Fashion sounds shallow until you actually pay attention to what people are wearing on the bus to Msida, or in the quad between lectures. The girl in an oversized football shirt and chunky boots. The guy in full black with eyeliner and silver rings. The friend who literally lives in thrifted floral skirts and Doc Martens. None of that is random. It’s like subtitles for who we are.
In Malta, we pretend we don’t care that much, but we clearly do. Eurostat data once showed that clothing and footwear made up as much as 7.9% of household spending here, the highest share in the EU at the time. Even in more recent stats, Maltese households still put around 4.5% of their total budget into clothes and shoes, which is only slightly below the EU average. For such a tiny island, that’s a lot of money going into outfits.
What’s funny is that clothes here are not even cheap. World Bank data shows Malta’s clothing and footwear prices at about 134 on an index where the world average is 100, so we’re paying above-average prices for what we wear. So if we’re spending more than we can really afford, on things that cost more than the global norm, there has to be a reason beyond “I was bored and went to Sliema.”
I think for a lot of us, especially girls my age, fashion is how we push back against how small Malta can feel. When you grow up in a place where everyone knows who your parents are, what school you went to and probably what your neighbour had for dinner, it’s hard to feel original. Clothes give you a bit of control. You can’t change the size of the island, but you can decide if today you’re dressing soft, loud, political, or invisible.
There’s proper research backing this up, not just my TikTok feed. One recent study on clothing preferences and self perception found that young people agreed that style is a key way they express who they are. Another report says around 90% of young adults feel influenced by social media when making fashion choices. Scroll through Maltese Instagram or TikTok and you see it instantly: girls matching Shein hauls with thrifted jackets, guys mixing vintage football tops with new sneakers, everyone copying and remixing looks they see online.
But there’s another side to it that we don’t like to talk about. According to a sustainable shopping survey highlighted by a Maltese fashion activist, Malta actually ranked last in Europe when it comes to sustainable fashion habits. We also had one of the lowest recycling rates in the EU, with only about 10.5% of our total waste being recycled in 2020. At a Malta Sustainability Forum webinar, a speaker even pointed out that people today own around five times more clothing items than their grandparents did.
So on one hand, we say we care about the planet. On the other, we’re filling our wardrobes with cheap pieces that fall apart after a few washes. It’s like we’re using fashion to make a statement about who we are, but sometimes the statement is “I’m stressed and this 7 euro top made me feel better for five minutes.”
The good thing is that something is shifting. You can see it in Valletta and Sliema where more second hand and vintage shops are popping up. Maltese media has started talking about how thrifting and clothes swapping are becoming a real alternative for young people here, with more of us choosing pre loved clothes over another fast fashion haul. Fashion Revolution Malta is active, too, organising events that make people think about who made their clothes and under what conditions.
For me, using fashion to make a statement in Malta is about three things.
First, identity. Some days I show up to campus in wide leg jeans, a tiny top and huge jewellery because I want to feel loud and unignorable. Other days I wear baggy hoodies and trainers because I want to blend into the background. Both are versions of me. My friends do the same. One of them wears Palestinian keffiyeh scarves with her outfits, on purpose, as a political statement. Another refuses to shop from certain brands because of worker exploitation. It’s not just “what’s cute”, it’s what feels right.
Second, community. When I see another girl wearing a tiny independent Maltese brand, or a tote bag from a local art market, there’s this silent “ok, you get it.” The same goes for the people who show up in fully thrifted looks. It’s like we’re building little tribes through what we wear.
Third, responsibility. I’m not going to pretend I never buy fast fashion, that would be a lie. But I’ve started asking myself more questions: Will I wear this at least 30 times? Can I style it with things I already own? Could I have found something similar second hand? Those questions are small, but they change what ends up in my wardrobe, even if it’s one item at a time.
If I had to imagine one last graphic for this article, it would be a simple circle split into three parts labelled “Identity”, “Community” and “Responsibility”, with “Fashion in Malta” in the middle. Not perfect, not sustainable enough yet, but definitely more meaningful than just “what’s trending”.
Fashion here isn’t just about looking nice for a night out in Paceville or getting the right fit for Independence Day mass. It’s become a language for our generation. We use it to say “this is who I am”, “this is what I stand for” and sometimes “this is what I’m still figuring out”. On a small island where everyone thinks they already know you, that kind of self written caption feels powerful.
We can’t fix the entire fashion industry by choosing one pair of jeans over another. But we can decide what we are saying every time we get dressed. And for a 16 year old girl in Malta trying to build a life that actually feels like hers, that’s not nothing.