/ground-report/media/post_banners/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Untitled-design-16.jpg)
Ground Report | New Delhi: Syeda Sakeena, 22, hailing from Srinagar’s Lal Bazar area has started her one of its kind online thrift store. Filled with enthusiasm about saving nature from further degradation, her underlying motivation behind starting the thrift is to promote the reuse of items that are normally discarded by people after use.
“For the unannounced " thrifting " is one of those activities that has become novelized these days and deemed “hip” and “trendy” by the mainstream media, but people have been shopping second-hand for as long as the fashion industry has been up and running,” Sakeena explained.
A believer of the three R philosophy- Reduce, Reuse and Recycle, Sakeena said that she is trying her best to save the earth through her business.
/ground-report/media/post_attachments/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/dd8f60d4-f440-46c9-9ed4-4c44e8ac6130-1024x1024.jpg "publive-image")
"My idea is not just to break into the fashion industry or to earn money or mark my presence as a businesswoman. Rather, I am trying to do something that can help out our nature and Earth," she said.
She claimed that her online thrift store promotes the idea of "sustainable fashion", considering fashion from the perspective of many stakeholders - users and producers, all living species, contemporary and future dwellers on earth.
As an environmentalist and a nature lover since her teenage, Sakeena said that she always chose thrifted clothing over new ones.
“I believed in saving the natural resources and thus started working on what I believed in,” she said.
“Also, we are making it easy for people who cannot afford expensive and high-end brands and products by giving another chance to these previously loved products to be used and accepted,” she exclaimed.
Her ‘Vintage Valley Store’ sells all kinds of pre-loved, rejected, home-crafted, custom seized products like clothing, bags, home décor and has been receiving good response from the people in the valley.
The environment-conscious ‘Vintage Girl’ while explaining the nuances of the fast fashion industry said that around 70 million barrels of oil are used every year to produce the polyester fibre, which takes more than 200 years to decompose. Not only that, polyester garments when washed multiple times shed microfibers which add to the increasing level of plastic in our oceans.
“Fast Fashions companies design clothes that fall apart quickly. They pursue a strategy called, “planned obsolescence”, which means designing garments that become worn out, lose shape easily. All this is done to force consumers to keep buying new clothes,” she said.
She further claimed that approximately 7000 litres of water are needed to produce one pair of jeans, which is equivalent to an individual’s five-year drinking water consumption.
She said that fast fashion is very brutal to the Earth. “When I learnt about these facts, I was taken aback and decided on what I needed to do and thus " Vintage Valley Store" came into being.”
A media graduate, she is currently pursuing her master’s from Media Education Research Centre, University of Kashmir. A girl of many talents, she is also interested in photography and also works as a freelance photographer.
You can connect with Ground Report on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Whatsapp and Subscribe to our YouTube channel. For suggestions and writeups mail us at [email protected]
ALSO READ
