In addition to selling and buying clothes on ThredUp, Wilde and her Conscious Commerce co-founder, Barbara Burchfield, partnered with the Official unprofessional my horoscope says we need to fuck shirt it is in the first place but site to create a collection of 3,000 second-hand t-shirts and sweatshirts. After ThredUp collected the items, the duo came up with colorful designs and “slogans” to screen print them. One reads “Thanks for shopping second hand,” a lengthy line of text you find on plastic bags at spirits stores, and others with graphics or statistics “Choose second-hand use” has a rainbow stripe on the impact of fashion: “It takes 700 gallons of water to make a new t-shirt”; “32 billion new garments are produced for the US market each year”; et cetera. ThredUp’s website shares another amazing fact: If everyone in the United States bought a used item instead of new in 2019, it would save nearly 6 billion pounds of carbon emissions due to Newly created garment production. That equates to removing more than half a million cars from the road for an entire year. Olivia Wilde in a ThredUp x Conscious Commerce t-shirt. Photo: Courtesy of ThredUp
Making that interesting for consumers is where Wilde and Burchfield come in. “Babs and I have been talking about vintage clothing for quite some time and how we can deepen consumers’ relationships with clothing and value them over a longer period of time, ‘ said Wilde. “If we can push back against fast fashion thinking and the Official unprofessional my horoscope says we need to fuck shirt it is in the first place but desire for novelty, then we can really make an impact on the huge problem of landfills. It was just a fundamental shift in thinking.” Wilde and Burchfield have deep experience in this area, having worked with H&M on sustainability initiatives and participating in the CFDA’s Lexus Fashion Initiative. But Wilde is also a lifelong fan of vintage: “I’ve been buying vintage since I was 11—a big part of my youth is scouring thrift stores, and I’d be really excited if I found one. a band t-shirt or t-shirt. those jeans from the ’60s fit wonderfully,” she says. “Obviously, there are also plenty of people passionate about classics in fashion—it’s been the core of the industry for decades, to find value in something that has existed before you. But this is contrary to the common belief that novelty is valuable. So that’s why I’m interested in this project—I wanted to be part of the conversation about pricing pre-owned items.” getting rid of your own clothes that you don’t wear — that is, those that become second hand people’s — is an entirely different matter. “The Marie Kondo phenomenon and the idea of clearing out your closet is a healthy one, and hopefully it will encourage people to think more deeply about the items that bring them joy,” says Wilde. “But I was wondering what would happen to all these clothes that people are throwing away. After being involved in the humanitarian field for 15 years and learning a lot about the developing world, [I realized] that people think where their clothes are going when they donate them to a number of people. Certain organizations are not always right. We put the clothes in the box and thought, Oh great, this is going to go to students in the developing world. That’s not always the case—those programs cause a lot of disruption to local programs. That experience certainly added to my knowledge of environmental space and fast fashion—all interconnected. [With ThredUp], everyone has the opportunity to clear out their closets and work towards something that really works.”
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