By Chelsea Keim // Place Coorparoo
What are you doing to help create a sustainable environment?
Have you heard of “fast fashion? It’s the cheaper clothing that mimic’s designer labels from runways around the world. Unlike high fashion, fast fashion is made with lower quality materials.
Because fast fashion is cheap and aims to match current trends, people who buy fast fashion throw them out once the trend has passed … or the pieces fall apart.
This builds up landfill and waste in our environment.
Tania Ivanovic-Falk is making her mark towards a better and more sustainable future through the use of pre-loved fashion.
After a long history within the fashion industry, Tania realised how much fast fashion was affecting our planet and wanted to make people more aware.
We caught up with her at her store in Annerley, Vintage Collective, to chat about why it’s important not to buy fast fashion.
Were you always in love with fashion?
I didn’t really love fashion when I was younger.
I was a bit of a punk; I had a big mohawk and I wasn’t into commercial fashion.
I wasn’t a real “high fashion” sort of girl. I loved trends and watching the trends, but I have always loved being a little quirky.
Labels weren’t ever a huge thing to me. I wouldn’t buy something just because it’s a label, I would buy something if it was quirky and edgy.
So fashion just sort of happened for me.
Tell us about your history in the fashion industry?
I started off working at Cue as a holiday job.
I was actually studying tech drawing because, at the time, I wanted to be an architect.
The manager at Cue talked me into staying on with them full-time once the holidays were over.
After my time with Cue, I moved onto another store called Stiletto where I was the HR manager.
I then realised I wanted to try something slightly different, so I went onto accessory buying for the same company. Once I was more experienced in that field, I became the head buyer and product development manager.
I used to source stuff from offshore.
That was when fashion first started going off shore and we started to get a lot of cheap fashion. This was in the 90’s.
Even though we manufactured the products ourselves, I started seeing a lot of companies importing cheap fashion, which made me notice the impact that fast fashion had and still has on the world.
How did you become so in love with vintage fashion?
While I was buying, I would do eight overseas trips a year, as we were sourcing what was selling well overseas and was hot at the time.
Because we manufactured our own clothes, I’d go into vintage shops and pick up pieces and fabrics to then reproduce for our own stores back at home. That’s really where my love for vintage fabrics, prints and styles began.
I’ve always been quite alternative and quirky, so vintage fashion is more my style than commercial fashion.
Why do you think it’s important not to buy fast fashion?
I think quality is important. I think we buy too much “fast fashion” that we dump too much. The impact it’s having on the environment is becoming a real issue.
That’s why I opened Vintage Collective, to be able to sell pre-loved high quality items at a reasonable and affordable price.
When you look at pre-loved pieces, like some of the ones I have here at Vintage Collective, you can see the quality is almost new. So if we are recycling and reusing we aren’t creating more and more waste.
My goal with Vintage Collective is to get people to be more aware that they can buy amazing pieces and not have to spend a bomb but still have amazing quality items that they will have in their wardrobe forever.
Buying good quality will reduce the amount that gets thrown away because they last longer in your wardrobe.
