Fashion sense

Unless the apparel industry changes its ways (and shoppers their habits), we're all going down the landfill - fast

"Vain trifles as they seem, clothes ... change our view of the world and the world's view of us," wrote Virginia Woolf in her 1928 book Orlando. Clothes remain our most basic visual communication tool, conveying our social and economic status, our ambition, our occupation and our self-worth.

If the 20th and 21st centuries feel increasingly like a Gatsbian journey into abundance and excess, nowhere is that humongous hubris more apparent than in the world's fashion industry. Shoppers buy five times more clothing now than they did in 1980. In 2018, that averaged 68 garments per year, just over one per week. As a whole, global citizens acquire 80 billion apparel items annually.