Every year, over 1,500 Spirit Halloween stores spring up across the United States – filling otherwise abandoned lots with demonic decorations and costumes galore. Spirit Halloween consists of all things spooky, but perhaps the scariest thing that lurks behind their doors is their reliance on fast fashion. In this article, discover how you can seize first place in your Halloween costume contest this year with a more sustainable costume that resists the fast fashion standard.
Option 1: The DIY
Feeling crafty? Some of the best costumes that I’ve seen have been DIY (Do It Yourself)! If you don’t feel the creative juices flowing, there’s not much out there that people haven’t created a DIY costume guide for. Take a moment to browse through Pinterest or do a quick Google Search for some great ideas!
Going the DIY route allows you to reuse and upcycle items that you may already have lying around the house. Utilizing what you have prevents needing to purchase one-time-use pieces that you will never touch again, and give a second life to what you currently own!
DIY Costumes my family
Option 2: Go thrifting
If creating your own costume is not your forte, head to the local thrift store for some great costume finds. Many places like Goodwill have sections of the store dedicated to Halloween decorations and gently-used costumes.
Though these stores have designated Halloween sections, I encourage you to venture off to the rest of the store to see what funky items may be hiding on other racks! You never know what eccentric items could be perfect for your outfit! Thrifting for costume pieces is often more affordable than purchasing brand new items. Plus, it has the added benefit of utilizing resources that already exist, which reduces demand to produce more costumes in the future.
As a wise man once said, “One man’s trash is another man’s come up; Thank your granddad for donating that plaid button up.” - Macklemore.
Option 3: Host a costume exchange
Do your friends and family always come up with the most legendary get-ups for Halloween? Consider this your sign to host a costume exchange! Gather your closest chums and invite them over to swap your old Halloween costumes with one another!
The perks of this route: (unless your friends and family are stingy goblins), your costume this year is free! Everyone who participates in the exchange gets to help prevent those costumes from ending up in a landfill, and they do all the leg work of costume building for you!
Elevate the costume swap by making it an event! Just throw on a classic Halloween movie and serve some of your favorite seasonal desserts for everyone to enjoy while exchanging costumes!
Why your costumes matter:
Halloween largely contributes to fast fashion. Fast fashion describes a business model of mass-producing cheap clothes, at the expense of exploiting textile workers and heavily polluting the environment.
Fast fashion companies can afford to sell their clothes at such cheap price points because they make up the difference in labor. In Bangladesh, the second largest exporter of clothes in the world, full-time workers may work up to 16 hour days, at a rate of only $0.33 an hour. Fast fashion is also notorious for its oversight of safety and hygiene. Accidents and infections impact sweatshop workers on a regular basis, and many of the dye chemicals that the workers come into contact with are toxic.
When these chemical dyes leak into the environment (or get deliberately dumped into local rivers and streams), the consequences can be devastating. In 2020, CNN released a report about the Dhaleshwari River in Bangladesh, which they described as once teeming with fish, but is now “black like an ink stain”. (I recommend you look into it, the black river is a jarringly sad sight to see).
Consumerism fuels fast fashion, and these purchasing habits immensely contribute to global warming. An estimated 80 million pieces of clothes are manufactured annually. The lifespan of textiles is ever decreasing due cheap materials in production. In addition, because consumers are not investing much money for their apparel, it is easier for them to part with items when they go out of style. As a result, the world produces 92 million tons of textile waste annually – roughly a garbage truck full of clothes every second.
Some of this textile waste ends up in the ocean. Some of the clothes get burned. Most of it ends up in landfills. When clothes sit to “decompose” in landfills, they release methane – a greenhouse gas that is 28 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. Even though your trash may be “out of sight, out of mind”, remember that throwing clothes in the garbage can still come back to haunt you as a ghost of climate change.
To sum it all up:
Reuse your Halloween costumes with DIY, thrifting, or clothing swaps.
When Halloween is all said and done, don’t throw away your costume!! Instead, donate it for someone else to wear next year!
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