Sustainable fashion is becoming more popular across Dublin as shoppers become environmentally conscious.
The fashion industry is a major contributor to climate change, accounting for 8-10% of global carbon emissions, and nearly 20% of wastewater.
Kilogarm is a Dublin business that sells vintage clothing and designer brands, encouraging Dublin consumers to stay away from fast fashion while also saving money.
Julia Walsh, operations manager at Kilogarm spoke to Dublin Live ahead of their pop-up kilo sale in the Radisson Blu Royal Hotel on Sunday, 20 February.
She said: “It’s a vintage/ second hand clothing sale where everything is priced by weight. Our tagline is shop, weigh, pay.
“So you shop and have a look around, bring everything to the till and weigh them up and the weight is how you determine how much you pay.
"You can get as little or as much as you like, you can get a t-shirt for a fiver or less, we rarely have people come in and buy one thing because there’s a lot of unique options, it’s great in terms of trying to find a bargain.
“The heavier products a lot of the time are better quality like Levi denim jeans.
“A lot of people who come to our events think that we’re like a charity shop, but we actually source clothes from suppliers that are trying to save clothes from the landfill. They’re unwanted clothes that have been collected.
“We bring them in, categorise them, quality check and save them as best as we can from the landfill. We focus on giving vintage and second hand a new life.”
Julia spoke about how the clothes are in fantastic condition and how you can grab yourself a bargain.
“It’s not until you actually get there that you realise ‘wow, this is like the stuff I could literally find in a high street store,'” she added.
“Almost everything is in near immaculate condition because of the quality control we have. You might have small wear and tear but you can see that the stuff is really cool, different and high quality.
“Even the track jackets from the '80s and '90s, you can’t get that quality anymore, it’s fun too, you’re not walking into a shop that’s tailored to specific trends. There’s such a wide variety of clothing.
“You’re not going to find the same thing twice in there which we love, that's the fun part about it, it’s unique and you get to find something that nobody else will have.”
By purchasing clothes from a kilo sale, it prevents the items that are in great condition from going to a landfill.
Julia said: “You’re saving tonnes of clothing from the landfill. In January, we saved over one tonne of clothes from being dumped.
“People know how much their purchase is before they pay by weighing, you can give clothing another life and prevent it from ending up in the landfill.
“You can walk into our kilo sales and find lots of unbranded vintage pieces but again, you can find branded Adidas, Nike, Umbro, Converse, any of those, a lot of brands come through here.
“There’s even designer pieces, sometimes people can end up with a Burberry shirt and they’re a couple of hundred euro but you could get it for under a tenner at a kilo sale because it’s all about weight.
“A lot of our products were worn only once and then they were tossed aside.”
Julia believes that you can still have a passion for fashion and help save the planet at the same time.
“The owner, Ade, has a passion to help with sustainability and climate change. It stemmed from both of us because of our interest in fashion too. We’re trying to keep it fashionable and fun while trying to help people,” she said.
“The events are a great way to get out and talk to people about raising climate awareness. We’ve an online store too but it doesn’t get the message out in the same way. The kilo sales allow us to travel all around Ireland and meet lots of different age groups.
“We get the young who are learning about kilo sales and the old who maybe find something they had when they were younger and think it's great.”
You can check out Kilogarm’s website here.
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