Some amount of time ago, I was talking with Idris and they suddenly said something that made me go: “wow, I can write an article about this!” So here I am, writing an article about how the Koornbeurs is contributing to the fast fashion industry by creating shirts with all the Owee themes, Nowee themes and all other themes that have their own shirts.
So let’s start off with defining what fast fashion is exactly. It’s the cheap and fast production of clothing that falls out of fashion quickly. Now, since I haven’t really seen any fashion trend take off that much in the KB, we might as well change the definition a slight bit to say that “falling out of fashion” is about the same as a piece of clothing becoming irrelevant. Unfortunately that does happen a lot with the Owee and Nowee theme shirts we create. Personally, I have no desire to buy or wear shirts from events I wasn’t at (except Toegang voor Onbevoegden but that was just a banger theme) and I have noticed that sentiment from other koornbeursers as well. This means that old shirts will be bought less, and eventually fall irrelevant as we move away from that theme. They have become more a show of how long you have been a member here (which also might come with a show of superiority that I might or might not yap about later).
It wouldn’t be so much of an issue if it were just a few events, but we have a lot of different themes for events that all have their own shirt. Like I mentioned earlier we have Owee and Nowee, but also MBB and not to forget other events that have their own shirt. Almost all of them have a certain amount that we need to order, so then we’ll have some amount left over that goes into the storage and stays there for longer than is useful. Maybe the fomoki will sell some of them, but that doesn’t really defeat my point of having too many of them.
But hey, unlike a lot of other associations, Koornbeursers actually continue wearing the shirts when the event is over. We do have the culture to not waste the shirts. And for recurring events like Metalcafe or Dixxo Herman it’s actually useful to wear them more often for both promotion reasons and being recognized as personnel. That’s at least a whole lot better than only wearing Owee shirts during Owee, then never wearing it again. And I also like that we generally try to keep that in mind when designing the themes and merch.
I hope this article gave a little bit of perspective on the subject, so those of you reading this article can think about it yourself and perhaps be a bit more mindful of which shirts you want to buy and which ones you might want to miss out on.