Save The Earth: Wear Preloved Apparel With Pride

Around five years ago, the idea of pre-owned clothing was alien to many in India. Even as the concept of thrift and vintage boomed in the West, and pre-owned apparel was projected to overtake fast fashion in the next decade, it never really took off in India in the right way. So it took a lot of careful positioning and awareness building to bring India to where it is today – with a healthy and growing demand and supply side market for pre-owned clothes. Just as the pre-owned car industry has seen broad-based growth, fashion is the next frontier for circular consumption in India.

India is lucky that many of our leading fashion icons including Bollywood stars have championed this cause, greatly boosting market adoption of this concept. India is too big an economy to be left behind in the circular fashion industry, because the stakes for the environment are far too high. And one of the biggest tools we have in our belt to grow the circular fashion ecosystem is data that an individual can relate to.

When it comes to the environment, we often hear emission or consumption numbers at a global, country or industry level. This can make the issue too abstract for someone to relate to, or even make some feel helpless thinking that an individual’s actions cannot make a significant impact to address this issue. So we can share statistics like – the fashion industry uses 93 billion cubic meters of water annually and is responsible for more carbon emissions than all international flights and maritime shipping combined, according to UNEP and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. But if we want people to take action towards a cause, we need to communicate what their individual action can do. That’s the amazing thing about pre-owned fashion – by making a small behavioral shift of participating in pre-owned fashion, an individual can really move the needle on climate change.

Today, we have the tools to get conservative estimates of the resources that went into making an individual piece of clothing. Yet, when the average person is asked about aspects of their lives that cause environmental harm, they will often speak of their travel and electricity consumption. We haven’t learnt how to think of clothing as a source of pollution, and this is where these individual numbers come in. Buyers need to see how much they can save by choosing a particular pair of jeans secondhand, and sellers need to see how much they can save by circulating a saree they may never wear again, back into the market for someone else to enjoy, instead of leaving it to decay with time as it so often does.

I’ve personally seen the power of these statistics. When someone sceptical about buying pre-owned clothes learns that the dress hanging at the back of his closet took over 12,000 litres of water to make – more water than they would drink in over seven years – he is forced to change his perspective about that dress. The pandemic made many reconnect with nature and rethink their lifestyles, so buying a quality-assured identical piece for a lower price that saves so much water and carbon over a newly manufactured piece is a no-brainer.

The most sustainable thing is always what you already have in your closet, and today leading international fashion icons are proudly re-wearing even statement pieces with style. If you want to branch out to something new, take the time to see if something preloved is available that suits your pocket. While many other climate-saving strategies involve spending more money or consuming more time, preloved is the low-hanging fruit we can all enjoy today. Look out for a quality-assured platform and you can’t go wrong .

(Komal Hiranandani is founder of the preloved fashion social enterprise Dolce Vee. The Calculator statistics referenced above are from the Dolce Vee Environmental Footprint Calculator, built in partnership with the Centre for Environmental Research and Education. )