An Aesthete's Journal: The Aftermath of the Haul Culture

Despondence can be drawn from a multitude of things around us including expectations of how humanity was supposed to uphold the sanity of our planet getting thrashed. Generation after generation meditations of how moral values are vacillating with time have circulated, yet, one of them wasn’t supposed to change, ‘Valuing our possessions’.

Fashion is an industry that has thrived on our fickle nature of acknowledging the exquisite beauty of things for short periods of times, ‘only’, for decades. With small worlds in our hands having crafted our modern perspective of things more than ever our ideas of beauty have also adopted some of our ideals.

Capitalism has many conventional objectionable points trailing it, yet, one mosaic among them has been frequently tried to be ghosted, ‘the mindless consumption it bestows upon us’. Figuratively, this is not a problem faced by the wealthy only. Middle class as well as lower middle class people have also been leeched into a void of purchasing behaviours to appease their social status. This has been stretched to a tower where people are willing to either throw away their resources on petty clothes and accessories or buy cheap but fake copies of the items just for societal validation.

Accessibility to platforms originally made to foster creativity and social interaction including, ‘YouTube’, ‘Instagram’, ‘Facebook’, ‘Pinterest’, et cetera have yet to police us from shattering micro-trends. As per multiple surveys and observations the width of the average trend-cycle has been stunted to a mere three months from the former two to three decades. Stigmatization associated with repeating outfits online even when we do the same in offline is uncontrollable. Glamorization of the portrayed lives of celebrities and idols who actually wear sponsored fashion is also a cherry atop the cake for a bird already strenuous to shoot.

This vicious cycle of purchasing and throwing away is environmentally degrading as well as unethical because it promotes workers operating in factories to work under inhumane conditions while we enjoy a fame that only lasts for thirty seconds to a minute on social media platforms.

This needs to change if we want ourselves to not be responsible for our own extinction and that of others. To end the endless talks about child labour and poor working conditions we need, ‘Sustainable Fashion’.

Sustainable fashion if taken to its constituent terms means a form of fashion that can sustain. It is significant to not only sustain the lives of our clothes but also the bodies that wear them. There are always two sides of a coin. The first side of this fashion is that it barricades us from the aftermath of the potential hazards associated with hauls and fast fashion.

New brands have started to rise across the globe. These are values with strong values of environmental sensitivity engraved into them. It was believed that there’s no more scope of entrepreneurial growth in anything but renewable fuels, electric automobiles, technology and data science (and associated fields). Amongst them a new child was born. Brands including ‘Thread Up’, ‘Patagonia’, et cetera as well as locally thriving thrift stores and second hand shops have seen massive growth with awareness about them being circulated in most institutions. Practices conventionally associated primarily with Asian and African households of wearing clothes belonging to siblings or borrowing them from friends should also be de-stigmatised if we wish to see a bright future.

The other side of the coin is many current brands are not diverse. Brands heavily associated with sustainability are seen to not include representative workers for certain communities (i.e. are racist or homophobic) as well as a not borrowing sizes of a standard (i.e. conventionally skinny or fat) excluding a humongous sect of people. They do not aim at the right population and are often beyond the pockets of majority people. They do not market themselves too well and are hence viewed with doubtful eyes by most. We need to strive for some changes in our communities as well if we wish to adopt sustainable fashion. Children as well as adults are criticised for practicing the behaviour of wearing second hand clothes are bullied and are often pronounced poor. The materials from which ‘Sustainable’ clothes are made still have a negative impact on nature as they too are made using huge volumes of water. We have to draw some changes onto this immediately and invest in uplifting into making our planet more environmentally prosperous.

Sustainability is not just a practice it’s a mindset that is innate and the very foundation of our civilization. We have lost its essence among the waves of time but now is the time to integrate it again in ourselves. We have to cultivate a spirit of active sensitivity and empathy for the mother who birthed millions but got the love of only a few and we need to do it now.

“The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.”

-Chinese Proverb