What Is Fast Fashion and Why Is It Bad for The Environment?
I remember that time when clothes used to be something to be cherished, and it wasn’t that long ago. In old movies and classic literature characters used to have a couple of underwear garments and a few other pieces of clothing. In ‘Anne with an E’, a TV show based on the Anne of Green Gables books, Anne had only one dress until Marilla makes her a new one. It is received by Anne with her characteristic amazement for things, but also with the gratefulness of an individual who knows the worth of a new dress that was handmade specially for her.
During my childhood it was very common to wear hand me down clothes. As the youngest of two, I got clothes that no longer fit my sister. I also remember we had a friend in the neighborhood who was moving back to Brazil, and she built a pile of clothes she wouldn’t be able to take with her and made us choose whatever we wanted to. We were excited at the prospect of refreshening our wardrobe without having to pay for new clothes. Secondhand clothes were as valuable as those with their tags still on. They filled, after all, the same purpose, with the additional benefit of carrying with them the experiences of their last owner, which brought, without a doubt, an air of poetic significance to them.
Sometimes our family bought new clothes, but we had to put thought into it. I recall a time where I had just 1 pair of jeans, which I wore constantly and for anything. I could wear it to go to the cinema, or to embark on adventures around the blocks, either exploring haunted vacant lots or walking on the puddles that formed after the rain with our rainboots. After a while, it started having a hole between the legs, which broke even after it was mended. I was nervous about asking my parents for a new pair. In Argentina clothes were never affordable, and I believe that contributed to the value we always added to them.
Fortunately, I traveled during my childhood. When we went to the U.S., we were blown away by how cheap clothes were. We bought some things so we could have clothes for the next 2 or 3 years (notice how we thought about clothes in the long term, a habit that trends have convinced us to abandon). I started finding $5 garments and was confused by that. When you spend your life exposed to clothes as something valuable, it is baffling to suddenly witness they are not. I imagine how utterly confused someone who lived constantly exposed to that could have been. The bewilderment aroused because I wasn’t sure whether I liked something or if I was just hypnotized by the low price. If clothes are always expensive, I must have thought, I would be stupid to let a $5 shirt pass. It was an ugly one, for that matter, and not even my style. I don’t think I ever wore it.
This was just a trip, but it was my first experience in the world of fast fashion. I took my clothes back to Buenos Aires and wore them for many years. My mom, as the handy and creative woman she is, mended anything that was broken. She even tailored clothes.
Fast forward to today. In Argentina clothes are still expensive but if you bring an Argentinian to a U.S. mall, they will be ignited by that confusion, they will burn various salaries on clothes.
Today this glimpse of fast fashion has only exacerbated. Luxurious designs have become more accessible by brands that emulate them, prices have gone down, collections have multiplied. Shopping became, especially in the noughties, not a necessity, but a hobby. In Gilmore Girls, Lorelai and Rory chose this activity to spend some quality time together; Cher in clueless was a confessed addict; and shopping as a sport also created a famous line in Mean Girls “get in loser, we’re going shopping”. Particularly in teenagers, walking on puddles and investigating vacant lots for fun was replaced with shopping sprees.
Then, online shopping came, and one could say it made matters worse.
SO, WHAT IS FAST FASHION?
Fast fashion is a model used in the fashion industry that relies on producing high volumes of cheap and trendy clothes very quickly, to catch up with trends and consumer demands. You get new styles fast, soon after they have appeared on the runway.
As they are cheaply made and trendy, they won’t last. This is called planned obsolescence: a strategy used by several industries, based on purposefully making products that won’t last. This way, you can soon buy a new one, and keep the money coming for them.
Recently, I saw a girl who sold handmade clothes on Instagram, and who was telling her audience that one garment can take her 20 hours or more to make. So, how come that same garment can be bought for 30 dollars, if that’s drastically less money than 20 hours of work, not to mention fabrics, expenses, and other resources? That’s because fast fashion thrives on massiveness, bad working conditions, and low quality of materials. Voilà!
Because these garments are cheap, they lose their value in the customers’ eyes, and are discarded without guilt or conscience. “Why would I wear the same dress over and over again, if I can just buy a new one for $25?” That’s the mindset of the industry, which is very far from the mending, slow, and hand-me-down culture that reigned during my childhood years. But even people who have been brought up like that (it happened to me as a teenager, and luckily it stopped) can succumb to the appealing claws of fast fashion. Those victims think they are saving money, defeating the system, and contributing to a highly polished version of themselves, who never seem to repeat outfits, as if they had been taken straight out of a TV show that runs for 5 years, but somehow no character seems to wear the same sweater twice. Once again, reality imitates fiction.
Because of the fast pace of this industry (it is estimated that around the world, about 107 billion units of apparel and 14.5 billion pairs of shoes were purchased in 2016), in addition to the planned obsolescence I mentioned above, people buy at an abnormal pace, and spend more money in the long-term than they think they are. A $25 dress will fool you into thinking you’ve made good business, but the truth of the matter is that what is cheap is, in fact, expensive in the long run. Not only this, but that idea of saving money might make you buy more clothes (“I can buy two dresses here, when I would have only bought one in that other store”).
HOW TO SPOT FAST FASHION
There are certain parameters that we can use to tell fast fashion brands apart. One of the most conspicuous ones is the number of collections they have annually. For example, Zara is known for having more than 20 collections per year. Once upon a time, there was one collection per season, meaning 4 per year. How did we get to 20?
