New collection sheds light on hidden treasure from Ghana marketplace: 'A testament to the ingenuity'

Yahoo

28-01-2025

The Vestiaire Collective is known primarily as a secondhand luxury marketplace. However, it recently launched an exclusive clothing collection in partnership with The Or Foundation.
This collection is 100% upcycled and features the accomplishments of Ghanaian designers while also spotlighting the organization, whose mission is to "identify and manifest alternatives to the dominant model of fashion," according to the foundation's website.
Consumers can purchase a range of clothing items, including varsity jackets with hand-painted details, patched jeans, and crocheted hobo bags. By purchasing an item from this collection, you are extending the life of clothing items already in existence and celebrating the work of independent artisans.
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As detailed by Trend Hunter, the sales will benefit both the designers and The Or Foundation's Secondhand Solidarity Fund.
"The capsule is a testament to the ingenuity of upcycling," the Trend Hunter wrote.
The Or Foundation is based in Accra, Ghana, which is home to Kantamanto, the largest secondhand clothing market in the world. Beyond saving thousands of pounds of scraps from the marketplace and upcycling them into new clothing items, the foundation also offers relief funds after climate disasters, analyzes water and air samples to measure pollution, hauls away plastic waste from Accra's beaches, fights for fair wages, and offers sustainability education.
Many cogs in the fashion industry wheel are destructive — more than 101 million tons of garments are tossed every year of the 100 billion that are produced. With that amount of waste, it is no surprise that microplastics and chemicals from dyes are polluting our waters. The fast fashion industry also has a concerning human rights record.
The way the world consumes fashion must change in order to be kinder to our planet, and shopping secondhand is a great place to start. Supporting initiatives similar to The Or Foundation x Vestiaire Collective collab also shows designers that sustainability can be not only stylish but also profitable.
"Fashion must divest from disposability. We can all do our part by recirculating quality garments, but we also have to prioritise justice for the people and the ecosystems who are often forgotten in fashion's chain of supply and demand. We are grateful to Vestiaire Collective for joining us in this mission," The Or Foundation co-founder Liz Ricketts said in a statement.
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