In yesterday’s London TimesOnline: “Disposable Fashion: For Sale, Hardly Worn, Two Million Tonnes of Clothes.” (I found this link via Linda Grant’s The Thoughtful Dresser.) From the article:

Instead of two annual seasons for clothes - winter and summer - we are now offered, and can afford, new apparel every few weeks. We buy fresh holiday wardrobes, which we wear for a fortnight. Our style icons are celebrities who are never seen in the same outfit twice. And as our high street stores reel from the credit crunch, still we are cashing in - packing out the shops, desperate for discounted clothes.

As a result, textiles have become the fastest-growing waste product in the UK. About 74 per cent of those two million tonnes of clothes we buy each year end up in landfills, rotting slowly (or not at all) in a mass of polyester, viscose and acrylic blends.

Slow fashion has always been something Europeans excelled at — choosing high-quality, well-fitting basics to last for many years, and accessorizing them for variety and color and self-expression — and something we Americans have envied. It’s time to rediscover this approach to fashion. The TimesOnline article is a fascinating look at what happens to all the cheap, poorly made clothing that doesn’t get sold, or gets thrown away the minute it outlives its trendiness.

The environmental and social ills of the textile industry are enormous, and must be fixed, yet they are so invisible to most of us in the West that we’ve been able to ignore them and indulge an endless appetite for more clothes, helped by marketing, advertising and media that make us feel inadequate unless we can fill a closet the size of many apartments. Historically, though, the best-dressed people, the most chic and interesting and spirited, don’t dress that way.  It’s time to move toward smart, slow and sustainable fashion.