In the past decade or 15 years, small details that used to be common have become scarce: darts, pockets, proper seams. Shoulders hang strangely and more complex cuts, such as bias cuts, are a rarity. Buttons dangle loosely, as if the items they're cursorily attached to aren't worth hanging on to, which they probably aren't, as most materials are cheap and synthetic, bobbling and fading easily. Everything just feels so ... rushed.
By tagging clothes, the Changing Markets Foundation followed a skirt handed in to H&M in London's Oxford Street in 2022, and found that it travelled 15,467 miles around the world, through a processing facility in the United Arab Emirates, only to be dumped in Bamako, Mali, five months later.
I've almost completely eliminated it from my life, and with very little effort. I've always tried to buy ethically and, in 2013, the Rana Plaza factory disaster in Bangladesh underlined that commitment. But the aforementioned decline in quality has also coincided with me entering my 30s. I know what suits me, value quality, and my head is far less likely to be turned by passing trends.
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