French retail marketplace Vestiaire Collective is banning fast fashion items from its website.
Products from this area should no longer be bought, sold or listed on the platform from November 22, Vestiaire Collective announced on Tuesday. Starting next Friday – Black Friday – the company will remove fast fashion brands from its platform. This venture is part of the company’s three-year mission to tackle waste in fashion.
“Fast fashion has no value, and even less when it comes to resale. We decided to take this step because we don’t want to get involved in this industry, which has a huge environmental and social impact,” said Dounia Wone, Vestiaire Collective’s Chief Impact Officer. “The current system encourages the overproduction and overconsumption of inferior items and generates huge amounts of fashion waste.”
Vestiaire Collective has shared with FashionUnited the list of so-called fast fashion brands that are no longer sold on its online platform. These include Shein, but also: Asos, Atmosphère, Boohoo, Burton, Coast, Dorothy Perkins, Fashion Nova, Karen Millen, Miss Selfridge, Missguided, Na-Kd, Nasty Gal, Oasis, Pretty Little Things, Topman and Topshop, and Warehouse. The company explains that this is an initial list and that “the rest will be done in a second step with an external consulting agency”.
Vestiaire Collective partners with Or Foundation
As a second step, the French company is working with The Or Foundation, an aid organization based in the USA and Ghana that works for justice and sustainability in the clothing industry.
Or showed Vestiaire Collective employees the reuse and upcycle economy in Kantamanto, Ghana, where around 15 million pieces of clothing are sold every week. 40 percent of the pieces that are not sold end up as landfill.
To ensure that the pieces that can no longer be sold on Vestiaire Collective as a result of the new regulation are not shifted to Kantamanto, the company wants to offer solutions for these products. These include wear, repair, recycle, upcycle and constructive giving strategies.
Vestiaire Collective is also inviting retailers, activists and innovators from The Or Foundation to Paris to meet with industry leaders, policy makers and organizations from the circular fashion movement, while advocating for change at the governmental level, including new ones Producer Extended Responsibility laws are promoted.