This summer has been one for the history books—wildfires in Europe; five blistering heatwaves in the UK; devastating floods in Nepal, not to mention the creeping proliferation of data centres (as one opinion writer put it in The Guardian: "In many people’s minds, datacentres [sic] are also a byword for the two totemic issues of yet another searing summer: heat and water").
Oxfam's State of Style report, released today, illuminates these issues with data that makes for particularly sober reading when it's framed around our buying habits: "The water used to produce Britain’s unworn clothes is enough to supply 1 million people for a lifetime." Overconsumption, coupled with under-wearing, is creating waste—not just of clothing but the resources used to produce it—at an unprecedented scale. "The average UK wardrobe contains 80 items—and 32% of them, around 26 items, haven’t been worn in the past 12 months." Put another way: "Our one-wear outfits waste the equivalent of 88 billion bottles of water."
