As the author of What Would The Spice Girls Do, How To Break Up With Fast Fashion, and reams of lifestyle magazine articles, Preloved by Lauren Bravo is the writer’s debut novel and TBH, we’re thrilled she’s diversified into fiction.
How To Break Up With Fast Fashion came out in 2020 as an exposé of everything wrong with the high street... It is a must-read if you want to learn about sustainability and fashion industry reform. And while that’s high up our priority list, sometimes we just want to curl up with a chai latte of a novel – an optimistic and engaging (but not too edgy) story that comforts and cossets us.
Enter Preloved… Telling the tale of Gwen, a thirty-something navigating redundancy, painful family relationships, bereavement and friendship that seems to be trickling away… Preloved centres around the charity shop where Gwen volunteers. Gwen has the kind of I know her / I am her reliability, and even though her adventures aren’t glossed over with main character energy (she’s rooting around the donations bags in a North London charity shop), you root for her on every turn of the page. We’re waiting for Preloved to be optioned by Reese Witherspoon or at least adapted into a binge-worthy Netflix series…
While Gwen’s romantic antics and relationships at every level are spliced through with narratives of charity shop life, the golden thread of the book is female friendship.
GLAMOUR caught up with Lauren over Zoom from her home while her two-month-old baby was sleeping to discuss shopping, sustainability and how to navigate grown-up friendships. Lauren explained, “I had been sold this idea (through TV shows like Friends and Girls) that female friendship is only valid if it's incredibly intense, incredibly close… if you are having baths together, seeing each other naked on a daily basis, holding each other's skirt when you pee onto a pregnancy test stick… If you're really lucky, you do have that in your early 20s, but once you get into your 30s, people's lives start changing.
"You have to prioritise work, family commitments, children, potentially partners, potentially ageing parents (over) friendships, and it becomes much harder. There can be a real disconnect between the friendships we imagined we would have and the friendships that we actually have.” As we watch Gwen clamber over familial relationships, potential romances and sex as well as as best friend who seems impossibly far away, Lauren believes “Preloved is definitely a love story about friendships more than anything else.”
Scattered through Gwen’s story are mini-chapters telling the tales of the treasures that populate the shop. “Society has taught us to be quite materialistic,” muses Lauren. “We value things, but there's a real romance to objects as well. It's not always the flashy or expensive thing that you become sentimentally attached to… often it will be a really innocuous item that sparks some kind of memory. In an increasingly isolated world, where often we're more connected through our devices than through face-to-face contact, objects can actually hold a special place.”
Indeed, Gwen’s relationships are mainly conducted digitally. And in comparison to homes that have been Marie Kondo’d within an inch of their lives, Lauren believes there's nothing wrong with surrounding yourself with stuff. “I love clutter!” she joyfully admits. But when it is time for a clearout… the charity shop is often our first port of call.
As a regular volunteer herself, Lauren shares the secrets of the charity shop… Preloved describes the ‘Oh my God’ moments of volunteering when Gwen discovers a dildo in a bag of donations. So, what was Lauren’s most gruesome discovery? “I haven't actually had a dildo, sadly, but I know they are frequently donated… We've definitely had bondage gear, and we found something with human hair in, too… Dubious stains are a weekly occurrence.”
With charity shops, there’s a moral code that if you wouldn’t buy it, you shouldn’t donate it. But sometimes charity shops seem closer to bins than boutiques. It seems people lose their sense of shame when donating, but Lauren disagrees, “I think people are actually trying to retain their moral compass. Donating is potentially a way of appeasing their guilt at having bought a life full of things that are ultimately going to end up in the bin. They think, ‘If I give it to a charity shop, hopefully, they'll be able to do something with it and make some money from it.’ I think it's a way of appeasing their own conscience.”
Lauren compares society’s misguided optimism as to the magic charity shops can create to wish cycling, the equally misguided way in which we put things in the recycling that probably can’t be recycled. We’re hopeful that maybe technology has advanced, and maybe they can turn that baby wipe/crisp packet/blister pack into something new.
“We know deep down that it can’t [be recycled], and we’re probably causing more problems for somebody down the line, but we still think, ‘Oh, if I put it in recycling, maybe there's a chance that it will get turned into something new.’ I think it's similar thinking when people donate crap to charity shops because they believe maybe someone can cut it up and make something from it… and maybe they can.”
According to recent research, 80% of UK households don't know how to recycle effectively.
