Cheap, trendy clothing is certainly alluring — but it’s also killing the planet, and even us.
Today’s millennials, zillenials, and Gen Z-ers all grew up with an acute awareness of the dire situation of our planet. Environmentalism efforts have grown rapidly in the last few decades, and climate change has been pushed to the forefront of many policy issues alongside the rise of green “stars” such as Bernie Sanders, Greta Thunberg, and AOC. And yet, if you’re a grade-schooler, broke college student with no income and student debt, or a new graduate like me, you know the pain of wanting new clothes without having to break the bank.
Thank goodness you can buy blouses on Shein for five dollars or stroll into H&M and swipe a pair of jeans on a special deal for under twenty bucks, right? But in the words of author and journalist Lucy Siegle, “fast fashion isn’t free. Someone, somewhere is paying.”
So, who’s paying for it? The answer is: we all are.
What is fast fashion?
The term fast fashion was introduced by the New York Times, describing when the brand Zara arrived in New York in the 1990s. Zara’s idea was literally, quite as the term described, to make fashion fast — or to fast-track garment creation from the drawing board to the store shelf in just 15 days. The mission statement is innocuous enough, but came with a whole host of side effects.
These days, fast fashion refers to the general practice in the clothing industry of rapidly producing mass amounts of cheap fashion using low-quality materials and underpaid laborers. Before the 1990s, clothing used to be expensive and, unless you were in the upper echelons of society, mostly only bought on occasion. But after the Industrial Revolution, clothing production sped up immensely. More and more laborers were brought in to quickly produce larger amounts of clothing to cater to the middle classes, and styles that used to be only available from high-end designer stores could now be sold even if you weren’t made of money. Statement pieces worn by haute couture models or A-list actors and actresses could now be snapped up just days after their release for a fraction of the price.
This cycle of sampling and producing new styles of clothing while they’re still considered relevant by society, only to be discarded months later after a new trend moves in, keeps consumers always looking for the next new style and keeps garment companies churning out new pieces at breakneck speed. The snowball has grown so fast, that the world’s population now consumes 80 billion new clothing items every year — a shocking 400% increase from just 20 years ago. How did companies make this happen?
Because brands have to constantly keep up a massive stream of new clothes and designs, lest they become irrelevant, some corners are cut by necessity. Clothes have to be made out of lower quality materials in order to sell them for a low cost and still turn a large profit. Instead of creating garments in-house and by hand, brands usually turn to offshore manufacturing and sweatshop labor that exploit workers with severely low pay and dangerous working conditions. But for consumers, all we see is thousands of new styles that mimic what we see our favorite models and stars wearing right at our fingertips — and often for the price of less than a restaurant meal.
Why is fast fashion harmful?
Buy, wear a few times, throw away, repeat. Fast fashion thrives on this swift cycle of clothing consumption and subsequent waste. In the United States alone, the average person will generate an average of 82 pounds of textile waste every year.
Why are we throwing away our clothes? Part of it stems from the need to always consume the latest styles, which go in and out of vogue at the speed of light. Once clothing is “out,” it’s no longer needed to take up precious space in our wardrobes. Another reason is simply due to lack of quality — the clothes are flimsy, sewed badly, and quick to degrade, and there’s no incentive to spend money or time repairing them when you can just buy another. But besides getting worn out after a few wears, the cloth used in one-and-done apparel has other, more serious effects as well.
The materials used in fast fashion aren’t just cheap; they’re also harmful. Cotton, the most commonly used fiber in textile production, is almost impossible to mass produce organically and sustainably — over 90% of the cotton used today is genetically modified, and consumes a shockingly large amount of water. It takes over 20,000 liters (5,283 gallons) of water to produce just one T-shirt and a pair of jeans. And that’s not all — memories of the Dust Bowl will remind us that cotton degrades the quality of soil, and the large quantities of mostly untested pesticides and insecticides used on cotton (18% and 25% of the world’s total use respectively) aren’t helping either. Carcinogens such as benzothiazole have been found in clothing on the market today, and despite the fact that they have been linked to various cancers and respiratory illnesses, we continue to wear them on our bodies and in contact with our skin. Leather and fur are also problematic materials. Leather tanning is a highly toxic process, to the point that leather tannery workers are 20–50% more at risk for developing cancer, not to mention that the process of raising livestock is hugely wasteful and consumes massive amounts of feed, land, water, and fossil fuels.
As if sucking up the planet’s resources at an alarming rate wasn’t enough, fast fashion also significantly contributes to global pollution levels in all aspects — water, landfills, and carbon emissions. Polyester, another highly popular fabric in fast fashion brands, is derived from fossil fuels and will not decay for long after our lifetimes. More than 60% of fabrics are now made from synthetics, and those fabrics end up contaminating our water and claiming vast amounts of space in landfills. 10.5 million tons of clothes are sent to landfills every year in North America alone, and most of that will never decompose. Imagine archeologists finding the remains of a dress from H&M thousands of years later — assuming humanity hasn’t completely destroyed the Earth by then.
These trashed clothes also shed microfibers that add plastic pollution in the ocean and cannot be removed from water sources, but instead spread throughout the food chain. Half a million tons of these microplastics are dumped in the water every year, which are then consumed by marine life and even humans, because even most water filtration systems cannot remove microplastics.
