Review: How to Break Up with Fast Fashion by Lauren Bravo
Picture the scene: Topshop changing rooms. Open the tatty purple curtain and you find me, cowering in my pants. The top looks fine, I think under the unforgiving bright lights. I’ll get it. Just get me out of here. I rush to the tills, fraught with pre-party anxiety at the prospect of looking like a sack of potatoes.
I wore the top. I consequently felt as bad as I did in the changing rooms. It resided in the back of my wardrobe until my next big ‘clear out’. At that point, I’d forgotten it existed – along with multitudes of forgotten Bardot tops and a pair of lacy pants I wore one time in a bid to convince myself that there were other comfy underwear styles besides high-waisted granny pants (hint: there’s not). Repeat this cycle six months to a year later. Cry a bit. This is the cycle of ‘fast fashion’.
Enter Lauren Bravo. She, too, knows this mess. How to Break Up with Fast Fashion is a brilliant half-memoir, half-manual for freeing yourself from this tangle. For those unfamiliar with the term, Bravo lays out a no-nonsense, straightforward definition. ‘[Fast fashion] is characterised by two things: low prices and relentless pace. It cycles through trends so rapidly, that transience has become almost the defining trend of a generation.’ It’s the neon mesh dress you bought on ASOS for a fiver and puked on at the club. It’s the crop top you bought on a whim from Zara and promptly relocated to the depths of your wardrobe after it destroyed your armpit skin on holiday. It’s the wearable equivalent to a boy that sends you 3am ‘you up?’ texts. We need to break up with fast fashion, Bravo says – and I tell you what, I’m ready to do some dumping.
Bravo explains why we need this breakup, and the book begins with hard-hitting statistics. The book is ready to bring to light the horrors of the garment industry – the human cost of cheap, mass-produced clothes and fabrics, the CO2 it produces, the aeons it takes for our clothes to decompose. Surprisingly, this bleakness is not useless fear-mongering. ‘[The garment industry] is huge and unwieldy, full of so many contradictions and complexities,’ she writes. Rather than frightening us with these statistics, Bravo wants us to understand them: she guides us through these complexities with an awareness of their nuances and grey areas.
This being said, Bravo is unafraid to hold us accountable. ‘We can only do the best we can do, but most of us can probably do better than we are,’ she tells us. Our behaviours are gently unpicked without harshness or judgment, in Bravo’s friendly, warm style of writing. ‘Guilt and shame, while they can be catalysts for change, often use up far too much energy to be helpful […] you change more with optimism and enthusiasm than you do with self-flagellation,’ she writes. In a world of finger-pointing and cancel culture, it is refreshing to be afforded the space to learn and grow while still acknowledging our part in the problem.
At some points, I personally felt a little less encouraged. While there is plus-size representation, charity shopping is celebrated throughout the book, which can be a challenge for plus-sized people. Plus-size fashion blogger Marie Southard Ospina (@mariesouthardospina on Instagram) has highlighted the lack of bigger sizes in charity shops. ‘I know so many fat people who would love to be more ethical in their shopping habits […] but when many charity shops won’t keep stock in our sizes, and many vintage shops won’t search for anything above a 14, and when larger sustainable brands forget fat people exist altogether, what are we supposed to do?’ I know the frustration of going into charity shops and finding little choice in my size. Bravo does acknowledge the thin privilege in other areas of fashion, such as vintage shopping and easily accessible dressmaking patterns. She also includes some valuable resources for those on the hunt for plus-size vintage. So altogether, promising – but a further awareness would mean people of all sizes could benefit from the book as much as your typical sizes 8-18.
The book is bursting with practical advice on washing, fixing and altering (and what to tell yourself when you find yourself in H&M, hormonal and hungry for a bargain). This is the encouraging, rallying push that’s needed alongside the earlier bleakness of the book. My favourite piece of advice comes from Bravo’s mum: ‘Before you can buy something, you must name three different things you already own that will go with it.’ We can still have fun with fashion. We can still buy things, it’s just about being more mindful. As Bravo acknowledges multiple times, what we wear is part of our identity.
‘I want this book to be a companion, not a critic,’ says Bravo in the introduction, and that’s exactly what it is: in between her hilarious personal anecdotes, the worrying statistics and the hard truths we need to hear, there’s sequins of hope scattered throughout and the conviction that fashion can still bring us joy. I know I won’t find that behind a Topshop curtain. It’s time I stopped looking for happiness behind one.
Written by Molly Cheek
Molly works in administration for her local town council. She has a degree in English Literature from Cardiff University, primarily studying 19th-century literature and women writers of the period. She writes poetry and songs, and enjoys walking around Bristol, Somerset and beyond.