Melissa Carton can count on one hand how many pieces of new furniture she owns.
In her Drimnagh home in Dublin, the visual artist has decorated her place with preloved items – some free, while others were sourced cheaply in a thrift store. Just three items were bought as new.
“Looking around my sittingroom, everything but the sofa and TV were either second-hand or free,” she says. “The only other thing that was new was my bed, and that was after using a wooden bed given to me by a relative, which lasted for ages.”
Carton, who is 35, believes her appreciation for other people’s cast-offs stems from growing up in a home where making, repairing and handing down clothes was the norm, placing a value on what you have rather than what you want.
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“I lived with my grandmother and we only had her widow’s pension, so there wasn’t a lot of disposable income,” she says.
“If I wanted something, I saved my pocket money whenever I got some to get it, but most of the time I would make my own things. My aunts had worked in sewing factories when they were younger, so that skill was a big part of my life that has continued into my adult life. Second-hand clothing or hand-me-downs from family members was the way it was.”
Carton is one of a growing global movement of people who consciously seek out the old over the new when it comes to dressing themselves or decorating their homes. “Mindful consumption” or “the age of deconsumption” are labels attributed to those turning their backs on disposable and throwaway products, in a bid to live more sustainably and do better by the environment. In short, buy less, use less and waste less.
Orla Martin is a 26-year-old primary schoolteacher from Cabra, Dublin, who has turned her love of second-hand clothes from charity shops into a personal shopping business for preloved-only garments.
“‘Preloved styling by Orla’ started on TikTok, asking people what items they wanted me to source from charity shops for them, but I would also style the item for them and create look books,” she says. “An Post got on to me about their boxes being sustainable, so the item is not only preloved, but the packaging is environmentally friendly too.
“I love fashion but money was always an issue, and I never wanted something that wasn’t unique so the charity shops were a big draw. But a friend really educated me on sustainability and that has become a main part of all of this. You’re giving used clothes a new life and you’re taking away the stress of charity shops, where things can be all over the place and you might not find what you want.”
While such anticonsumerism crusades are commendable, the practice of consciously reducing one’s consumption of material goods could prove bootless when going up against the giant powers of fast fashion, namely Chinese shopping sites such as Shein and Temu.
With US president Donald Trump’s elimination of the de minimis loophole – where parcels under $800 could enter the US tariff-free – the ecommerce giants have been forced to hike up prices in their biggest market by as much as 145 per cent. But this still leaves a $2 T-shirt within an affordable price range at $4.90.
It also means European customers – and there are many, with 130 million active users for Shein and 92 million for Temu – are the new favourite children, bombarded in recent months with even more ads and coupon deals while US customers grow accustomed to their new norm on imports.
The EU’s trade chief Maroš Šefćović announced in May that the EU is preparing its own war on low-value packages by imposing a €2 flat fee that would remove the customs-free status of packages worth less than €150, but it has yet to materialise. Figures show 12 million low-value items come into Europe each day, amounting to 4.6 billion consignments under €150 in 2024 alone.
[ US shoppers ditch Shein and Temu as Trump closes tax loopholeOpens in new window ]
France is leading the charge against the behavioural and environmental effects of inexpensive mass-market clothing. In June it passed a Bill to target “ultra-fast fashion” with the introduction of eco-taxes, ad bans and mandatory sustainability disclosures.
The Bill, which has been criticised for putting only Shein and Temu in the “ultra-fast fashion” category, but not high-street labels such as Zara and H&M, can apply taxes of €5 per item, and includes a ban on advertising for these brands along with sanctions for influencers who promote them online.
As France aims to bid adieu to social media feeds flooded with “haul culture” from such cheap brands, some European countries, including Ireland, are calling on Shein to rectify practices on its platform that potentially breach EU consumer law.
As the problematic effects of fast fashion rattle on – not least including unethical labour practices – there is a concerted effort to inform consumers about the consequences of such shopping behaviours. In June the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), published a 2024 nationwide survey that gathered insights on sustainable fashion practices.
Findings show that one in four adults buy clothes they never wear or end up wearing only a few times, 46 per cent of people buy clothes frequently, and, while 40 per cent of people often donate clothing and other textiles to charity shops, only 20 per cent bought a second-hand item in their last three purchases.
“Ultimately, this is about durability and buying items for the long term and caring for items, in how we wash and repair, can increase the life of a textile, and that reduces the environmental impact of an item,” says David Flynn, director of the EPA.
