The plus-size problem with thrifting
Claudia is a 21-year-old plus-size student who loves fashion, and finds great joy in expressing herself through clothing. Claudia, like many other plus-sized students, often feels that fast-fashion is the only option left, saying “it tends to be a lot cheaper and much more accessible for me, particularly when women my age are expected to keep up with trends that change from week to week”.
In a modern society, we’re encouraged more than ever to reduce our carbon footprint. This includes pulling away from consuming fast-fashion and making a conscious effort to shop sustainably. The fashion industry is the second largest polluter in the world, just behind the oil industry. It’s impact on our environment is catastrophic: water pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, waste accumulation and rainforest destruction are just some of the crises that are exacerbated by our obsession with clothes. This tends to promote guilt and shame around shopping fast-fashion, understandably. After having a kōrero with several plus-sized students, it was clear that defining factors of continuing to shop fast-fashion were accessibility, price, and keeping up with the trends.
ACCESSIBILITY:
Fast-fashion is incredibly convenient. It’s accessible online at our fingertips and is generally easy to order. While people present op-shopping as a more environmentally and ethically friendly alternative, this just isn’t always possible for plus-size people to engage in. Most of the time when there is a limited stock of plus-size options available, they tend to be snatched up by smaller people looking for an ‘oversized fit’, even though there’s so many other options available to them in store. Op shops are also becoming heavily gentrified, particularly in Welly’s CBD, which further limits the options. Claudia says, “There’s nothing I’d like to do more than go thrifting for my whole wardrobe, but that isn’t sustainable or even possible for plus-sized people.”
For plus-size people, it’s extremely rare to walk into a physical store and find our size in anything. There is NOTHING more we’d love than to walk into any store and know our size will be stocked. But sadly, this just isn’t the case. While many brands are striving to become more sustainable, they typically aren’t very size-inclusive and don’t cater to us. It’s much easier to find accessible clothes through bigger corporations, due to them having more money to produce an abundance of affordable, trendy clothes in our size.
As one student, Nancy, notes, “Many clothing stores are becoming environmentally friendly, however, most of them are not size inclusive. So where else are we going to shop?” Unlike straight-sized people, we can’t just wander into any shop of the street and purchase something instantly. The majority of us rely on online shopping for our clothes, as these fast-fashion brands provide a bigger range of sizes to fit us. We often don’t get the chance to try on our clothes before purchasing either, we just have to trust that the size we’ve picked is going to be the right one.
PRICE:
Clothes shopping as a student, at any size, puts a dent in our very bare bank accounts. For plus-size students, this is one of the leading factors as to why we shop fast fashion. While there are a couple sustainable brands here in New Zealand that cater to a large range of sizes (Friday Flamingo, Ruby & Rain, etc), their prices are not affordable for students. As a slow-fashion brand, it’s obvious as to why their prices are steep, but it does make it harder for plus-size students to shop sustainably. Therefore, we turn to fast fashion. Shein, Boohoo, Pretty Little Thing, Missguided: it’s all accessible AND in the typical price range for students.
Student Fenella says that price is the biggest barrier for her: “There’s a couple NZ brands like Friday Flamingo and they have some cute stuff, but the prices are so so high. Their prices are totally understandable but it really isn’t affordable, especially for students. I can’t think of any other things that would hold me back!”
So yes, there is a small selection of slow-fashion brands we could choose to shop with that would fit us. But on a student budget? This is very unlikely. And again, there’s the risk of having to shop these slow-fashion brands online and not physically. Purchasing fast-fashion items and not having them fit isn’t terrible, as the prices are usually quite cheap and it doesn’t feel like you’ve wasted a lot of money. But, if we were to shop from a slow fashion brand and splurge on an item for it not to fit us, it can be incredibly frustrating. As Claudia summarises, “When you can’t just pop into any store, it changes your perspective on how you spend your money.”
TRENDS/STYLES:
A majority of slow fashion plus-size brands assume that if you’re plus-size, this means you want to hide your body. They think we all “want to cover up, hide our stomach rolls, etc, and make baggy clothes with no shape, when that’s not the case for many of us,” Fenella laments. This is an incredibly damaging stereotype that perpetuates fatphobic ideas that plus-size bodies should be hidden. Some of us are very comfortable showing skin, which is hard to do when there’s a lack of clothing in our size that allows us to do this. One student, Katherine, notes: “We are told that we should look and dress a certain way in order to ‘fit in’ by depicting these ideals that are communicated to us. This is something that needs to change.”
Again, this is where fast-fashion comes to our rescue. A large range of styles are provided that allows us to keep up with the latest trends, which is often a pressure that society feels everyone must live up to. Fast-fashion gives us the cute trends that many plus-size slow fashion brands don’t want to provide, because they want us to ‘hide’ or ‘flatter’ our bodies. “Not all of us want to shop City Chic or Torrid, and most plus-size ranges are boring and plain,” Fenella says.
A lot of the plus-size brands provided to us are not in the best interests of young people. Take K&K for example – their clothing is primarily designed with adult women in mind. For teenagers and young adults who want something to go clubbing in, we have to take our search to the internet.
Overall, plus-size students know the costs of our consumerism. As Nancy says, “I mean, we get the cute fits, but I do feel guilty for contributing to an industry that is one of the world’s biggest polluters.” But, fast-fashion truly does feel like the only option for the majority of us due to these three reasons. Before you lecture a plus-size person on how they’re a terrible person for shopping from Shein, please take the time to educate yourself and become aware on how the fashion industry doesn’t cater to us, especially slow-fashion brands. I hope to see a world in which sustainable fashion becomes more accessible and affordable for plus-size bodies, and doesn’t make us feel that the only clothes we should wear are ones that completely hide our body. But, until then, this is our reality.