According to the writer, what becomes of about half of the clothes Is…

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My college friend Ishita posts a thrift haul every second Sunday. She lays the pieces out on her bed: a corduroy jacket for two hundred rupees, three shirts from a pile at Sarojini Nagar, jeans from a brand not sold in India. The video ends with the total in fat yellow letters, and the comments ask how she does it. I used to watch with envy. Now a small question nags at me.

Thrifting is meant to be the answer to fast fashion. Buy what already exists, the argument goes, and you stop feeding the factories that turn out a new collection every few weeks. As far as it goes, I agree. The trouble is the word ‘haul’, which is about quantity. Ishita goes to the market nominally for a jacket she needs, but what she really needs is a video for Sunday. Half of what she buys is worn once, for the camera, then folded onto a shelf she calls, without any irony, her archive.

A shirt rescued from a pile, she would say, beats a new one ordered from an app. She is right. No fresh cotton was grown for it, no fresh dye poured into a river. But when the low total is the whole point of the video, viewers learn that clothes are too cheap to think about. Fast fashion has been teaching that for years.

My grandmother owned perhaps fifteen saris and could tell you who had worn each one before her. By her arithmetic, a jacket worn forty times is cheap even at two thousand rupees, and one worn once is dear at two hundred. I have not said this to Ishita. Her next video goes up on Sunday, and I will probably watch it.