Slow Fashion Manifesto

What Is Slow Fashion?

Slow fashion, as used at Academy St. Thrift, is both a noun and an adjective—a framework we embody and a value we apply to every garment we handle.

As a noun, slow fashion refers to a justice-centered ecosystem that prioritizes environmental sustainability, ethical labor, cultural preservation, and conscious consumption. We exist within this ecosystem not as producers, but as stewards—rescuing clothing that has already been made, worn, discarded, or overlooked. Our role is to prolong its life, not restart the cycle of overproduction.

As an adjective, slow fashion reflects our approach to clothing: we prioritize secondhand and discarded pieces—including those that are new with tags—treat every garment with care, and make mindful choices about how it’s cleaned, displayed, and passed on.

Reclaiming Our Relationship with What We Wear

Slow fashion isn’t just about resisting fast fashion—it’s about reclaiming our relationship with what we wear. What this means in practice is that at Academy St. Thrift, every item on our racks has a story. Maybe it came from my own collection, worn through years of styling, teaching, and traveling. Maybe it was rescued from a rag house bin (warehouses filled with discarded clothing awaiting sorting, recycling, or disposal), or pulled from the clearance section at a major retailer at the end of the night—seconds away from being dumped, bleached, or shredded in the dumpster.

This is what slow fashion looks like in action—rescue, revival, and re-love.

Examples of Destructive Fast Fashion Practices

• Bleaching and Dumping: A KETV investigation uncovered that a publicly-traded clothing store disposed of unsold garments by saturating them with bleach before discarding them to deter dumpster divers.

• Shredding and Incineration: Brands like H&M and Burberry have been reported to destroy unsold clothing to maintain brand exclusivity. H&M was found to burn up to 12 tons of unsold garments annually, while Burberry incinerated unsold stock worth millions.

• Employee Accounts: Retail workers have reported being told to destroy unsold items by cutting, bleaching, or trashing them to prevent reselling.

  
  

Secondhand as Second Chance

The pieces we collect at Academy St. Thrift aren’t just secondhand clothes or discarded items—they’re second chances. And for every customer who steps through our door, slow fashion becomes real the moment they find a piece that speaks to them.

It's not theory. Slow fashion is the story behind a worn-in pair of boots from Italy. It’s the joy of knowing your purchase didn’t exploit another worker or harm the earth more—it gave something, instead of taking. That’s what slow fashion looks like, here, now, in our hands.

A Lifestyle of Intention

Slow fashion isn’t just a philosophy—it’s a lifestyle built on everyday choices. It’s not about perfection or luxury, but about intention. The truth is, many of us already practice slow fashion without realizing it. It shows up in the small, creative ways we extend the life of our clothes, support local makers, or resist the pressure to constantly buy new.

Here are some real-life examples:

• When you turn worn-out jeans into shorts for summer—that’s slow fashion.

• When you cut a stretched-out tee into cleaning rags—that’s slow fashion.

• When you thrift a $10–15 pair of jeans instead of spending over $100 on a new pair inflated by brand marketing—that’s slow fashion.

• When you pass down a shirt to your little cousin, or swap clothes with your best friend—that’s slow fashion.

• When you decide to wear what you already own, even if it’s not “trendy"—that’s slow fashion.

• When you crop an old hoodie into a new sweatshirt—that’s slow fashion.

• When you dye a faded dress to bring it back to life—that’s slow fashion.

  
  

Slow Fashion as Resistance

Slow fashion isn’t just a design trend. It’s a radical act of resistance.

It pushes back against a global fashion industry built on speed, disposability, and exploitation. In a world where clothing is treated as cheap and replaceable, slow fashion reminds us: real people make these clothes—people with names, families, lives, and labor that matter.

Fast fashion runs on injustice—from the fossil fuels it burns to the hands it overworks and underpays. Its legacy is everywhere: landfills overflowing with textile waste, rivers dyed with chemical runoff, and supply chains marked by modern-day slavery.

Thrift Stores as Intervention

Thrift stores are the intervention.

We stand in the gap between overconsumption and the landfill—or the shores of Ghana. As a career academic, I'm wired to look for gaps—and then ask how I can fill them with meaningful intervention. At the intersection of my work in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion administration, my faculty roles across higher education, and my lifelong love for saving and reimagining “good stuff,” I believe I’ve stumbled onto something both purposeful and practical: an intentional intervention for social justice, ecological good, and measurable progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals.

Thrift stores—since transitioning from a thrifter to a thrift shop owner—I’ve come to realize they aren’t just places to find treasures. They are deeply undervalued agents of change in a global system built on exploitation, excess, and erasure.

Rooted in Justice

Slow fashion demands we ask uncomfortable questions: Who made this? Were they paid fairly? What is the environmental cost?

It reflects what the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call for: "doing more and better with less" (United Nations, SDG 12). It recognizes that climate justice and labor justice are inseparable. And at the center of it all is dignity.

Dignity means recognizing the inherent worth of every person—regardless of their job, income, or place in the supply chain. It means no one should be harmed, humiliated, or exploited so someone else can wear a $7 t-shirt. At Academy St. Thrift, dignity looks like paying attention, honoring stories, and serving with integrity. It’s why we refuse to prioritize profit over people. Because choosing slow fashion is choosing care.