What about climate change and fast fashion’s massive carbon footprint? The fashion industry emits 1.7 billion tons of CO2 per year, or a whopping 10% of global carbon emissions — a larger carbon footprint than all international flights and shipping combined. Even worse, if left unchecked, the fashion industry’s carbon emission will rise by more than 50% in the next 10 years.
And none of that even takes into consideration the adverse effects on the actual humans living on this planet. From health problems to dangerous working conditions, factory accidents, and grossly low wages, the human cost of fast fashion is affecting real people today.
The exploitation of factory workers began early. In the early 1890s, when immigrants arrived in the United States from Europe in search of work, they were put to work in the garment industry, often working 12.5-hour days for six dollars a week. They had to supply their own needles and thread, and in many places, the women didn’t even have bathroom access. Then in 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York claimed the lives of 146 young immigrant workers, many of them women, in one of the United States’ deadliest workplace catastrophes. This led to demands of reform for safety regulations and better working conditions in the United States, but many of the changes were resisted by the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory owners.
Then in the 1990s, Nike was exposed for using sweatshops to exploit laborers offshore in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Vietnam, Ecuador, and countless other countries. Indonesian workers were being paid as little as 14 cents an hour, and factory conditions could reach 37 degrees Celsius (98.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Nike smoothed things over by taking an ethical pledge, but investigations over a decade later found offshore factory workers were still laboring in deplorable conditions, including poor ventilation, exposure to toxic chemicals, wage theft, and even padlocked exit doors. However, this made few ripples as Nike had already established itself as one of the forerunners in the athletic footwear industry.
In 2013, the Rana Plaza clothing manufacturing complex in Bangladesh collapsed, killing 1,100 workers and injuring another 2,500. Although this was certainly not the first time the world got a look at what exactly was happening behind closed doors, greater societal concerns around the true cost of fast fashion began to arise. People began to reject apparel brands that exploited their workers or refused to pay them a living wage. The idea of fashion being a slow-killing industry began to gain greater traction. Fast fashion was phasing out — sustainability is in.
What is sustainable design and slow fashion?
In recent years, “sustainability” has become somewhat of a buzzword. Companies proudly label their goods and services as sustainable left and right, but what does it actually mean? Slow fashion relies on smaller-batch production, usually from small businesses and independent designers, and focuses on higher-quality, longer-lasting garments made by employees paid a fair and living wage in ethical conditions.
In contrast, most well-known fast fashion brands are clothing giants, including Zara, H&M, Forever 21, Nike, Primark, Uniqlo, GAP, and Topshop. In more recent years, even more egregious offenders have cropped up, such as Shein, Romwe, and Revolve — all brands that I see everyday being touted by millennial and Gen Z influencers on social media. Many of these companies make sustainability promises, pledge to “go green” by a certain year, or throw the word “sustainable” around in their product descriptions and mission statements while not actually taking any action. This is known as “greenwashing,” and allows companies to look good on the surface while still turning a massive profit from their unethical labor practices.
Real slow fashion brands that focus on sustainable design will be transparent about how they are making it happen. Naturally, the cost of sourcing sustainable materials, paying a living wage to their workers, and not using machines to churn out tens of thousands of clothing items a day means that most apparel from slow fashion brands has a higher price tag than fast fashion brands. For many of us, that’s a major turnoff, especially because consumerism tells us we need to buy more, more, more — and those expenses add up. However, slow fashion is proven to be actually cheaper than fast fashion in the long run. How does that work?
Whereas a fast fashion item will wear out and become unusable after a few wears, ethical clothing is designed to last a long time — and by a long time, that means years and years into the future. The idea of cost per wear is one way to identify how expensive clothing items actually are, instead of simply looking at the price tag.
Even though $40 can get you four ten-dollar shirts from a fast fashion company instead of one shirt from a sustainable slow fashion company, those ten-dollar shirts will be low-quality, easily damaged, pointless to repair, and less comfortable — and most likely thrown out after a few years at most. In comparison, the singular $40 shirt from a slow fashion company will even last decades if you want it to. The cost per wear of the cheap T-shirts ends up being far more expensive than the sustainable shirt, at a factor of ten or even a hundred. With slow fashion even beating out fast fashion in the price department, there’s even less reason to buy from fast fashion companies — you’re just spending more money than it’s worth. Investing in ethical clothing is worth it.
Isn’t there no ethical consumption under capitalism?
The concept of there being no ethical consumption under capitalism leads back to the fact that almost all companies are owned under mega corporations, and that it’s pointless to buy from one brand or another because the money all goes back to the same monopolized source. Even if it sounds fatalist, this is definitely true in many consumer circles, especially in food and energy departments.
Luckily, the garment industry is starting to rebel from that model — and successfully, to boot! There are so many independent clothing designers and shops popping up because people care deeply about the environment and the conditions of human workers. Seeing the inner workings of small, sustainable designers is like a breath of fresh air. You have fabric that doesn’t go to waste, you have small-scale creation, you have promotion of small businesses, you have employees paid a fair wage and making ethical pieces in safe conditions. It’s certainly not easy to break the habit and step away from the rapid pace of fast fashion consumption, especially when we’ve been inundated with that concept our whole lives. But it’s time to leave fast fashion behind, for the good of everyone — including ourselves.
