It all started with a high school AP Environmental Science class, and the rest was history.
Though she had known she wanted to go into the fashion industry her entire life, that one high school class made the University of Wisconsin-Madison junior Yvett Sanchez think twice about why. Three years later, her academic career at UW-Madison had become centered around fashion and its crossroads between sustainability and equity.
Yvett founded ReWearIt, a student organization dedicated to ethical consumerism and education on fast fashion, in her second year at UW-Madison. Since its founding, the organization has seen exponential growth with more than 40 active members and over 300 signups at the Student Organization Fair.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Tell me a bit about ReWearIt. Why did you start it?
I started ReWearIt last semester because I was kind of having a midlife crisis – I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I was feeling super unmotivated in my studies, partially because I just did not like doing fashion design online at all. I also realized sewing garments is just not my thing. I've always had an interest in sustainability since high school when I took AP environmental studies. I was just kind of curious about how fashion has a role in things like climate change, so I watched this documentary called “The True Cost,” which shows the negative social-environmental impacts of the fashion industry. I couldn't believe my eyes.
I was finally like, you know what, there aren’t enough classes here in SOHE and in general that talk about fashion in terms of sustainability. Also, with the sustainability certificate, you have to do a community engagement project. I've had this idea of starting the organization for a while because I saw other universities like the University of Miami or the University of Florida had a similar organization. I thought, you know what, there's nothing like this at UW-Madison, and I haven't seen anyone else want to start it, so I might as well do it. It was the perfect opportunity.
How much has the organization grown since you founded it?
It'll be a year in February. The response has been really great. I wasn't expecting that many students to be so excited about joining an organization like this during the pandemic, but I had a lot of support from the School of Human Ecology. They posted a few times for me about starting the org. Now that we're in person, we were at the student org fair, and we got over 300 members to sign up for our email list. We get about 30 to 40 people coming to our meetings consistently, which is something I'm really proud of.
What do you do at ReWearIt?
We have general body meetings where we meet once a month. We either do a discussion activity, like a video, which we did during our last meeting. We watched the “Patriot Act” episode about fast fashion and we just talked about it at the end.
In the past, like last semester, and [at] our next meeting in November, we have speakers who work in sustainable fashion come to talk to us about how they got started and the problems they see in the fashion industry and how they address it.
Another big component that we want to do more of is clothing swaps, which is mostly what our members are excited about.
You started ReWearIt during the COVID-19 pandemic. How did you manage founding a club and getting people engaged with it in an online format?
Keeping people engaged during the pandemic was definitely a challenge. At the same time, I think it was almost easier because we were so new and people were really excited to be involved. Our meeting numbers during the pandemic were a little lower with the exception of our first meeting which had 40 to 50 people, which was insane.
As far as keeping people engaged, I just tried to make the meetings fun and have a social or trivia night once in a while, or bring in speakers that would resonate with our members. Last semester, one of our speakers here was a student that started her own sustainable streetwear brand called Good Conscious. I try to always listen to what people want from us because I think it’s really important to keep them engaged.
What other things do you have going on that you’re excited about with ReWearIt?
We also have a little project that we have going on on the side. Last year, we were invited to be a part of a Green Fund project to create a permanent space where students can swap their clothes. Hopefully, by next year, there'll be a permanent location on campus, kind of like a thrift store, where people can go swap their clothes and have easy access to secondhand clothing.
Outside of ReWearIt, what else are you involved in – what’s your Wisconsin Experience like?
I’m involved in quite a few things. First, I'm an intern at the Office of Sustainability in the Green Office on the Green Greeks and the Green Athletics team. So with the Green Office team, I work with different offices across campus to certify their offices as “green”. For Green Greeks, I help certify Greek chapters as green and implement sustainable practices within their chapter. With athletics, we work with a group of student-athletes to help push sustainable initiatives within athletics.
Another thing I've been involved in on campus since my freshman year is my scholarship program. I'm a part of the Mercile J. Lee scholars. I'm like the personal contact chair for the program, so I'm just in charge of making sure my fellow scholars attend our monthly meetings and making sure everyone's birthdays are being recognized.
I'm also part of The Artisan Collective, which is a student-run business that sells artisan goods from women in Nepal, Mexico and Ecuador. It really stayed with me because I love the mission and like the idea of fair trade, which is something that goes with sustainable fashion.
I'm loosely involved with the Latinx Student Union. I was a part of it my freshman year, but I'm starting to go more now. The Latinx community, in general, is something that I try to be a part of because it’s difficult to find your people at a predominantly white institution (PWI) like UW-Madison.
After college, what are you hoping to do, and what do you want your future to look like?
I really hope to get more connections within the sustainable fashion industry or just the fashion industry in general and hopefully start my career by working with a company that really does prioritize sustainability. After that, I hope to start my own consulting company where I help either startup brands get into the fashion space and help them implement sustainable practices and then also help existing brands implement sustainable practices within their company.
I also want to help be a voice for the Latinx community because I know for a lot of us, sustainability is something that's really rooted in our culture, and a lot of the fashion industry is white. I want to show that you can be a person of color in this space and care about sustainability and fashion.