So how can we donate responsibly? Lauren is at the front line. “Charity shops are swamped with donations at the moment. We get given so many things that we can't sell. Even perfectly good stuff won't all sell. It's not enough to use charity shops as a dumping ground. If you're going to donate a bag of stuff, you have to stop and browse. A character in the book does the classic thing of just dumping a big bin bag full of stuff inside the door, calling out “donations!” and off they go. Unfortunately, if everybody does that, charity shops become another linear economy.”
Preloved hints at another area of fast fashion’s unsustainable impact on the planet… and how that impacts charity shops too. “Most people don't realise that many big high street brands donate unsold stock (to charity shops) as a tax loss,” reveals Lauren. “The idea that you might find something brand new is an incentive for people who are squeamish about second-hand to go charity shopping. But the truth is that brands are incentivised to make far too much stock.
The single biggest problem with the high street today is overproduction. Brands keep margins low by making huge volumes of clothes, but what often happens is those clothes end up in a warehouse and don't ever see the shop floor. Brands absolve themselves by donating a certain amount to charity, and it's better than burning stock (Burberry came under fire a few years ago for burning £28million worth of stock), but it still contributes to the problem where brands wash their hands of the one thing they could do to make the most dramatic difference to sustainability - radically reducing the amount that they're producing.”
Just because you're donating, doesn't mean they won't go to landfill.
As well as the stomach-churning and eye-opening, charity shops offer everyone hope. Lauren has found some gems in her time volunteering.
“Everybody has heard the urban legend of somebody who found a Chanel 2.55 handbag in a charity shop. I think (that sort of find) is becoming less common, but we get quite a lot of Marni in my charity shop. Depending on which manager is in that day, you might get really lucky, and it could be priced really low.” But it’s certainly harder to find designer gems or true vintage in charity shops now.
Obviously, shoppers are keen to make a return on their investment, if they can, by reselling brands on Vestiaire Collective as we navigate the cost of living crisis, and Lauren also points out the rise of vintage sellers (as echoed by one of the characters in Preloved.)
“There are people whose job is to go shopping, source quality pieces and sell them on at a higher price.” So real vintage gets snapped up quicker, too, but you can’t have missed the masses of fast fashion on the racks these days… Lauren believes charity shops are a visual demonstration of how quickly clothing moves through our lives. “Often you see items in charity shops that were on the high street just three months ago. It's a perfect representation of how fast fashion has become so cheap that people can afford to buy so much more.
It's become normalised to buy a new outfit every week then once it’s been on your Instagram grid, or your TikTok, it's completely normal to then cast it off again. In charity shops, we see many clothes that still have the tags on. They represent people bulk buying fashion. Hauls, where people empty out hundreds of pounds worth of clothes onto their bed, film a video with it, and don’t wear half of it, means it heads to the charity shop.”
Serving some inspiration to help you live more consciously
Preloved’s reminder of sustainable shopping and the disposability of our culture is subtle.
“Rather than banging a drum for the environmental cost of fast fashion, I wanted to plant a seed of reminding people that every item that ends up in a charity shop was once made by human hands.” Lauren points out, “Fiction can play a really important role in making people think about issues and humanity. It's true for so many social problems. People have been moved to think differently about racism, sexism and discrimination through reading fiction rather than reading the facts. Storytelling has always been a way to reach people when cold hard statistics feel scary, overwhelming or inaccessible…”
With tough issues at its core, Preloved is still intimate and joyful. While you’ll find no spoiler alerts here, there is an optimistic finish. GLAMOUR wonders, why do you think people need happy endings?
“I'm going to quote Marian Keyes, who once said that she thinks that to give people a book that doesn't have a happy ending is just rude, which I agree with! You don't have to tie everything up neatly in a bow, but I needed (Preloved) to be uplifting and hopeful too. I couldn't have spent a year and a half of my life writing a book that didn't have a hopeful conclusion.
"Particularly when we're living among bleakness and uncertainty, it’s a privilege when somebody chooses to sit down with a book you've written and invested hours of their life with a character; you owe it to them to give that character a satisfactory ending. I've had so many experiences where I've loved a book right up until the 5% and then I want to hurl it across the room!" You just feel cheated. And I couldn't do that to readers.”
Buy Preloved by Lauren Bravo here.
Read more from Glamour UK Fashion Director at large Alex Fullerton here or follow her on Instagram @alexandrafullerton
