To raise awareness for the environment and celebrate Earth Day, Thrifting Club planned the first Eco Spirit Week featuring various activities, including a mini Club Rush and a fashion show Monday-Friday, April 21-25.
“The club’s goal is to try to enforce sustainability through fashion,” Thrifting Club co-president junior Nia Cambal said. “We want a lot of people participating because we wanted to make it as trendy as possible and also easy to do.”
Co-president junior Olivia Nguyen said Eco Spirit Week is a “generic spirit week” but with themes more tailored to the environment.
“You can wear patterns for the environment like in nature, the animals or camo,” Nguyen said. “Bringing anything but a backpack day, but make it eco edition, so you bring tote bags or recyclable stuff.”
Associated Student Body [ASB] adviser David Fenstermaker said Eco Spirit Week differs from usual spirit weeks, which only the ASB activities group coordinates.
“The theme is more geared toward service,” Fenstermaker said. “It’s definitely from a club, as opposed to from ASB, which is different, and then it’s from sort of the ground up, as opposed to just top down, meaning that we didn’t put it together, they did.”
NOT FAST FASHION, BUT ETHICAL
Nguyen said the club worked with the ASB to include a free fashion show in the quad on Thursday, April 24, at 4:15 p.m.
The co-president said she formulated the idea while participating in the Live2Free Club’s annual Fair Trade Fashion Show at Vanguard University on Thursday, Oct. 17, at the invitation of one of the university’s coordinators.
“I reached out to the people that I worked with at the Vanguard Fair Trade Fashion Show, and I asked them if they wanted to come and give a presentation at ours,” Nguyen said. “And they’re actually totally down to do it, so the minute Mr. Fenstermaker gives us a ‘Yes, you can do this,’ that will be our plan.”
The Live2Free Club’s fashion show aimed to raise awareness about unfair labor practices in the industry and to discourage fast fashion. The event was student-led, free and open to the public, according to Vanguard University’s website.
“I was really inspired by it, and I thought it would be fun to have it during Earth Day; we don’t have anything like that at school,” said Nguyen, who pitched the spirit week idea to Fenstermaker on Tuesday, Jan. 7.
Nguyen also saw the spirit week as an opportunity to complete her International Baccalaureate [IB] Creativity, Activity, Service project, which, according to the IB website, is “one of the three essential elements that every student must complete as part of the Diploma Programme.”
“I was talking to my mom about how I wanted to host a similar fashion show at Sunny Hills,” Nguyen said. “Then, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to have a brand new spirit week based around Earth Day and to have a fashion show happening sometime during the week?’”
Though Fenstermaker has yet to confirm the event, Cambal and Nguyen plan to talk to Fenstermaker and finalize the details of the fashion show on Tuesday, April 22.
Nguyen said if the event happens, the show will host volunteer models wearing ethically sourced clothing and costumes, allowing students to showcase their favorite thrifted items, outfits, costumes, cultural clothing or outfits designed by Nguyen’s team.
“[The Thrifting Club members] came to me and asked me if they could [do] the things that we do in ASB, like promoting and putting it on a bigger stage, because they were a club but wanted to access some of the resources that ASB has,” the ASB adviser said. “They were passionate about this idea, so we wanted to see how they could sort of implement it.”
Nguyen said she encourages students and teachers to participate in the event, and that if the event is confirmed, the club will post information and put up posters with more details, including a QR code that interested models can scan to access a sign-up Google Form.
“I want it to be kind of similar to ‘Dancing with the Staff’ with the number of people that show up,” Nguyen said. “I was thinking if teachers were to model in it and have funny costumes, students would be like, ‘Oh, I want to go to this.’”
Nguyen said she hopes this spirit week becomes an annual event, though that would require further discussions with Fenstermaker.
PLANTING THE SEEDS FOR SUSTAINABILITY
The Thrifting Club collaborated with the ASB and other clubs to host a mini Club Rush featuring other groups with a similar sustainability focus on Friday, April 25.
At the event, the participating clubs, including Helping Hands, Teens2Tots and others, will set up tables where students can learn about each group and take some goodies.
“We did intend for the event to be more like a market, where clubs could sell goodies for club funds, but this would have been difficult with all the money being handled,” Nguyen said.
The co-president said that each table will have parts of the materials for a plant-kit-making station, in which students can get a pot of soil at the first table, a packet of seeds at the next, and continue until they can decorate their final bag with the seeds and the pot to take home.
“This last spot will be the biggest section, and we’ll have stickers, markers and ribbons laid out for people to decorate with before they leave with their completed plant kit,” Nguyen said. “This will also be first-come, first-served, as we only have 40 kits available.”
Thrifting Club adviser and Spanish teacher Cindy Ruiz said she wants this spirit week to unite people in recognizing the importance of caring for the planet.
“I think it’d be awesome if we come together to not only show our school spirit, but see the purpose of the spirit week and see what we can do to help our environment and how we can work together to improve the Earth that we live in,” Ruiz said.
