I’m joining the Write 31 Days Challenge hosted by Crystal Stine to get my blog juices flowing and chronicle my Wardrobe Fast journey. You can find the first post in the series here.
Day 3
Top: Thrifted…not even sure of the brand
Jeans: Also thrifted…also not sure of the brand and too lazy to take them off to look.
(Also too lazy to take a legit picture, but I’m enjoying that book!)
My #2 reason for buying better is the environment–which also goes back to my #1 reason, which is the people making my clothes.
When God told Adam and Eve to “subdue the earth,” I doubt he meant build a whole bunch of factories to pump out stuff nobody needs and fill all the rivers and air with toxic chemicals and waste.
That’s not a deep, exegetical reading of the passage; it’s just a hunch.
(Movie still from the documentary RiverBlue, courtesy of EcoWatch)
Where environmental law is slack, business takes full advantage. The photo above came from the same article that said this:
In the opening scene of the new documentary RiverBlue, deep magenta wastewater spills into a river in China as the voice of fashion designer and activist Orsola de Castro can be heard saying “there is a joke in China that you can tell the ‘it’ color of the season by looking at the color of the rivers.”
Imagine if your drinking water, bathing water, and wash water all came from a river that looked like this. Imagine a river that looked worse (don’t worry; they’re out there).
I could say so much more, show you so many more pictures. There’s so much that it becomes depressing. Friend, this is not subduing the earth; this is tyrannizing it.
My jeans (all of them…and most of my wardrobe, in fact) are my little sliver of rebellion against this mess. They’re used. Instead of coming directly to me from a factory near a river like this, they came from somebody else’s closet.
Yes, before that person’s closet, they probably came from a factory with a river like this nearby. I’m hard on jeans. Apparently, I have super friction thighs (TMI, sorry), so I put holes in jeans really quickly. With my current budget, I can’t justify buying new, ethically-made jeans. I’m just not there yet.
But I can buy used and only buy what I need. It’s not enough. No one person’s efforts are enough. But it’s what I can do right now, so that’s the plan for right now.
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