Designer Jessi Arrington packed nothing for TEDActive but 7 pairs of undies, buying the rest of her clothes in thrift stores around LA. It’s a meditation on conscious consumption — wrapped in a rainbow of color and creativity.
.
Watch:
Glossary
- thrift store – a shop that sells secondhand articles and especially clothes and is often run for charitable purposes
- to pick up – to learn a new skill or start a habit without intending to
- overrated – valued too highly
- She picked
- dress-up – putting on clothes and pretending to be someone different
- to pull off (a look) – to succeed in doing something that is difficult
- to rock – to wear a particular style of clothing, etc. and look good, fashionable
Put the verbs in brackets into the right tense:
Secondhand shopping allows me to reduce the impact my wardrobe has on the environment and on my wallet (…) and it makes shopping like my own personal treasure hunt. I mean, what 1. ………… I …………… (find) today? 2. ……… I ………. (like) the colour? (…) If all the answers 3. ……….. (be) yes, I feel as though I 4. …………….. (win). (…)
I want to tell you what I 5. ………… (pack) for this exciting week at TED. I 6. ………….. (bring) (…) exactly one week’s worth of undies. I 7. ………….. (bet) that I’d be able to find everything else I could possibly want to wear once I 8. ……….. (get) here to Palm Springs. (…)
I’m also going to tell you a few of the life lessons that, believe it or not, I 9. …………….. (pick up) in these adventures wearing nothing new. (…)
It is almost physiologically impossible to be in a bad mood when you 10. ……………… (wear) bright red pants. (…)
I 11. …………….. (grow) up with a mum who 12. ……………………. (teach) me this day-in and day-out. (…) If you believe you 13. …………… (be) a beautiful person inside and out, there is no look that you can’t pull off.
Key: 1am I going to find; 2. will I like; 3. are; 4. ‘ve/have won; 5. packed; 6. brought; 7. was betting; 8. got; 9. have picked up; 10. are wearing; 11. grew; 12. taught; 13. are
Practice Makes Perfect
Fill in the gaps in the article below with these sentences:
a) Don’t be afraid to dip your toe in before committing completely to a rentals program.
b) In other words, flimsy silk wraps and delicate lace dresses need not apply.
c) Whether you use a third-party service provider like CaaStle-which offers to ship, clean, and track customers’ rental orders-or you do it yourself, rentals may come with more overhead than traditional retail.
d) “It makes it super easy to return and process the returns.
Renting Is the New Fast Fashion. Here’s What You Need to Know About the Booming Retail Trend
For so long, America’s love affair with fast fashion has been torrid and insatiable. Now it seems at least some of that desire has fizzled out.
Consumers are increasingly conscious of the toll that accumulating more stuff–and then throwing it away–takes on the environment, and they’re demanding companies evolve accordingly. Rentals by contrast are viewed as a way for consumers to keep up with trends without adding bulk–and that’s led to an explosion of rental offerings, from Ikea to Urban Outfitters to West Elm.
If you’re interested in getting into rentals, consider these four tips:
Aim prices high.
Your rentals program should be priced in a way that makes it worth the effort.
1……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Vince, a high-end fashion brand based in NYC (and a CaaStle customer), charges customers of its “Unfold” rental program $160 per month for four garments. It pays CaaStle a per-subscription fee, and in return, CaaStle handles the entire rental process.
Test your assumptions.
2. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
“We always looked at this from our end that we were testing this,” says Vince’s CEO, Brendan Hoffman, who noted that Vince’s pilot program with CaaStle needed to be both on-brand and additive to the company’s bottom line. Twelve months in, Hoffman says he is satisfied with the performance of the company’s rental program, and anticipates expanding it to include men’s clothing.
Keep your customers close.
A key enticement of rentals is sustainability. So be sure to include brick-and-mortar locations for pickups and drop-offs. The minute you mix in massive shipping distances, you lose that selling point, says Kodali. “A lot of the value is proximity,” she says
3. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Once you get into [long-distance] shipping, the economics stop looking as attractive.”
Quality tops trendiness.
Products offered up for rent have to be able to withstand multiple uses and wash cycles.
4. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………….. Companies like Nuuly–Urban Outfitter’s eight-month-old fashion rental company–and CaaStle use low-impact garment washes, but quality should also be of paramount consideration during the buying phase
You can read the whole article here:
Key: 1c; 2a; 3d; 4b
Discuss:
- Do you spend lots of money on clothes?
- Do you think clothes are a waste of money?
- Is shopping for clothes your favourite kind of shopping?
- Do you ever buy secondhand clothes?
- Are there any clothes in your wardrobe that you’ve never worn?
- Do you recycle your old clothes or give them to charity?
- What do you think of street fashion?
Explore it more to create your own teaching-learning experience!
Quarantine Fashion …
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/quarantine-fashion-for-the-week-ahead
(1917)
