Daily outfit: Abstract

Sweater: Hand me down
Jeans: Garage sale
Shoes: Steve Madden
Purse: Vintage



"Going green" has become a marketing campaign. Maybe you purchased an eco friendly cotton t-shirt but it's still something that was recently produced and lets face it, the world is full of already made t-shirts. I found out that Patagonia, a clothing company focused on outdoor wear, started a campaign to buy and sell their used gear via ebay. Hows that for a green campaign? Thats another reason why I love thrifting and buying vintage. I care about fashion, and dressing well, and there aren't many other options for being sustainable. The ready to wear fashion world is about consumerism, you can slap as much green font as you want on your marketing campaign, but it's still about replacing perfectly good clothes with new ones a few times a year to stay "on trend".
         Fashion blogging has it's awesome examples of sustainable fashion practices, like clothing swaps to meet the need of showing off ways to style new garments to your readers, without having to go buy something from the mall. Or showcasing independent designers. Sure, buying new clothes is fun, fitting in is desirable, but there needs to be a point where we take some time to think about where our products come from. I'm not trying to preach, because this is something I have to make myself conscious of as well. Being self employed means very little disposable income, so I can never go buy the Jeffery Campbells shoes every other blogger is wearing so I can feel like I appear "fashion forward" to my readers, and my situation doesn't afford me the ability to support the independent designers that deserve it. Instead what happens is when I do go buy some item from the mall (rare, luckily), it ends up being cheap materials and probably from some country with cheap labor. Frankly I just want to be backwards at this point. I am sick of that little twinge in the back of my head that tells me I want something I don't need because I see it all over the place and I feel like it's an important aspect of being a successful blogger, or you know, a successful human! It's ingrained in our brains as consumers to buy, and new things make us happy, and I am trying very hard to break myself of the destructive side of that and replace it entirely with thrifting, vintage, and swapping clothes. I feel like I am being manipulated by a ghost, how did these thoughts end up in my head to begin with and why can't I just make them disappear? I'm clearly at that point where I'm figuring out how I can carry out whats important to me in the things that I do. I've been thrifting for 10 years, and I try to do it by selling vintage and supporting myself with something that I believe is fun, and sustainable, but I often forget that's enough. Good grief, I just wanted to write about patagonia, but I ended up with this novel. Soo, I will just exit with a grin.