The idea of working in the frontlines of fashion is not prominent in his thoughts, but 33-year-old Rey Parojinog is doing exactly that.
In the current state of the fashion system where overproduction and overconsumption patterns are brought to prominence in climate change discussions, efforts from the community to contribute to the ambitious journey to achieve sustainability are just as important to acknowledge to create a shared understanding of the easy steps every citizen can take.
In Rey’s case, it’s keeping clothes in circulation and away from being discarded to the landfill. It’s that simple, really.
On Sundays, when the general merchandise and hardware stores in Ramon Magsaysay Avenue in Davao City’s Chinatown are closed, Rey assembles makeshift clothing displays on the sidewalk. He hangs a carefully curated set of second hand tops and bottoms on a rack and on accordion folded gates, inviting onlookers and thrifters for a good bargain.
He is joined by a few other guys who have a strong masculine streetwear drip: oversized graphic shirts and cargo shorts with pockets that rival the capacity of a standard sized canvas tote bag.
The week’s drop (a word that refers to the limited release of merchandise) are tops from Kenzo, Gucci, Nike, Patagonia and Carhartt. Operating with a no-fuss latagan model, Rey is able to showcase a display of second hand clothing (SHC) minus the hassle of digging through piles and piles of ukay-ukay. Latagan is a common method of splaying out items on the ground in flea markets.
Rey has done all the dirty work for his customers; shopping in the latagan is as easy as pointing at pieces that make your heart skip a beat. I copped a navy Nike fleece hoodie and a black Dri-FIT graphic shirt during that day. It is business as usual for the street entrepreneurs.
Rey takes care of his family of six primarily through this latagan fashion livelihood. He also hustles for extra income through CCTV installation gigs on the side.
He is lucky to reside in a location close to where bales are unpacked because he gets a scoop of the high value items first when they drop every Monday. The bulk of second-hand clothing that comes in are those coming from South Korea, Japan and China.
“Drops from [South] Korea are mostly luxe brands and street wear,” he said. He shares a fine selection in his Facebook every week and also displays them on his rack the following Sunday.
He keeps his eyes on a range of brands that have good resale value and he keeps abreast with trends through social media. His eye for this fashion business is refined naturally and over time. Since his high school days, he has been immersed in streetwear through thrifting and bartering.
Today, his fashion acumen has enabled him to send his kids to school. On a good week, flipping thrifted goods can get him as much as P25,000. On slow weeks, earnings dip to about P10,000.
“Instead of staying home, I make a living on Sundays for extra income,” he said. He has been in this hustle since 2017 and he is grateful to have also made a brotherhood out of his peers on the street; they are each other’s support system.
Collectively, they give clothes a second life and they make sustainable lifestyles easier to approach through influencing consumer choices by presenting options and promoting conscious consumption, a much needed solution to fashion’s elaborate waste problem.
The big fashion cleanup
Global sustainability conversations discuss waste as a major responsibility of the current fashion system. There is a lot of cleaning up to do. Linear business models that have operated for the longest time do not put value on the environment and on people, making fashion a major global polluter. To produce clothes, big brands resort to an intensive extraction and use of natural resources like arable land, fossil fuel, cotton crops, and water. In order to be profitable, big brands are in pursuit of finding the cheapest labor available to assemble garments and this results in exploiting garment workers in clothing factories around the world. Not only does fashion exploit the environment and people, it also has to resort to overproduction to take advantage of the best cost for their scale of operation; when they produce more, each item becomes cheaper and yields higher profits.
Overproduction then is supported by marketing that perpetuates overconsumption patterns along the way. Fashion messages around us often tell us to buy the “hot” essentials and “must-haves” on shelves. As consumers buy more, fashion brands continue to produce more in rapid cycles, leaving much of these clothing as waste, often sent to Global South countries.
The realities in the destination of these clothing waste varies. In Accra, Ghana, the situation is grim. The Kantamanto Market in the city is the largest second hand clothing market in the world. The Or Foundation, a USA and Ghana-based nonprofit working at the intersection of environmental justice, education and fashion development, describes Kantamanto to be on the receiving end of fashion’s waste crisis.
