When you walk into Urban Jungle on Knickerbocker Ave in Bushwick, you’re immediately greeted with rows upon rows of t-shirts in every size, shape, and color, more densely packed than a department store. Few, if any, thrift stores in New York can compare in size to Urban Jungle. Near the fitting rooms, suit jackets, and coveralls section, I met with Avalon Hester.
Thrifting has surged in popularity over the last few years, partly due to reports about how ugly fast fashion can be — exploitative labor conditions, wasteful practices, and even store policies that require returned or unsold items to be destroyed with scissors. With two degrees in progress, one in fashion and one in journalism, Hester has come to the understanding that “Fashion is an art form that all of us engage with on a daily basis, it’s such a part of our individual expression, and the way we do it is killing the planet.” However, she said “it’s about looking at the history of it and how that hasn’t always been the case.”
Hester, searching for pieces for her next project, led us over to a rack of handkerchiefs. Looking at a finely-detailed scarf, she explained, “Slow fashion, I think, is part of the way that people are getting back in touch with what quality clothing means.” Standards are compromised quickly, though, when retailers try to pump out clothes and trends faster and faster. “There’s just things that you cannot produce quality-wise at the speed at which we’re going right now.”
Trend cycles may feel like they’re moving at an incredible speed, but the influence of the trends is rooted in past decades. The most recent bout of 90s-era crops and low-rise jeans were no exception. Hester sees these decade influences as being “in response to the fact that the 90s is a little bit of the last decade in which there was an expectation of quality in production. But really as soon as you start to approach the 2000s, what we think of now as fast fashion and lower-quality items becomes a reality.”
This is why Hester focuses so much on vintage and historical clothing. “Going hand-in-hand with some of the research I do of different seam types, thrifting is part of how I look for quality construction. I don’t know if that is how other people are engaging with it, but that is how you can engage with it. You get to open up different garments and see how they’re made.” She pulled a dress off the rack to reveal a quality seam, and one that will fall apart. Serged seams, where two raw edges of cloth are sewn together quickly with a machine, tend to fall apart much faster than something like a french seam. This is because with french seams, the edges of the cloth are folded over twice so that the edges are hidden, protected, and unlikely to fray and fracture.
She pulled out a 1940s-style dress, and opened it up to show me its construction. “Some of these dresses will be old enough that they have seams that we don’t use anymore because we don’t have the time or the infrastructure to produce those seams,” she explained. Thrifting “feels better because it is better. You’re getting things that probably are going to be of higher quality, especially if you have a little bit of vintage flair or taste.”
But is quality the only reason why thrifting feels sustainable? Only a minimum of 30% of clothing donated actually makes it onto the store floor, according to the Washington Post. It turns out that thrifting, and the randomness of what is available, pushes consumers to think more about the clothing. “It’s gotten people into touch with the idea that clothing needs to be altered,” Hester said.
According to Hester, alterations used to be a long-term solution to the fact that trends change. Hester, who is partially interested in sustainability because of her interest in historical fashion, explained that “Up until you were talking about the wealthiest classes, the expectation was that the gowns that were being produced, or even the suits, would be majorly reworked. It was clothing that was produced at high enough quality in the first place that you could pull it apart, and make it into a different silhouette […] without wasting more material.”
One reason that alterations and the reworking of clothes used to be more commonplace was because cloth was difficult to produce, and far more labor intensive, meaning that more people were involved with it. Knowing the labor involved, they wouldn’t want to just cut something up and throw it away, they would want to refashion it. Even today, making cloth is still a really labor intensive process. Translating these historical trends, Hester observes that “thrifting embodies some of that [historical mindset] too. People are looking for clothing in thrift stores in order to turn it into something else, which has its problems, but I think is going to be part of the sustainability solution.”
We crossed the LED rainbow bridge into the other half of Urban Jungle, landing in front of a double-rack of plaid shirts. Handling a shoulder seam, Hester mused that “Thrifting teaches us what lasts. A huge part of having sustainability in clothing is having things that exist outside of trend.” She suggested that you may never need to buy a plaid shirt new, because most plaid shirts are produced in a high quality way. “This thing is triple seamed, that doesn’t exist on a t-shirt.”
Looking forward to how the industry can change for the better, Hester suggests, “A great way to be sustainable is to be made of quality in the first place.” Even outside of thrifting, Hester finds that when shopping for quality pieces for herself, “things that are staying in the closet for a long time need some element or thought in investing in those.” Keeping clothing in use reduces its environmental footprint, and if you don’t have to keep repurchasing the same pieces, it keeps fashion waste out of landfills.
However, “Thrifting isn’t the final stage. What we do with clothing after that still matters.” Recycling of cloth, the composting of organic materials like silk, linen, and pure cotton, is important to keeping fashion waste out of landfills.
It’s important to keep materials in mind when thrifting too. After we met, Avalon Hester texted me some final thoughts, saying “Thrifting is a more sustainable option, but you still have to bring your sustainable purchasing ethics to the thrift. Things like shopping natural fiber over polyester, and not over-purchasing, still matter.”
Over all, what matters most in the sustainability of our closets, she said, is “how we maintain our clothing once we bring it home.” Keep the cloth in good condition to keep on wearing it, so that if you donate it, someone else can keep on wearing it, too.
