Clothes take a great deal of water to produce, along with nonrenewable resources. Reusing clothes is a helpful way encourage sustainability. Shopping at the thrift shop should not be a faux pas. In fact, this practice is becoming more popular. Clothing companies are being more sustainable by using recycled materials. Some of these companies include: Nau Clothing (http://www.nau.com/) and Eco-Fashion World (http://www.ecofashionworld.com/). If small companies can do this, there is no reason for other large scale production clothing companies to do the same.

It may be a bit expensive at first, because manufacturing companies have a financial model that they have followed for years which works with them. I think that it is important to give awareness to environmental effects. As the population of the world increases, the need for clothing will too. There is an abundance of clothes. When walking into a thrift store, there seems to be a never ending supply. In America, a teenager's wardrobe is much bigger than any teenager in a lesser economically developed country. There is  no need to have so much clothes. The environment should take priority over being fashionable, because if there is a scarcity of water, fashion will be the last thing on anybody's mind.

That is not to say that people deserve to buy things that they can afford. The key is to try to be as sustainable as possible. An excess of anything is never right.

Shopping at thrift stores is a fantastic way to reduce carbon emissions- thrift stores are local, and, especially if a greater amount of people used them, it would logically follow that carbon emissions would be reduced worldwide. However, how does this effect the economy and those working to produce new clothes? To allay a possible economic downturn due to the desire for less new clothes being produced in the market (if there were a shift in trend towards shopping more at thrift stores), maybe companies could introduce sections of their stores (at physical locations-to reduce emissions due to shipping via airplane or bus) where there was a trade system between clothes, with consumers of the company's products trading clothes with another, and the company benefiting from this by using it as a marketing strategy to attract more consumers and/or charging a low fee for the operation of the trading system. In this way, thrift stores could be in use both outside brands and inside them!

Hi Tabitha! I agree with your points; thrifting is an excellent way of reducing carbon emissions. Not only is it environmentally friendly, but it has also become trendy. Vintage clothing can be cute, inexpensive, and it also reuses material that would've otherwise gone to waste. There are also companies such as Urban Renewal that take used clothing and upcycle them, or "reuse them in such a way as to create a product of a higher quality or value than the original" (Oxford dictionary). This isn't something only companies can do; at home you can add buttons, prints, or personal touches. Also, by mending tears and such at home, you can reduce the amount of clothing you put in a landfill. 

Like you mentioned, the problem is not only clothing made out of high-emission materials, but the sheer amount of clothes we have. Think about your closet--how many of those clothes do you rarely wear? We should try to buy only what we really, really want, and be sure to donate, r ecycle, or upcycle our clothes. Try to get the most use out of a clothing item with the least amount of environmental harm.