Can DIY Clothes Unravel Fast Fashion’s Climate Disasters? – Dame Magazine

When Helena Stark decided to crochet her own wedding dress two months before her ceremony, she knew it would be a time crunch. She planned to chronicle her exhausting journey on her TikTok account (@squish.and.co), where she creates crochet and knitting content for half a million followers. 

“Because I am the queen of making rational decisions that are good for my mental health, I will be crocheting my wedding dress,” Stark posted at the end of May, smiling and throwing her hands to her face. From buying the yarn—which she ran out of pretty quickly in the process—to sketching and crocheting the dress row by row, she finished just in time to walk down the aisle to marry her partner in a completely unique gown. 

“It was just such an important time in my life and I have such a passion for making things,” Stark said. “I knew that I could do it if I put my wrist into it, and I wanted the experience of doing it. I wanted it to be special. Also the thought of shopping for bridal attire was terrifying, and this meant I didn’t have to do that.”

Stark is one of many creators on TikTok and Instagram who are posting content about making their own clothes as an alternative to fast fashion and hyper-consumerism. The fashion industry is harmful for so many reasons. For one, social-justice activists have consistently called out the fashion industry for its lack of diversity—in particular its exclusion of fat bodies, Black and brown bodies, and disabled bodies. For another, fast fashion is responsible for 8 to 10 percent of global carbon emissions and nearly 20 percent of wastewater, using up more energy than aviation and shipping combined, at a time when scientists are warning of an upcoming fatal climate catastrophe. 

And then there’s the issue of the industry’s reliance on exploitative labor, which allows it to cater to the ever-changing social-media trends that change almost every week. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, fast fashion and the fickleness of online trends have increased the number of clothes consumers buy and decreased the number of times these garments are worn. On average, consumers are buying 60 percent more clothes than they did in 2000, and wearing them half as often. 

For artisans like Stark, making your own clothes and sharing the process of it online is a way to push back against the fast-fashion industry. Instead of buying something disposable and forgettable from a fast-fashion brand like Shein—a company known for exploiting its workers, who work 17-hour shifts, make as little as 0.03694 cents per item, and are docked pay for any mistakes—she can design bespoke garments that are meaningful, enduring, ethically sourced and are intended to be worn repeatedly. 

“I love the idea that I can make my own clothes because I find it really hard—I think every woman does—to find clothes that actually fit you and look good on you,” Stark said, adding that she started making this kind of content in 2022. “And [clothes] that you feel like yourself in that are ethical—and that was something that I could do with crochet. I could make something just for me, or for somebody that I love, that is going to stand the test of time and is a handmade piece.”

While time is a finite resource for most of us, artisans like Stark use their social-media reach to demonstrate the lengthy process of making a single garment, which becomes educational for her viewers. By watching the process, we learn each step of making a sweater or a dress without having to make it ourselves. What goes into making the sleeves? How long does it take to crochet or knit a specific stitch all across the body of a sweater? How does crochet lace come together and how long does it take? And when we put that all together, can we say the clothes we buy are fairly compensating the people who make them?

“Once I started to make [clothes], I realized, Oh, every single thing that you buy takes time,” said Stark. “And if you’re buying something that costs $9, that means that the person who made it is clearly not getting paid well.” By filming her process, Stark shares this perspective with people who haven’t thought about what goes into making clothes, which is a kind of consciousness that the majority of consumers are cut off from in modern capitalism.

To demonstrate this more thoroughly, Stark produces a series where she crochets fast-fashion knits that become social-media trends, like a dress worn by Taylor Swift in July that sold out after a paparazzi photo went viral. That dress came from the Australian fast-fashion brand Vrg Grl, retailing at $34. Stark re-created it, accounting for materials and timing her hours of work so she could track how much the labor of making the garment would be worth. The first half of the dress, which she has yet to finish due to a tendon injury, took 11 hours to make, bringing the labor cost for making it ethically to around $80—that is, if the artisan was being paid minimum wage in the U.S., almost triple the cost of the garment. 

“The message brings visibility into the process because I truly think people don’t know,” she said. “When I see somebody out and about wearing crochet, I can tell that it’s crochet and I can tell you didn’t make that, I don’t really blame them because how are they supposed to know? So if my videos can make at least a few more people be knowledgeable about that process,  I think that’s a win. Now I get DMs of people saying, ‘Is this fast fashion?’ Or ‘I saw this in the store, is it ethical?’ At least people are asking and thinking about it.”

This approach demonstrates the absurdity of fast fashion and micro trends. Today, fast-fashion companies follow the model of 52 micro seasons to produce new collections—instead of producing four seasonal collections, they produce a new collection every week. Watching Stark’s process illustrates how fast and untenable this fashion cycle is, and why it is impossible to have good labor practices at this pace. It makes it easier to understand why many garment workers—usually located in Global South countries (in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean), Asia (except Israel, Japan, and South Korea) and Oceania (except Australia and New Zealand)—work up to 16 hours a day, seven days a week, with only 2% of 75 million factory workers making a living wage worldwide.