🌿 1. It Advocates for the Planet

The fashion industry produces over 92 million tons of waste annually. Fast fashion thrives on overproduction, and it shows. Landfills overflow. Rivers are polluted. Carbon emissions climb.

Slow fashion resists this cycle. It embraces natural and recycled materials. It favors quality over quantity. It promotes local production. And it slows the relentless churn of consumption. It aligns with SDG 13: Climate Action, and reminds us that small choices—when made collectively—can alter systems.

✊🏽 2. It Advances Labor Justice

Slow fashion confronts the true cost of clothing—human lives undervalued and exploited across the globe. From women and children in Global South factories to incarcerated workers in U.S. prisons and laborers in mega-prisons in El Salvador, fast fashion thrives on hidden systems of control, poverty wages, and modern-day slavery. These workers—often migrants, often silenced—are the invisible hands of global capitalism.

Slow fashion says: enough.

It demands transparency, fair wages, and dignity for all garment workers, whether they’re in a sweatshop, a subcontracted U.S. factory, or a prison sewing uniforms. It affirms that garment work is skilled labor, worthy of rights and respect—not punishment or exploitation.

This directly supports Sustainable Development Goal 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth, a global call to end forced labor, human trafficking, and all forms of modern slavery while building economies rooted in justice—not disposability.

💬 3. It Amplifies Marginalized Voices

The mainstream fashion industry rarely uplifts BIPOC, Indigenous, LGBTQ+, women-led, indie, or activist brands. Slow fashion does. It centers them. It uplifts traditional craft, cultural storytelling, and the reclamation of ancestral practices.

This work aligns with SDGs 5 and 10, which promote gender equality and reduced inequalities. It reminds us that fashion can be a tool for empowerment, not erasure.

🧠 4. It Advocates for Conscious Consumerism

Slow fashion is not about shame. It’s about awareness. About buying less, choosing well, and making our wardrobes reflect our ethics.

Conscious consumerism means asking better questions. It means repairing, swapping, thrifting, and supporting brands that share your values. SDG 12 calls us to "substantially reduce waste generation through prevention, reduction, recycling, and reuse." Slow fashion makes that actionable.

🌍 5. It Encourages Systems Change

This movement isn’t just about better clothing. It’s about rethinking how we value labor, land, and culture. It calls us to decolonize fashion, shift power back to artisans and workers, and build economic models based on reciprocity.

As SDG 17 reminds us, we need partnerships across sectors to transform systems. Slow fashion embodies this spirit—through community, solidarity, and cross-border collaboration.

Slow fashion is not the absence of style. It is style with soul. It is resistance stitched into every seam. And it reminds us that wearing our values isn't just possible—it's powerful.

So next time you dress, ask yourself: What story does this garment tell? What kind of world am I supporting when I wear it?

When you choose slow fashion, you choose justice. And that is always in style.

How Academy St. Thrift Embodies Slow Fashion

At Academy St. Thrift, we live these values every single day—we are on the streets, literally. Sourcing. Searching. Saving. We’re deep in the trenches of secondhand fashion, reclaiming items that are often just steps from the landfill.

We buy from Goodwill, Red White and Blue, local and global rag houses, in-person vintage warehouses and online warehouses, online auctions, and the basements of libraries (my all-time favorite). We’ve driven to Cambridge, Massachusetts to dig through Boston Costumes, and down to Philadelphia to sort through vintage boxes by hand.

Being a thrift store owner brings me deep joy. There’s something magical about the hunt—knowing that any day, I can go searching and find something special. Academy St. Thrift is my happy place. And because I lead with love, I serve with integrity. That’s what servant leadership looks like.

The customer always comes first. Not profit. Yes, we must pay our bills and keep the lights on, but never at the cost of another’s dignity. Our ethos is rooted in socioecological justice and sustainability. And that will never change.

I don’t yet know how to merge my identity as a career academic with my role as a thrift shop owner—but maybe that tension is the point.

References:

Hendriksz, V. (2017). H&M accused of burning 12 tonnes of new, unsold clothing per year. FashionUnited. https://fashionunited.uk/news/fashion/h-m-accused-of-burning-12-tonnes-of-new-unsold-clothing-per-year/2017101726341​Textile Excellence+4FashionUnited+4European Environment Agency's home page+4

KETV NewsWatch 7. (2012). I-Team: Shredded, bleached clothes found in store dumpster. KETV. https://www.ketv.com/article/i-team-shredded-bleached-clothes-found-in-store-dumpster/7636496​KETV

Lieber, C. (2018). Why fashion brands destroy billions’ worth of their own merchandise every year. Vox. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/9/17/17852294/fashion-brands-burning-merchandise-burberry-nike-h-and-m​Vox

Khomami, N. (2018). Burberry destroys £28m of stock to guard against counterfeits. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2018/jul/19/burberry-destroys-28m-stock-guard-against-counterfeits​Wikipedia+2The Guardian+2Teen Vogue+2

Green Matters. (2020). Why do fashion companies destroy unsold goods? https://www.greenmatters.com/p/why-fashion-companies-destroy-unsold-goods​Green Matters

Zettler, M. (2020). Former employees allege retailers engaged in practice of destroying, dumping unsold merchandise. Global News. https://globalnews.ca/news/6417399/unsold-retail-merchandise-destroyed/​Global News