My father was a garment-maker who taught me to cut waste. Buy secondhand and you wear your values on your sleeve

• Halima Begum is chief executive of Oxfam GB

I still find the hum of a foot-pedal sewing machine incredibly therapeutic. It’s a sound I associate with my father, once a garment-maker in London’s East End. From my earliest childhood, Dad instilled in me the value of a piece of clothing and the art of its creation, as well as the need to reduce waste in its manufacture.

In those days that was not because he knew anything about the harmful environmental impact of the clothing industry, but because the less material he used as a piecemeal tailor the more he was paid.