A fashion trend to help the planet

New look, new you – it’s fun to have new clothes, isn’t it? But wait!

Did you know that the clothes we buy can be really tough on the planet? Manmade materials like polyester and nylon are basically kinds of plastic, made from oil that is adding CO2 to the atmosphere. And when we throw them away, that's more plastic pollution that can end up in the sea. Natural materials, especially cotton, can also be a problem - growing cotton can take huge amounts of water and chemical fertiliser that also damages the environment. And then, lots of our clothes come from a long way away, from Asia by ship - more carbon emissions in transport!

Now, of course, no one’s saying, don’t wear clothes. That would be weird. Not to say chilly in the winter!

But we’ve become too keen on ‘fast fashion’. The latest trend can last just a few weeks before people want to try something different. People have been buying more and more clothes and wearing them less and less before throwing them away. Some clothes even get thrown away before they’re sold – to make way for new fashions in the shops. That’s a huge waste for the planet, that’s adding to pollution and climate change.  

Julie saw all this when she ran a fashion shop in Belgium: "Every three weeks, we had to make room in the shop for the newest fashions," she told WoW! News. "So whatever we hadn't sold by then, we had to send away as rubbish. So clothes were being made and thrown away without ever being worn." 

For adults, there’s an easy solution to this excess – buy clothes less often. But of course children can’t always do that. As Julie says: "Children keep growing. So they always need new clothes, often before their old clothes are worn out." 

Fortunately Julie found a solution. She decided to save these clothes that have been loved and worn and to make sure they get cleaned up and well-presented and so that they can find a new home, another child who’ll be really happy to wear them. She created her own fashion brand, only for secondhand clothes.  She called it Yupla!

It started when Julie’s son started to grow fast. His clothes weren’t much use to his little sister but Julie couldn’t bear to think of just adding to the growing global mountain of wasted clothes and go to the shops to buy even more clothes. She saw there was a "gold mine" in really good clothes sitting in family's wardrobes unworn because they no longer fitted the kids in the house.

Come and meet Julie in the WoW! News app, and here what kids think of second-hand clothes - and how finding her solution to this global problem has made Julie feel.