Let’s keep it real: everyone wears it, everyone buys it, everyone likes it, but most have heard that we should avoid it. It’s fast fashion.
To start: what is fast fashion? Fast fashion is a type of clothing that is inexpensive and produced at mass rates due to its low quality. It has consumed people from all around the world with quickly changing trends and typically horrible quality. Fast fashion first started making headlines when brands like Zara appeared in the mid 1990s. Once people began to notice how a mass amount of trendy clothing was being produced in such minimal time, it caught on like wildfire. But if people have the clothes they want, as quickly as they want, and they’re able to keep up with the latest styles. Where’s the problem?
Turns out, rampant consumerism is terrible for the environment. Shocker, right? First of all, let’s start with trends. Trends come and go in a flash, and when something isn’t popular anymore, society tends to shun it. This leads to billions of clothing getting thrown away after only a couple weeks of wearing it. These clothes get taken to the dump, leading to more trash, which leads to contamination of the air, water, animals, and habitats. It’s an endless cycle of consumerist tendencies, leading to more clothes getting bought, thrown out, and left in dumps.
It should come as a surprise to no one that to sustain the fast fashion industry, companies forgo safe working conditions. Producing low-cost clothing inevitably means companies use low-cost labor and low-cost materials. Companies like H&M and Forever 21 have taken to employing in developing countries where they can pay below living wages. In sweatshops across China, Bangladesh, and India these wages are earned over long hours (14-16 hour days) seven days a week. The average wage in India is an outrageous 58 cents per hour, barely what one needs to make to support their family. Caught in poverty, most sweatshop workers are children trying to support their families.
On top of the low-wages, exploited workers are also subjected to unhygienic working conditions. Workers are endlessly exposed to dangerous synthetic chemicals without proper ventilation in the factories. Some of the substances they are exposed to are cancerous or have other detrimental health effects. Sweatshops also breed frequent deadly accidents like the infamous collapse of the Rana Plaza factory. The 2013 accident in Bangladesh left 1000 dead and more than 2,500 injured. While the factory’s collapse was the wake-up call authorities needed for fast fashion factories to be investigated, that does not mean anything has changed.
So how can we prevent these issues? First, start by buying clothes from sustainable industries and small businesses. This will prevent the clothing from breaking down so quickly because it’s made from good, strong materials, stopping so much clothing from going to the dump. Second, when you buy clothing, ask yourself: will I wear this thirty times? If not, then don’t buy it! It’s useless to buy something popular at a time when trends are so short-lived. One can also partake in thrifting. Thrift stores sell second hand clothes for less money, helping our lives become greener. Our refusal to feed into the fast fashion craze can cause companies to stop producing wasteful products. If we as consumers show interest in quality clothing made by adults being paid a living wage then companies will be forced to change. The blind eye we turn for cheap trendy items costs lives; it can’t continue!
