster bug bit them.
The truth is, the fast fashion flood is the bed we have made for ourselves and we have to live with these consequences, but if I may radicalize you for a moment:
-Clothing should be a human right, and to an extent, clothing should be free. As a society, we should be opening more clothing banks where people can access free clothing of any quality.
-Clothing should be a human right AND ALSO most people have way more clothing than they need, and the culture needs to re-normalize outfit repeating(??)
-We have enough clothing to stop producing. If society had the will to abandon trend-culture. We could focus on effectively recycling and re-distributing the clothes we do have.
-Yes, much of this clothing will be lower quality due to the sheer amount of poorly produced, fast-fashion items in circulation right now. Like I said, this is the bed we have made for ourselves and humanity needs to face the consequences of their wasteful actions.
-None of this can happen unless people are willing to reject popular culture, reject consumer culture, and reject capitalist culture. People are not ready to admit that perhaps we have enough. Perhaps it is no longer necessary to work for the clothes on your back. Perhaps it’s no longer necessary to flaunt your “wealth” by wearing this season’s most popular (knock-off designs). Perhaps we have been fooling ourselves all along.
So, to conclude this ramble, thrifting is good and thrifting is necessary. It is a great and easy way to lower your own carbon footprint. But the only real way to make a difference is to reject the fashion industry altogether. Buy less and boycott H&M, boycott Forever 21, boycott Shien and Temu, boycott fast fashion companies. Buy necessities like socks and underwear new, and buy the rest from ARC or Goodwill. Don’t go to consignment boutiques, they are praying on your downfall. They are hoping that you will be so afraid of being perceived as actually poor that you will be willing to pay 20 dollars or more for a used t-shirt.
I know this isn’t new information to most people. That’s the problem. We have continued to desensatize ourselves to the suffering and degradation in this world. And unless we repeat repeat repeat that what we are doing should not be normal, things will never change.
Reject, reject, reject. Don’t let yourself be manipulated, instead just walk away from Omelas.
Works Cited
“Apparel Data in Fashion.” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 5 Feb. 2025, http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2025/apparel-data-in-fashion.htm.
Associate, Kathryn Horvath Zero Waste Campaign, et al. “How Many Clothes Are Too Many?” PIRG, 4 Mar. 2025, pirg.org/articles/how-many-clothes-are-too-many/.
Director, Janet Domenitz Executive, et al. “Fast Fashion by the Numbers.” PIRG, 3 Oct. 2023, pirg.org/articles/fast-fashion-by-the-numbers/.
Nguyen, Lei. “The Danger of Sweatshops.” Earth.Org, Earth.Org, 4 Mar. 2024, earth.org/sweatshops/.
“Textiles: Material-Specific Data.” EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, http://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/textiles-material-specific-data. Accessed 26 Apr. 2025.
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