Another thing that will tell you your clothes were made cheaply–in addition to the price tag– is the Low quality of the materials. Most garments will be made with petroleum-based materials like polyester or acrylic, which you can read more about in my post, in which I write about clothes made from plastic.
If you dig a bit deeper into the company’s website or background, you won’t find much transparency regarding their working conditions, wages, etc. The manufacturing of their clothes will probably be made offshore in cheap labor countries. You have probably heard about the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which housed 5 garment factories and killed 1132 people. It was one of the many alarms that exposed the dark side of the fast fashion industry.
Hand in hand with a lack of transparency comes Greenwashing, something fast fashion brands are expert at. They will try to fool you and tell you sustainability is amazing but lack any proof that they are doing something tangible about it, or they do the bare minimum, which contradicts their general model. For instance, H&M has been accused of misleading marketing in terms of sustainability.
Another red flag: having the latest trends at the stores fast. You may have seen it in Paris Fashion Week, and a week later it’s at the fast fashion brand’s store.
One of the most common indicators that a brand is fast fashion, is if they have frequent sales. They probably do sales every holiday or every couple of weeks, to clear up stock and welcome the new trends. When this happens, clothes are sold at even lower prices, promoting the obsolescence and lack of value of fashion.
Finally, pay attention to Influencer hauls, a trend that has appeared on social media not long ago. The brands that are featured in these are fast fashion brands.
WHY IS FAST FASHION BAD FOR THE ENVIRONMENT AND WORKERS?
ENVIRONMENT
Fast fashion is terrible for the environment for various reasons. A single garment will pollute the environment 1) when it’s made, 2) when it’s used, and 3) when it’s no longer used.
Environmental impact when clothes are produced
When a garment is made in the fast fashion world, the process will pollute air, land, and water. This includes the toxic dyes they use. The fashion industry is responsible for at least 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and produces 1.2 billion tons of CO2 equivalent per year, which is more emissions than international flights and maritime shipping.
The fast fashion industry also uses vast amounts of water to produce garments. For example, cotton that isn’t organic uses more water than you can imagine. Water, as well as land, is also polluted in the industry. Runoffs from water contaminated with agrochemicals pollute rivers, land, and freshwater in general. Chemical dyeing generates about 20% of the world’s industrial water pollution. However, this is not all. The textile dyes are usually toxic, mutagenic, and carcinogenic agents that become environmental pollutants that affect the entire ecosystem.
The fast fashion industry is also a big contributor to deforestation, mostly because of their involvement with leather and tanneries. In fact, projections estimate that to satisfy demand of wallets, handbags and shoes, the industry must slaughter 430 million cows annually by 2025. Many fast fashion brands use animal-based materials like leather and fur, which means animals are killed and removed of their rights and conditions as sentient beings. These materials are treated with huge amounts of harmful chemicals that also pollute the environment and, again, the animals. Some materials, like wool, require overgrazing, which hurts land, soil, and flora.
Animals aren’t only hurt because they are killed or used for materials; pollution caused by the fast fashion industry hurts animals because it destroys their habitat and their food sources.
Environmental impact when clothes are being worn
While a garment is being used, if it’s made from a plastic material, which are the most popular ones in the fast fashion industry, it will shed microfibers when they are washed.
Environmental impact when disposing of clothes
Lastly, clothes become obsolete very fast, so people either throw them away (the average American throws away around 81 pounds of clothing annually), or give them up for donation, but even donated clothes end up in the landfill as textile waste, as only 10% of donated clothes are sold. Precisely because of materials being made of plastic or with toxic dyes, these clothes won’t biodegrade. Instead, they will exist in this world for many years to come, as a polyester shirt may take 20-200 years to decompose (releasing toxic substances while doing so).
workers
The fast fashion industry stays alive by selling cheap clothes massively. In order to do this, they need workers that get paid low wages and work in terrible conditions.
I mentioned before that conditions in factories can be dangerous, or even unhealthy.
A staggering 93% of surveyed brands aren’t paying garment workers a living wage. They usually get paid 2 or 6 cents per piece, and work 60-70 hours a week.
FAST FASHION BRANDS
Some popular fast fashion brands are: Shein, H&M, Primark, Forever21, Asos, Urban Outfitters, Inditex brands, such as Zara, among others.
WHAT IS SLOW FASHION?
Slow fashion is an alternate approach to fashion. It puts a stop to purchasing impulses, encourages thinking ten times before buying something, and supports more sustainable forms of fashion.
To start getting into slow fashion, you can begin by doing a fast fashion cleanse, and to read more about why sustainable fashion is so important.
Once we create that space to grow personally and as consumers, and we find the motivation by understanding the reasons why slow fashion is so important, we can embrace sustainable fashion. This could mean:
- Using what we have, and understanding outfit repeating is cool!
- Avoiding trends and focusing on personal expressions
- Buying less clothes
- Taking care of the clothes you have, including mending them
- Buying secondhand: thrifting is a great experience.
- Swapping with friends and family
- Investing on a timeless wardrobe, built with sustainable materials and high quality garments
- Supporting sustainable brands
If you’d like to embark on this journey with me and read my future posts, please don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter!
Hi, I’m Melina,
I’m the creator of Sustainable Rookie, and my goal is to share what I learn throughout my sustainability journey, so that I can help other people live a more conscious life.
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