“It’s not necessarily about where you buy the clothes from but how long will they last, what can we do to care for them, and from the EPA’s point of view, how can the impact on the environment be lessened? But also, at the end of life, where do these clothes go? We’re finding that a lot of textiles are ending up as waste; they are just going into people’s black bin – almost 10 per cent of black bin waste are textiles. These could be donated to charities, or there’s lots of new online platforms where people can put their own clothes up for sale or to swap.
“But data from the survey also shows that people do care, and 87 per cent agree that it’s important that the clothes they buy are produced to last. About 75 per cent of people feel that the clothes are grown and made by workers that are paid a fair living wage. But when we look at data around climate change impact on clothes, you can see that people aren’t making the connection between buying clothes that are never worn and the impact that has on climate change.
“Only 40 per cent of people see that link. So I guess the crux of the issue is that people care but they are not quite making that connection between the consumption patterns and that environmental impact. And then, separately, it is about having options so that when people are finished with clothes that they are collected, sorted and reused so it brings them back into the circular economy.”
It doesn’t have to mean no satisfying shopping spree either. Recommerce, as it is termed, is proving more of a hit than ever before among conscious shoppers. Vinted, the second-hand fashion marketplace, is already gaining popularity in Ireland, alongside Depop. In France, Vinted now sells the most clothing in terms of sales volume, outranking Amazon.
In Ireland ventures encouraging consumers to embrace the idea of preloved place an emphasis on repairing items, and learning how to keep and mind textiles is on the increase.
Mary Fleming founded Change Clothes, a nonprofit community-powered textile hub in 2017, after a visit to Kenya brought her face to face with mountains of discarded clothes and textiles imported largely from developed countries, and left to rot in giant piles, leading to all sorts of environmental and health risks.
“What I was seeing was the kind of textile mountains you would see in the media, although we weren’t so aware of them back then,” she says. “We were all shopping mindlessly back then, and I was too. I was shopping every week and didn’t care until I saw those mountains for myself. When I got home I tried to think how I could help people be more sustainable without being preachy about it, and I had heard about swap shops, so I started running one of them.
There’s a sense of community around it as well because we get people to come in for classes and to learn a new skill
— Mary Fleming of Change Clothes
“I was living in Bray at the time, and the local Tidy Towns gave me the platform to run clothes swaps, and they were really fun. But then I got bogged down in my day job in the corporate world, and moved back to Crumlin, where I’m from, in 2022, and thought I’d pick it up again, so Change Clothes Crumlin then came about and it went really well because we had swaps, workshops and exhibitions, and now three years later we have a base in Thomas Street.
“I think people want to do better. Because we started in a working-class place in Crumlin, we got an insight into how sustainable fashion seemed out of reach for some people. Once we made it the norm that you could walk in anywhere and buy preloved clothing or learn about sewing, then people were willing to take part.”
Fleming, who is 35, says growing up in the 1990s meant shopping regularly was something people did on the weekends with friends or family. Change Clothes allows people to book slots online for when they can come in to swap clothes – each shopper can bring up to five items of their own to donate. Tokens are distributed based on the quality of the garment – one for high street, two for a slightly higher end of fashion, and three for vintage or items made from natural materials.
“Then you take your new clothes home and you can buy membership or pay €6 when you come to swap,” she says. “The swap is about 10 per cent of what we do now because the big focus is on repair and production from scrap textiles, because we’re seeing clothes banks overflowing with crap. And what are we going to do with that because we can’t keep exporting abroad, so what we’re trying to do is create products from that scrap and work and train long-term unemployed people in the process.
“There’s a sense of community around it as well because we get people to come in for classes and to learn a new skill, but also just talking to people who might be at different stages of their sustainability journeys. We have hand-sewing, embroidery and monthly sewing machine classes.”
For her part, Melissa Carton set up a Dublin 8 and Dublin 12 Pay It Forward Freecycle page on Facebook in 2017, as a way to allow people to find new homes for unwanted, but perfectly useful, items of furniture.
“It took off, especially during lockdown, and has over 4,000 members now,” she says. “I actually think a lot of the time the second-hand pieces are of better quality and longer lasting than if you pick it up from somewhere like Ikea. It also gives people a sense of community and gives a piece that is no longer wanted a new home somewhere else. It’s in my nature now to keep an eye out for something that I can use in my home or my art studio rather than think of buying anything new.”
