We love fashion for how it makes us feel confident, expressive, put together. But what we don’t often see is where fashion ends up.

Every year, millions of tonnes of clothing are discarded. Much of it is worn only a handful of times before being thrown away ending up in landfill, incinerators, or as pollution in our environment. And it doesn’t stop here either. It affects communities in the Global South including where my parents were born. In other words, what feels like a quick trend or impulse buy doesn’t just disappear. It becomes waste.

That’s why I’m doing something a little different.

I’ll be litter picking in carefully styled outfits with a maximalist style using fashion itself to draw attention to the waste it helps create. The contrast is intentional. The same industry that produces beauty, creativity, and identity is also responsible for enormous environmental impact.

But this isn’t just about individual choices or littering. It’s about a system that often designs things to be disposable where overproduction and waste are built in from the start.

I’m raising funds for the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, an organisation working across industries from fashion to plastics to tackle waste at its source. Their work is built around the idea of a circular economy. For example, designing products and systems so materials are reused, rather than thrown away.

And as someone that believes fashion is more than clothes, I gravitate towards this as it means rethinking how clothes are made, worn, and reused so that waste and pollution are no longer inevitable, but designed out.

By supporting this fundraiser, you’re helping push for a future where clothes are made to last by tackling the issue at its source, as opposed to waste being an afterthought , and a solution oriented approach with their emphasis on a circular economy which I feel is necessary given the impact of fast fashion and capitalism.