What is slow fashion?

I used to love fashion, not just clothes, but fashion. Being a teenager in the early nineties before the arrival of internet and way before social media meant the excitement I used to get when a new edition of Vogue or Elle came out was enormous! When I’d get to college and the glossy Italian magazines filled with catwalk photo's had arrived, we'd all fight to have the first look! But that excitement has gone, Social media and instant access to everything has changed it all.

Back then, designers and retailers used to work to a long lead time, the clothes we wore were often designed a whole year ahead. Seasons and trends were considered, colour stories were perfected, but now that we live in an age of 24/7 information, and images can be shared across the globe in seconds, trends are moving ever more quickly, and companies are turning around new designs in only a couple of weeks, and clothing is getting so cheap it's almost disposable. Albeit with a loss to quality - but does anyone care?

If you've found yourself reading this then I imagine you do. How different does the factory process look to how you sew your own clothes?

To answer the original question, slow fashion is the opposite to 'fast fashion'. And the ultimate in slow fashion is creating your own clothes, that aren't following 'trends' and are sewn to last. It's not a new term, but it's one I'm hearing more and more in the mainstream.

There are many reasons that clothing is one of the biggest pollutants to the planet, from the chemicals used to make synthetic fabrics, to the dyes used to colour them. But the biggest reason is the sheer amount of clothing produced. If we all bought less, better quality clothes, we could reduce the amount going to landfill in an instant.

As Vivienne Westwood once said, "Buy less, choose well, make it last."

I remember H&M opening it’s first store in New York in 2001, I was living there at the time. Having shopped there in the UK as a student, I didn't understand the excitement, after all I was in New York, the shopping capital of the world! But people went crazy, they were queueing for hours around the block, I couldn’t get my head around it. Fast fashion was well and truly here!

Now that clothes had got so cheap, is it any wonder people stopped making them themselves? In fact do children actually learn to sew at school any more? I’m not sure at what point it became more expensive to make your own clothes, but it became a hobby rather than a necessity. Gone was the make do and mend era of Mrs Sew and Sew!

So where will it go from here? I honestly can't see how it can carry on as it is, the cost to the planet is just too big. Something needs to change, but how long will it take for that to happen?

I used to think seeing fabrics that were made from recycled plastic was a good thing, but it's not. When plastic is recycled in to something like a bottle, it can be recycled again, when it's recycled in to fibres to make clothes, it's the end of the road, it goes to landfill when it's finished with. (If you want recycled clothes, just buy second hand.) From landfill, and from washing our clothes, those fibres enter the water system and get broken down to micro plastics, and into our food system. Ultimately we end up eating our clothes!

This won't go on forever, nothing ever does. But in the mean time, every time you create something that you know you'll wear for years, you can smile knowing that you're not adding to the problem.