Margaret “Maggie” Mangan at her antique storefront, “Margaret’s Closet,” at LaGrange Park Antique Mall (800 E. 31st St., LaGrange Park)
Maggie Mangan
With fast fashion ever-prevalent in today’s online shopping atmosphere, Maggie Mangan is doing her part to ensure people have access to a curated style of clothing, filled with merchandise that isn’t hastily made in bulk in factories with cheap materials that pollute our environment.
“We already have so many things here, and we don’t need to be mass-producing ******, cheap fabric like polyester that takes up to 200 years to decompose,” Mangan said in an interview with The Xavierite.
Mangan sells antique clothing at her own storefront, “Margaret’s Closet,” at LaGrange Park Antique Mall. According to Mangan, most of these clothes are made from biodegradable materials like cotton, linen, suede, and leather.
“So, if they do end up in a landfill, God forbid, some of them do,” Mangan described, “but they can at least decompose faster and it’s not as bad for the environment. The clothes in fast fashion that are being made today are going to be on this planet for hundreds of years.”
Mangan asserts that purchasing resold goods is the most ethical way to consume, especially clothing, and believes all people should consume secondhand. To find items for her shop, Mangan will go to various Goodwill locations, which she says typically have bins of merchandise that are refilled multiple times daily and can be purchased for approximately $1.65/lb.
“There’s probably, like, fifty bins per store,” said Mangan, “and they get changed multiple times per day.”
Many of these clothes, according to Mangan, end up in landfills if nobody takes them, a large reason why she feels such a sense of urgency to resell clothes. Another reason is the often extreme unethical nature of the conditions in which fast fashion clothing items are made.
“Carbon emissions is one of the leading industries destroying our planet,” Mangan stated during our interview, “and on top of that, slave labor, [which] is why prices are so low [with brands] like Shein and Temu.”
Another large concern of Mangan’s is the growing habit of people throwing clothes away, believing sewing to be growing into “a lost art.”
Mangan even mentioned a desire to host events where people are taught how to sew so they can repair their own clothing instead of throwing it away. She hopes things like this will revitalize people’s respect for not only their own clothing, but fashion more broadly.
“I think we’ve just kind of become, like, ungrateful with fashion because everything, nowadays, is so cheap and fast, and fashion is meant to be very intentional, like, how you express yourself, and it used to be something people put a lot of time into making, and it still is if you do it the correct way,” Mangan said.
“Margaret’s Closet” can be found @margarets_closet_lgpantique on Instagram. Mangan will be hosting a Mother’s Day pop-up shop event with “Margaret’s Closet” on May 9 from 10 AM to 1 PM at Deesignz Lash & Brow Studio (708 E. 31st St., LaGrange Park).
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