***

Brooklyn Karasack makes two types of videos on her TikTok account. The first is the step-by-step process of each outfit she creates, each of them crafted from clothes she bought at thrift shops or picked up at her grandmother’s house. In the second type, which is more algorithm friendly, she demonstrates how she reinvented the clothes she thrifted, with seamless transitions between old and new outfits. Karasack, who is based in St. Petersburg, Florida, started filming process videos in 2021 so she could teach her friend how to sew. Today, Karasack has over 300,000 followers.

“I was just talking [my friend] what I was doing and that was while I was learning, too,” Karasack said. “I’ve really just been teaching myself as I go, so while it is a tutorial, it’s also about the process—This is what I’m going to do, we’ll see if it works out. I’m also trying to empower other people to try things out and learn how to sew. It doesn’t need to be anything where you’re going to school for it or really even taking lessons—just messing around with it on your own, you can learn how to do these things.”

Historically, people made their own clothes because purchasing them was too expensive. In the 1980s, the production of clothes shifted to countries in the Global South where labor costs were lower, thus making buying clothes more affordable for people in the Global North. While Global North folks buy fast fashion, garment workers are stuck in unsafe, exploitative labor conditions as they have very little upward mobility. A 2019 report by Oxfam found that 0% of Bangladeshi and 1% of Vietnamese garment workers earned a living wage, with 1 in 4 Bangladeshi garment workers disclosing some form of abuse. For them, our ability to get clothes fast is a way to barely support themselves—probably for the rest of their lives. 

In defiance of this, Karasack is part of a growing movement of people who are returning to this crafting tradition. According to the Craft Industry Alliance, one million people—most of them women—started sewing from 2014 to 2017, bringing the number of those who enjoyed making their clothes to 7.7 million. By turning woven pillows into tote bags and sweatshirts, and dresses into two-piece rave outfits, Karasack recycles materials that would otherwise end up in a landfill. Occasionally, she sells her designs under her Controlled Chaos brand. What’s striking about Karasack’s creations is their originality: Recently, she turned a cream dress into a dragonfly top. These designs cannot be bought anywhere else, they reflect Karasack’s personal style and go against any micro trend that might circulate social media. For her, making clothes has been instrumental in developing her eccentric sense of style, something fast fashion does not encourage in its consumers.

“It’s so beneficial to your mental state to express yourself in those ways,” Karasack said. “I think that people get too tied down to what’s on trend. People should wear whatever they want to wear. If you look at the thrift stores, you can find things outside of the trends, and it promotes so much more individuality and being able to express yourself—not to the style that the fashion industry is telling you to follow.”

Karasack’s unique style emphasizes something else we’ve lost to fast fashion: the ability to really express yourself through your wardrobe. Of course, this is still possible with one’s personal curation of clothes from your favorite store, but Karasack’s designs make viewers wonder: What would I create if I was able to make my own? What designs are we missing out on because the way we dress is dictated by the fashion industry?  

Her approach aligns with a sustainability solution that climate-change studies and activists have been suggesting: creating a circular economy, a model of production and consumption that consists of reusing, sharing, repairing, and recycling existing materials and products for as long as possible, and cutting down on unnecessary waste and energy use. Additionally, making her clothes with items from her grandmother’s house as well as sewing with her grandmother’s old sewing machine makes Karasack’s creations all the more meaningful. Though Karasack’s grandmother is unlikely to come to any raves with her anytime soon, the fashion influencer feels like there’s a part of her in every outfit she makes.

“Whenever I am using materials from [my grandma’s] house, it’s like a family ring. Maybe I’m bringing it to a festival but I’m [also] bringing a part of my grandma to something that I love and that I love to experience,” Karasack explained. “My grandpa, who passed away a year or two ago—I used one of his blankets to make my sister’s sweatshirts. I’ve turned some of his sweaters into a lounge set that I always wear. Those are some of my favorite things that I’ve made and I think it’s such a nice way to remember someone and bring them into parts of your life that otherwise they wouldn’t be able to be in that way.”

Professor Anna Hensley, from the University of Cincinnati, published an article for The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics about making clothes as a response to an exploitative fashion industry. She theorizes that knowing more about the garment-making process allows us to develop a sense of identity more critical of culture and the current economic framework damaging the planet and people’s lives. “[It] allows for a wider freedom of expression with regards to who you want to be because you’re not limited by what’s available,” she explained. The tactile step-by-step experience of constructing clothes can give her students—who can feel hopeless about fast fashion and its relationship to climate change—a new perspective into the plight of garment workers. 

Like Stark and Karasack, Hensley hopes these reflections lead to more ethical consumerism and that it reminds people that this conversation around fashion isn’t just centered around the horrors of capitalist exploitation and the looming threat of climate change. It can actually be fun. Which is echoed in what Karasack has said about her videos, “What I want to get across with my content is how much fun you can have with your clothing and self-expression. Just being more intentional with the things that you’re buying—buying clothes from secondhand stores and avoiding fast fashion.”

Hensley acknowledges that making your own clothes can be “too much of a reach for most people.” But what she is asking us to do is think more critically about what we buy and what we wear. “I think it’s about looking around you and just pausing, and asking: What do I want my relationship with this stuff to be?” Hensley said. “But if you learned to knit, and you made yourself a hat and a scarf and wore those for the next ten years [instead of buying] six more hats and scarves, that’s a small thing you can do. It’s really about developing a curiosity of asking: What can I do?”