No month, these days, is allowed to pass without its own good cause, and in September – fittingly the month that sees the biggest issues of fashion magazines – the focus is on our insatiable appetite for new clothes. Oxfam’s annual Second Hand September campaign calls on consumers to buy only used clothing for 30 days.
“Not only are you helping to keep clothes out of the landfill and refresh your wardrobe without costing the earth,” reads the campaign’s mission statement, “you’re also helping to raise money to help people beat poverty.”
He suggests that images of the month’s favorite purchases should be posted online, using the hashtag #SecondhandSeptember.
The face of this year’s campaign is award-winning actress Felicity Jones, whose roles span a decade as Emma Grundy, the culmination of the Archers’ most sultry love triangle, and Jyn Erso in the Star Wars prequel Rogue One. A lifelong fan of charity shops, Jones loves “the mystery of thrift shopping and the narrative behind the clothes”.
But as we search for used rails this September, doing our bit for sustainable style, we might question the campaign’s claim that such a purchase is “kinder to people and the planet”. Next to good quality donated clothing, it is common to find clothing from fast fashion labels that sell for almost as much as when they were new and are often destined to join bundles of unsold clothing. sent abroad to developing countries.
or Telegraph the investigation in Ghana, the biggest importer of such clothing, found waste clothes with labels from charity shops in poorly managed dumping sites scattered across Jamestown Beach, where local fishermen haul clothes in their nets.
As hashtags go, “#SustainableishStyle” lacks the “amazing feel-good factor” promised by Oxfam’s campaign column, but it’s closer to the truth. The story of the clothes that fascinate many of us does not end when we get rid of them. It may go on to please someone else, or it may become part of an ugly story on a distant beach.
Access for all to places of entertainment is, of course, one thing. Now, spurred on by activists like comedian Sofie Hagen, fat accessibility is joining the list. Venues such as the Gulbenkian Theater in Canterbury and the Old Fire Station in Oxford offer online details of seat sizes and seats without armrests.
Some of our most beloved actors have been generously proportioned – the late Richard Griffiths, Hattie Jacques and Orson Welles – and it was once universally accepted that opera singers would be bigger than the tubercular heroines they embodied. One standard for the stage and another for the audience would be clearly unfair, especially when government statistics show that the majority of the UK population (62.8 percent in 2020) is overweight or obese.
Amidst the festivities, however, spare a thought for the slim minority. Beatrix Potter’s tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse features a house-proud mouse whose house is invaded by an oversized toad, Mr. Jackson. She finds him, to her surprise, “sitting all over a little rocking chair.” Anyone who has ever taken an armless seat on a plane, train or theater next to a Mr. Jackson will struggle to suppress the thought that Mrs. Tittlemouse, c’est moi.
