I did not get into the vintage clothing business because I wanted to run a sustainable clothing business.
That might sound strange coming from someone whose entire shop is built on secondhand fashion. But it's the truth, and I think it matters. I absolutely love vintage clothing — for the craftsmanship, the history stitched into every seam, the thrill of finding a piece nobody else will have. The fact that vintage shopping is one of the most sustainable choices you can make for the environment? That's a bonus. A big one. But it was never the starting point.
Sustainability Before It Had A Name
Here's what I didn't understand until I'd moved far enough away from it to see it clearly: the culture I grew up in was sustainable long before "sustainable fashion" was a hashtag or a marketing category. Nobody called it that. It was just how things were done. With intention and conscious of community. You mended. You passed down. You reused. You didn't waste, because waste didn't make sense in a community where everything and everyone was connected.
It took leaving that culture to recognize what it actually was: a worldview built around people and oneness. The environmental care was real, but it was the result of something else — not the goal.
That something else has a name: Ubuntu.
What Ubuntu Actually Means
Ubuntu is a Southern African philosophy, often summarized as "I am because we are." It comes from Nguni Bantu roots and it centers on the idea that our humanity is bound up in each other's. You don't exist as an isolated individual optimizing your own outcomes. You exist in relationship. Your relationship with yourself, with others, and the cosmos.
This is a fundamentally different starting point than most modern conversations about sustainability, which tend to center the environment first and ask people to adjust their behavior to protect it. Ubuntu flips that order. It says: nourish the people, and the environment gets nourished too. Not because people are told to conserve resources for the planet's sake, but because a community that truly takes care of its own people has no room for the excess, the waste, and the disposability that damage the planet in the first place.
Fast fashion is, in a sense, the opposite of Ubuntu. It's built on disconnection — from the person who made the garment, from the person who wore it before you, from the consequences of throwing it away next season. It treats clothing, and by extension people, as disposable. A people-centered culture doesn't produce that kind of waste, because it doesn't produce that kind of disconnection.
Why This Shapes How I Sell Vintage Clothing
So when I say Seventh Row sells vintage clothing, I don't lead with "shop sustainably." I lead with something closer to: every piece here already has a story, and it deserves another chapter. That Christian Dior robe, that Y2K slip dress, that quiet-luxury cashmere sweater — someone chose it once, wore it, lived in it. Selling it again isn't just diverting textiles from a landfill. It's continuing a relationship between a garment and the people who value it.
That's the Ubuntu lens applied to my vintage shop:
- People first. I want the people who shop with me to feel genuinely nourished by what they find — not guilt-tripped into buying vintage because it's the "responsible" choice, but excited because it's beautiful, well-made, and theirs.
- Connection over consumption. Every piece in this shop passed through someone else's life first with love. That continuity is the point, not a side effect. You're in the Seventh Row
- Sustainability as a byproduct, not a pitch. The environmental benefit of buying vintage is real and worth talking about. But it's downstream of a deeper value: caring for people well enough that waste stops making sense.
Sustainability Without the Guilt Trip
A lot of sustainable fashion messaging asks shoppers to feel bad about fast fashion so they'll feel good about the alternative. Ubuntu offers a gentler and, I think, more honest frame: take care of people, and the planet takes care of itself. When you buy vintage from Seventh Row, you're not just keeping a garment out of a landfill. You're participating in something older and more human than the sustainability movement — a culture that never separated "good for people" from "good for the earth" in the first place.
That's why I do this. Not because I set out to build a sustainable clothing business, but because I was raised inside a philosophy where sustainability was never a strategy. It was just Sunday morning.
- Linda Ruvarashe, founder of Seventh Row
Shop the current collection at Seventh Row — every piece has a past, and we'd love to help you give it a future.