“Every week, 15 million garments arrive from countries across the Global North and 40% leave as waste, often within one or two weeks of landing at port. This waste ends up in burn piles around the city, dumped in informal settlements where it pollutes the backyards of Accra’s most vulnerable citizens or it is washed out to sea,” the foundation stated on its website that campaigns against waste colonialism, which they refer to as the domination of land for the use of disposal.
The Philippines is oceans apart from Ghana and the fashion realities vary significantly. But waste remains to be a common thread, unfortunately. According to the British Fashion Council, there are enough clothes on the planet right now–enough to dress the entire human race for the next 100 years.
Yet, big brands continue to produce more clothes at a pace faster than planetary resources can recover. This results in waste, a tangible symptom of a big fashion problem concerning all of us.
Ukay-ukay is imported waste–but we make do with it
The nuances of SHC is acknowledged in a research by the Philippine team of Fashion Revolution, a non-profit global movement that seeks reforms in fashion. The study explored the impact of used clothing importation in the Philippines and pointed out some strengths and weaknesses.
The group noted that SHC answers consumer demand for affordable and trendy clothing while providing low-cost business opportunities for entrepreneurs. However, the negative effects are not to be ignored: ukay-ukay tends to be wasteful because of mass volume and promotes rapid disposal of clothing.
The report cited a statement from researcher and Baguio native Ma. Rina Locsin who said that “the single most important driver that fuels the ukay-ukay trade is the fast turnover rate of fashion in the world’s capitals, which unleashes a huge amount of castoffs for the secondary market.”
According to Fashion Revolution, Republic Act No. 4653, which seeks to “Safeguard the health of the people and maintain the dignity of the nation by declaring it a national policy to prohibit the commercial importation of textile articles,” is an outdated law and requires revisions and further examination. The law prohibits the importation of SHC but these are smuggled into the country, nevertheless, as donations or pasalubong.
“Because only the importation itself is prohibited, once the shipments are cleared for entry, the sale of SHC is technically legal by all means,” the report stated. Their report stated that as of 2017, the top five countries which are the primary source of SHC are South Korea (41%), Japan (15%), China (9.9%), United States of America (7.8%), and Malaysia (6.7%).
The narrative involving Rey’s clothing latagan is telling of a sustainability journey that we all share.
Sustainability is not all black and white. And while indeed some livelihoods like Rey’s are realized and supported as a result of SHC, it doesn’t give big brands an excuse to overproduce and consequently send waste down the line.
Keeping clothes in circulation is a solution to keep fashion’s service to the people and respect for the environment. It means supporting local thrift vendors (fashion frontliners, really) like Rey as they make the effort to uphold clothing value even at the end of a t-shirt’s life cycle.
The concept of ukay-ukay whether as a latagan pop-up or as a permanent store is not new. Revisiting their role in the bigger fashion system through today’s sustainability conversations, however, provides a glimpse into the small and actionable steps that we can take to contribute to 2030 scenarios pictured out by our global goals.
The simplest message being: it doesn’t take a lot to make a difference in sustainability through fashion. (Jesse Pizarro Boga/for MindaNews)
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Jesse Pizarro Boga (Jesse Boga Madriaga) is a 2023 fellow of the Next Gen Assembly, an advocacy program led by non‑profit organization Global Fashion Agenda and Fashion Values, a sustainability education program developed by the Centre for Sustainable Fashion at the UAL-London College of Fashion. He convenes voices from fashion, sustainability and beyond in the Unstitch: Sustainable Fashion Forum. He is @thegamejay on Instagram.
Charliebebs Gohetia is an award-winning director, writer, editor and filmmaker. In 2019, he ventured into food, establishing his own ice cream shop that evolved into an Asian-inspired restaurant franchise. He currently dabbles in social media through blogging and visual content creation in his blog: Facebook.com/triptayoblog.
