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“Look good, save money, reduce waste,” reads the Nu Wardrobe’s slogan, a grassroots and gen-z ran platform which seeks to revolutionise how we view the remnants of our wardrobes, battling against the fast fashion industry and influencer-culture one share at a time. Since the advent of the internet, our shopping habits have migrated from the highstreet to the virtual. Viral brands like Fashion Nova and Pretty Little Thing have threatened to swallow up their IRL-counterparts like Primark, igniting a dangerous and environmentally-damaging game of catch-up in the process. By 2050, the fashion industry could be responsible for a quarter of all carbon emissions, but Nu Wardrobe are spearheading a movement to stop fast fashion in its tracks.
Since the advent of social media, our circles of influence have evolved beyond our immediate friends and family, into the micro-influencers of Instagram and the million-follower behemoths of the Kardashians — mass consumption at the touch of a button. ‘Influencer’ is a job title accredited to those who have amassed a large social media following and turned it into currency. Through ads and brand deals, influencers have aided in a consumer exodus from the highstreets to the virtual world of fast fashion, where brands such as Fashion Nova have founded themselves upon influencer marketing. Purchasing fast fashion has never been easier — cheap to make, quick to break, completely and utterly replaceable. Richard Saighan, CEO of Fashion Nova, likes to say he has turned fast fashion into ultra-fast fashion.
“There aren’t many brands that are creating clothes as fast as we are,” Saighan has said, “we bring so many trends every day.” Brands such as Fashion Nova have enabled fast fashion’s takeover of our wardrobes and our social media feeds — the trending page has become environmentally toxic. Fast fashion trends are dictated by the endless images and brand deals churned out by Instagram personalities and celebrities, by the people in power at the detriment of the environment and humanity. Nu Wardrobe founders Ali and Aisling, both students of Trinity College Dublin, saw the devastating conditions the industry was creating while volunteering in India. Images of pollution and miserable working conditions haunted them upon returning to Ireland. “They couldn’t ignore what they saw,” Michaela of the Nu Wardrobe in Cork told me, “so they set out to provide an alternative.”
“Clothes nowadays aren’t made to last a long time,” Michaela continues, “this is called planned obsolescence, where clothes are intentionally designed and made to fall apart.” It is the trait of the fast fashion industry which makes it so toxic, with influencers promoting what Nu call a ‘Take-Make-Consume-Discard’ economy. Instead of perpetuating this, the Nu Wardrobe hopes to help build a Circular Economy, “which mimics the cycles in nature where there are no such things as waste!”. In the process, ‘Take-Make-Consume-Discard’ becomes ‘Make-Consume-Reuse-Repair-Remake’, where everything is cycled back into the system.
In speaking to Éanna Cristin Doyle, a sustainable fashion activist from Kilkenny, she revealed how she became conscious of the fact that fast fashion seemed too good to be true. As the suburban landmarks of Penneys — budget fashion retailer Primark’s Irish twin — towers above highstreets in every corner of the country, Éanna describes how much of a staple unsustainable shopping is in the fashion diet of Irish cities. “It’s the provincial Irish thing,” she muses, “everyone I knew had a wardrobe that seemed to be 80% stocked from Penneys, [but] about two years ago I started having a growing feeling of discomfort with the way I was buying clothes. I was buying items I only semi-liked only to grow sick of it and buy something new within a few months to catch the next micro-trend.” It was guilt-inspiring, Éanna explains, once she began to dwell on her shopping habits,” I thought, ‘how come I can buy a t-shirt for €3, how is it this cheap and what is the human and environmental cost?’”
The shift to sustainability for those like Éanna is aided by the new slow fashion movement rumbling in Ireland and the UK — the Nu Wardrobe. “Nu is an online clothes sharing platform. It’s like Depop or eBay, but instead of buying the items, you are renting them out to people,” Michaela, a Cork-based volunteer for the platform explains. “We want our members to enjoy guilt-free fashion and to have fun while becoming educated on the environmental and social impacts of the fast-fashion industry.” The Nu Wardrobe is pioneering an alternative to the disposable trends of social media — the currency of influencers.
