Zady Is Here—And Looking To Change How We Shop

I’d be lying if I didn’t cop to the occasional fast-fashion shopping spree: It’s just too tempting not to test-drive every (age-appropriate) trend at a great price point. I used to be far worse when I lived in New York, where I’d literally binge on H&M and Zara every weekend—hilarious, in retrospect, since I lived in an apartment that felt like the cabin of a ship. I had two very small closets. And an oven! Like a bad Sex in the City episode, I thought about storing stuff in there.

Now that I need to drive to a mall and park (and oh, I have a baby!), I don’t go nuts like I used to: Also, my nine-month break from my closet created enough emotional distance, that I can look at all of my clothes a lot more objectively. (I've always found that when I need to get rid of stuff but feeling torn, it helps to pack it in a bag and store it away—when I check back in on it after enough time has passed, I'm fully ready to drop it all off at Goodwill.) Because here’s the thing: As the shoe-line 80/20 makes clear, like everyone else around, I wear 20% of my closet, 80% of the time. And I wear that 20% hard, so it makes sense to focus on high-quality stuff.

Enter new shopping upstart Zady, conceived and launched by Maxine Bedat and Soraya Darabi, where the premise is that our cultural addiction to fast fashion just isn’t sustainable: It’s bad for the environment, it’s bad for our closets, and it’s ultimately bad for our wallets…because buying stuff that you’ll only wear a couple of times is just terrible cost-per-wear math. Quite simply: Sometimes cheap clothing is far more expensive than investing in something that you’ll wear for years. Here’s a horrifying statistic from Zady’s Why Zady page: “More than 2.5 billion pounds of used clothing ends up in landfills each year. That is 67 pounds that each of us, on average, sends directly to the trash dump.”

Zady is focused on the “conscious-consumer,” i.e., people who want to know who made the item they’re wearing, and where it came from: They’re sourcing artisan-made items that have a story, and that were made with purpose. It’s all admirable stuff. (I encourage you to read their entire letter.)

The site offers a range of items—jewelry, men’s jeans, home goods—that all ascribes to a modern/organic vibe. Nothing is so loud that you can’t wear it every week, and it’s all built to last. Here, the things lingering in my shopping cart (though, like everyone, I could probably stand to shop less!).

clockwise, l-r: SUNDRY SWEATPANTS, $98.00, Zady; SHINOLA CLASSIC NOTEBOOKS, $14.50, Zady; IMOGENE & WILLIE BARTON SLIM JEANS, $275.00, Zady; MONDIAL LUS CLASSIC ITALIAN PUSH PINS, $4.50, Zady; SUNDRY STARS T-SHIRT, $68.00, Zady; SCOSHA ARROW BRACELET, $98.00, Zady.

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