The Vestiaire Collective, a resale platform for designer fashion goods, has announced it will no longer allow fast fashion items to be bought, sold or listed on the platform from today.
The pre-loved marketplace is banning fast fashion brands in an effort to encourage consumers to buy “quality over quantity” and “invest in craftsmanship at better prices”.
The list of banned brands include Asos, Atmosphere, Boohoo, Burton, Cider, Coast, Dorothy Perkins, Fashion Nova, Karen Millen, Miss Selfridge, Missguided, Na-kd, Nasty Gal, Oasis, Pretty Little Thing, Shein, Tezenis, Topman, Topshop (and collaborations) and Warehouse.
Vestiaire, which is a certified B-corp corporation, said that companies that meet a “fast fashion criteria”, including low product quality, working conditions and carbon footprint, will be added to the list.
Dounia Wone, Vestiaire’s chief impact officer, said: “Fast fashion has no value, and even less in resale. We’ve taken this step because we don’t want to be complicit in this industry which has a tremendous environmental and social impact.
“The current system encourages overproduction and overconsumption of low quality items and generates huge amounts of fashion waste.”
As for members of Vestiaire who currently own fast fashion items, the company said it is “committed to finding and promoting practical solutions for the fast fashion items that its members already have”.
“This includes wearing, repairing, recycling, upcycling and constructive donation strategies,” it said in a statement.
It comes after a team of Vestiaire employees visited Kantamanto market in Ghana with The Or Foundation in October. The market is the largest second-hand clothing market in West Africa.
The Or Foundation is a US-based charity working to create a “justice-led circular economy”. In 2016, its research found that around 40 per cent of more than 15 million items of clothing that arrive at Kantamanto market every week are of such poor quality that they are almost immediately dumped in landfill.
A 2022 report by Greenpeace found that fast fashion fuels the trade of pre-loved clothing and, subsequently, the dumping of textile waste.
For Vestiaire, the trip “underlined the importance of taking immediate, radical action around fast fashion”.
