Students donated old clothes in a clothing drive held by the Fashion and Sustainability club Wednesday, June 2. 

According to club officers, the drive gathered around 500 pounds of clothing. After putting up posters advertising for the clothing drive, sophomores Julia Ma, Cathy Zhao, and Christina Schmidt-Hong said they expected only a few people to bring clothing for the event.

“We show up, the whole table is stacked,” said Ma, “It was crazy.”

The collected clothing was donated to Second Chances, a charity that provides clothing and other forms of aid to homeless people in need.

According to Zhao, Ma, and Schmidt-Hong, the drive was done in order to help combat fast fashion and clothing waste in Massachusetts. “It was just so heartwarming to see that people actually cared about these issues,” said Zhao.

The officers decided to organize the clothing drive shortly after they began to focus more on sustainability aspects of the fashion industry in club meetings, Ma added. 

“We realized that there’s a very important side of fashion, too, which is sustainability, so we actually expanded our brand to Fashion and Sustainability club, so we just talked about all sorts of things related to sustainability,” said Ma.

According to Schmidt-Hong, the officers are planning to install a thrift store at North in order to reduce fabric waste and provide students with an easy way to access cheaply-priced clothing.

“The clothing drive was a way to get our name out there a little bit more, and we do have bigger plans for next year, so it was just sort of a start to that.” Schmidt-Hong added.