Transcriber: Peter Van de Ven Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
The rhythm of life today is not what it was last month.
The world is in suspense.
I am not sure if we will get out the same way as we have gone in.
The future is here and now.
The world is upside down.
Clothes in our daily life
are as important as they are unimportant.
They’re as essential as they’re unessential.
Once bought, they’re treated with respect.
Once worn, they are disposed of.
But clothes in our daily life
are much, much more than just a way of covering ourself.
They are a way of expressing identity, personality and status.
In other words, they have become fashion.
Fashion has to reflect who you are and where you’re going.
It doesn’t have to be bright.
It doesn’t have to be loud.
It just has to be you.
My mother, Sunita,
is the reason why I’m standing here today.
From a young age, she taught me that secondhand is firsthand.
Her trick?
She gave me the clothes of my role model,
who was my drum teacher at the time.
Yes, at school I was a little bit the odd one out,
but my mother said,
“I don’t want to buy every three months new clothes.”
Fast forward a few years,
I made a one-of-a-kind experience.
Whilst I was going into a bar,
I saw a person who had the most amazing jacket.
I said, “I really have to have the jacket.”
So I went up to him and asked him if he would sell me his jacket,
and he said, “I’ll swap you your jacket.”
Wow. My first swap.
Going home, I started reminiscing about what had just happened,
and I realized how powerful a swap can be.
Not only does it remix your wardrobe at home
and give some freshness to it,
but it does much more.
[SWAP]
With a single swap, you extend the clothing life of the item
and with that reduce carbon, water and waste emissions by 30% -
with just one small swap.
An idea, or let’s call it a dream, started emerging in my head.
Just imagine, this wardrobe would be huge,
and it would belong to all of us here.
My dream was to create the world’s largest shared closet,
to give all of us the possibility to get what we want, where we want,
affordable and inclusive.
I wanted to inspire the creation of clothing lifecycles,
one swap at a time.
And I came to a very hard realization:
The world was not ready.
There was a huge stigma on secondhand clothes,
and I thought,
“How can you make people want to swap and share secondhand clothes
if they are still preferring firsthand fashion?”
What I did, I founded a company
whose mission was to bring quality secondhand clothes to the masses.
And yeah, I also brought a message to the masses,
my mother’s message:
secondhand is our firsthand.
Now, today,
secondhand is becoming much, much more part of the new normal.
And people come up to me and say,
“Robin, are you happy?”
No, I’m not happy.
The world is upside down.
We don’t have a planet B.
And while I'm standing here today,
a hundred billion items are being produced every single year.
A hundred billion.
We have new phenomenons like ultra-fast fashion,
fast fashion on steroids.
Disgusting.
Can you imagine that we still have 250 million children,
aged between 5 and 14,
working up to 16 hours to produce those 100 billion items.
Fashion industry still - yeah - is responsible
for 10% of carbon emissions globally,
the equivalent of what the maritime and aviation industry do together.
And in the deserts
of this beautiful planet,
the dirty little secrets are hidden.
134 million tons of clothing waste exists here.
What I want to tell you now
is “Buy nothing new.”
But, you might ask me,
how can we dress with a different clothing item every single day?
We want to be creative about ourself.
We want to be.
We want to express our personality.
In the existing lies the answer.
We, or the whole world, have 9 billion items at home.
These are items which have never been worn, or maybe worn once.
So I say to us all,
use what we all have and let’s create a platform,
a customized personal platform,
where we all share the clothes that we have
so you can all express your creativity, your identity,
wearing a different clothing item every single day.
And the theme of TEDxPadova is called “upside down.”
What if we turn the fashion industry downside up?
The overproduction
and the throwaway culture of the past century
can be the powerhouse of tomorrow.
A real circular, secondhand revolution.
Let’s let this sink [in].
Imagine, just imagine ...
You’re going to the airport and you’re going on holiday,
and you don’t have a suitcase!
And you arrive in your oversea destination
with your freshly pre-selected laundered clothes.
Imagine ...
You have the largest walk-in closet
with millions of items for every occasion of the year.
Imagine!
Imagine, every day a driverless ...
or let’s call it every week,
a driverless car comes to your house
and brings you the items which you want for the whole week.
We could turn, with this imagination,
the fast-fashion factories
into clothing life cycle extending facilities,
places where we repair, upcycle and clean.
We could convert the stores in our cities
to meeting points where we can generate new mindsets on sustainability.
Ladies and gentlemen, to make this vision a reality,
we need to follow a three-step plan.
Next year, we will buy more secondhand than firsthand fashion.
In the year after, we buy nothing.
We lend, swap and repair.
And in the years to come, we can live a life in pride
and with endless possibilities of self-expression.
In a time
where we can fly to space,
where we talk about DNA babies
and we have self driverless cars,
I believe this vision can be a reality.
Ladies and gentlemen,
let’s build the world’s largest closet together.
Thank you.
(Applause)