The impact of influencer marketing can easily be seen as synonymous to ‘the Kardashian effect’. With a collective following of over 536 million people, the status of influence of the family was surmised perfectly in a recent article for The Guardian: they are ‘the assured Medicis of modern celebrity.’ The Kardashian effect refers to the growth of a brand following a paid partnership with a sister. In the last four months of 2018, in unison with a collaboration with Kourtney Kardashian, Boohoo’s sales rose by a third to £180 million — and all online fast fashion brands are experiencing the ripple effect. Brands such as Pretty Little Thing and Nasty Gal are renowned for duping the trends set by the Kardashians, and in the same four month period saw growth of 95% and 74% respectively. In reaching consumers through influencers and selling at slashed prices, items as barely-there as the £1 Missguided bikini or blatantly-plagiarised as Kim’s Barbie pink mini dress, wreak havoc throughout the supply chain — from the polyester which fashions them to the workers who weave them.
Between 2000 to 2014, clothing production doubled as the yearly number of clothing purchases of the average consumer increased by 60%. Demand fuels supply and in an age where we are constantly exposed to advertising, the demand is insatiable. Éanna worries about the impact influencer marketing is having on young people and their approach to sustainability. “The aggressive advertising of [fast fashion] brands really concerns me since I can see how young clothes shoppers can be lured in by the flashy camera work, gorgeous insta-glam styled models and upbeat music,” she illustrates, “it’s eye-catching but behind the shiny veneer it’s nothing more than cheap clothing that will be out of style in 6 months time.”
The curse of influencer culture and the hyper-online lives we feel obliged to lead; the vow that outfit repeating is a sin; if you wore it on Instagram it becomes a pariah of your wardrobe, never to be seen again. Is it possible to make our online connections climate-saving? Éanna hopes more conscious slow-fashion influencers will come to the fore of our feeds, but she is reluctant to commit to her idealism. “I guess there isn’t much money to be made from [promoting slow fashion]”, Éanna dejects, “Sustainability is bad for business.”
Michaela from Nu Wardrobe echoes Éanna in her description of our stigmatised and unsustainable sin of ‘outfit-repeating.’ She describes the current state of our wardrobes — we only use about 20% of it regularly, the rest remains a rainy-day fund of dresses, coats and questionable jumpers you swear will get another wear. The Nu Wardrobe seeks to fulfill Éanna’s desires to build a movement around slow fashion however, with sustainability being the centre of the business rather than a thorn in its side. Nu’s website pledges that borrowing instead of buying will get you a ‘nu’ wardrobe without it costing the earth. The Beta trial began in 2017 and founded communities in Dublin, Cork, Cambridge, Oxford, Maynooth and East London . Volunteer brand ambassadors took a leaf out of the influencer book and promoted the platform online and in-person, getting people to start sharing clothes and organising slow fashion events. Online, people upload their outfits and others can request to borrow them for just 50 cent a piece.
It is a movement which is infectious, those of us who are reluctant to give away our most sentimental pieces are able to lend them, and those who are partial to that new-clothes feeling are able to borrow and feel it guilt-free. “It’s constantly growing,” Michaela says, with an app-version of the platform having just been granted funding.
While self-care might always err on the side of retail therapy-style indulgence, self-preservation means saying no to fast fashion. If it is not the yearly 92 million tons of waste the industry adds to landfills each year that disturbs you, perhaps it is the ethical implications of affordability. In economically-exploited places such as Bangladesh, over 50% of workers are not paid minimum wage, and when they are, men are more likely to receive it over women and children. A new fast fashion purchase which harms those who make it is not worth the adrenalin, or the cleaved out bank account. “Fast fashion is like fast food,” Livia Firth has said, “after the sugar rush it just leaves a bad taste in your mouth.”
Nu is rejecting the fashion commandments of following fast-paced trends. The only rules now? “Look good, save money, reduce waste.”