I have always been a person who appreciated life’s pleasures. I love to lay around in the sunlight, I love the sound of birds chirping, I love it when the early morning light sneaks into my bedroom in the first hours of the day, and I greatly appreciate my space. I have always felt that, as long as I had a space in which I could fully be myself, where I could rest and roll and read, that I would be very content. So it’s no surprise that I take great care of how I organize my bedroom, it is where I spend most of my time.

This morning I woke up and decided I wanted to spend a few hours clearing out my wardrobe and my dressing. It had occurred to me that I had changed nothing in my space for the longest time. And so I got to it, I went through my products and my clothes and made piles of what I wanted to keep and what I didn’t. I ended up keeping a good deal of my things, because they were bought from abroad, or because they were too valuable and I would not be able to buy them again now; in light of the recent inflation and the various problems with imports. This made me notice just how little I bought clothes and products from local brands. Most of my clothes were purchased either from fast fashion brands, or from big fashion houses. It got me thinking how, especially in light of our national economic situation, we should focus more of our monetary efforts towards supporting local businesses and brands.

Our community has taken a hard hit with the recent global shifts, imports are becoming stricter and stricter, and the prices of these fashion brands are getting less and less attainable. It seems only reasonable that we take a direction we would’ve been taking a long time ago, to shop local.

Supporting our home-grown brands is not only smart money-wise, it’s also a more unique range of products. Because local brands cater to such niche audiences, their products are rarely mass produced. The chance of seeing your favorite statement piece on someone else is thin. To me, personally, that’s my favorite aspect of shopping from smaller businesses — the uniqueness of each and every piece. An unfortunate side effect of fast fashion brands is that they make us all look alike, and so we lose our sense of self and our identity. We end up looking like replicas of each other, like a mainstream flow of the same thing over and over again.

Local businesses bring out a sense of community in us, which is sadly something we seem to be lacking when it comes to supporting homegrown fashion. And while some might argue that local brands do not rival the materials of global fashion houses, I believe that the best way to improve the quality of their products is to support them in order for them to have space to grow. That is what community is all about, supporting each other in order to improve.

Now is not the time to be mainstream or to conform to the standard, if anything, now is the time to each individually find our own creative voices and explore our identities beyond the realms of the social standard. Beauty is more celebrated than ever before now, unique is the new trendy. And that is thus-far my favorite shift in fashion culture that I’ve witnessed.