On Fast Fashion
This is the first post in a series of three posts that are all related. There’s a lot in these three topics, and I want to go deep into them.
On Fast Fashion (read on!)
On Greenwashing (coming soon)
On Avoiding vs Living with Fast Fashion (coming soon)
Once you start going down the sustainable fashion rabbit hole, it’s not long before you come across the term “fast fashion”. It’s unfortunate that it’s become such a buzzword, but it’s an important concept that is central to a lot of conversations around the sustainable fashion movement.
What is Fast Fashion?
From Investopedia:
Fast fashion is the term used to describe clothing designs that move quickly from the catwalk to stores to meet new trends. The collections are often based on designs presented at Fashion Week events. Fast fashion allows mainstream consumers to purchase trendy clothing at an affordable price.
From Lexico (Oxford Languages):
Inexpensive clothing produced rapidly by mass-market retailers in response to the latest trends.
"the high-street leader when it comes to fast fashion"
From Good On You:
Fast fashion can be defined as cheap, trendy clothing, that samples ideas from the catwalk or celebrity culture and turns them into garments in high street stores at breakneck speed.
History can give us some context about why this phenomenon became prevalent in the first place.
Fashion before the Industrial Revolution was by nature slow. “High fashion” as it was called was really something for only the wealthy aristocratic classes, and they set the trends for the current season. Most people though, dressed within their class, and didn’t have the means or access to get custom-fitted garments. This didn’t mean that they didn’t care about fashion, but they would have accessed trends late, or had to make modifications to their own clothes to fit with the emerging styles.
As the Industrial Revolution picks up steam starting in the 1800s, we start to see a natural boost in production capabilities with the invention of the loom. From then until about the 1960s, more and more fashion houses took measures to standardize and industrialize their production capabilities. WWII also impacted this, as many fashion houses devoted resources to creating uniforms and other materials for the war efforts.
And then come the 1960s. Along with the Civil Rights Movement, counterculture, and angst about the Vietnam War came a resistance to old social norms. Fashion, being one of the best ways of self-expression, became something that the younger generation of the 60s really tried to make their own. There was a strong desire to move away from the fashions of the older generations, and fashion retailers began to realize this. The search for cheap and new fashions led them to the first wave of “fast fashion” retailers who realized they could open up manufacturing centers in other parts of the world, where we still see a prevalence of sweatshops today: Central America, China, India, and other parts of South America and Asia.
A few factors then led to what we see today as trends change literally as soon as you feel like you have a handle on the latest styles: technology (being able to buy something from your phone with a couple taps), marketing (in some ways, retailers are all in a rat race, trying to beat each other to come out with next season’s hottest thing), celebrity culture (magazines telling us what to wear/what not to wear, celebrities never being shown repeating outfits).
Why is Fast Fashion so bad?
If you go to H&M, Zara, Forever21, or any other major retailer in a mall or shopping complex, you’ll likely see prices that are tantalizingly low. $3.95 for a tank top, $12.99 for a dress, $10 for 2 blouses. How do these retailers manage to sell these clothes for so cheap, while staying in business? The answer comes pretty quickly if you think about their supply chain: cheap labor and materials allows them to price low enough to keep the demand going. Constantly changing the trends also allows them to really market products to make people feel like they need them. This is where our consumerist culture got out over its skis.
Environmental Impact
To keep up with the demand for cheaply made “trendy” clothes, the industry inevitably started cutting lots of corners. Cheap dyes and textiles are often the most harmful to produce and shed microfibers and toxins into our water supplies. Greenwashing efforts have made us think that even cotton is good for the environment, when in reality it has an extremely water- and pesticide-intensive production process, leading to droughts and biodiversity problems in the areas it is farmed.
People Impact
To maintain those door-buster deals, the people hired to make those clothes are often hired at extremely low wages and in dangerous (or just downright unpleasant) working conditions. The documentary “True Cost” goes into a lot more detail on this: https://truecostmovie.com/
On the side where we sit as consumers, there’s also an unfortunate side effect of this that comes in the form of a ton of angst and FOMO. Constantly seeing new trends and designs reinforces a culture where we are never satisfied with what we have, leading to a lot of wasted time and money, if you’re throwing away or even donating clothes.
Is Fast Fashion Getting Better?
Changing an entire industry that has been rooted in near-instant gratification, the next Big Thing, and putting profits over planet is going to be slow. We’ve started to see more and more brands call out what their sustainable initiatives are, in responses to media outcry like “True Cost” which had notable fashion icons like Stella McCartney, Vandana Shiva and Livia Firth speak out against what mainstream fashion brands have been getting away with. Pulling the curtain back has made a lot of brands go on the defensive. This is where things can get a little shadey. It can be really hard to tell if a brand is actually taking steps to improve their practices, or if they are doing the bare minimum and “greenwashing” their brand.
What is Greenwashing?
Greenwashing is a marketing tactic that brands use to make themselves seem more environmentally responsible than they really are. An example of this is bottled water that markets itself as natural and organic. Isn’t that obvious? What they’re really trying to make you forget is that their bottles are plastic and most likely won’t be reused or recycled. The same concept applies in fashion when a company markets themselves as “green” or “eco-friendly”, but then doesn’t really provide any data or facts around how.
Like I said, I’ll have a whole post on greenwashing so this is just a bit of a primer. In the meantime, here’s a great article from Vogue UK about ways to watch out for Greenwashing: https://www.vogue.co.uk/news/article/greenwashing-in-fashion
The Simple Take: Nobody is winning by playing by Fast Fashion rules.
British journalist Lucy Siegle said it best:
Fast Fashion isn’t free. Someone, somewhere, is paying.
As consumers, the best we can do is to make informed choices that will last. The less we buy overall the better, and when necessary, we should try to make things last as long as they can. This is a sound philosophy for most things in life - invest in quality over quantity.
Unlinked sources:
Fashion History Lessons: The Origins of Fast Fashion, Fashionista: https://fashionista.com/2016/06/what-is-fast-fashion
What Is Fast Fashion, Good On You: https://goodonyou.eco/what-is-fast-fashion/
Stay tuned for my next post about greenwashing: what it is, how you can figure out if a brand is greenwashing, and brands that are known for that practice (and better alternatives!)
On Sustainability
Sustainability: Here’s a word that gets thrown around so casually and frequently that I think people have started to really become numb to the actual meaning.
Sustainability: noun
the ability to be maintained at a certain rate or level.
"the sustainability of economic growth"
avoidance of the depletion of natural resources in order to maintain an ecological balance.
"the pursuit of global environmental sustainability"
Definition from Oxford Languages
Can we take a moment to reread that second definition? The avoidance of the depletion of natural resources. This implies that it can still be avoided. Not to be a debbie downer, but reversing climate change at this stage is going to take some serious multi-faceted strategies, time, money, and technology. However, if you think this means that things are beyond hope and we should all just throw our hands up and go back to binge-watching Riverdale, you’ve got another thing coming.
Why is there an increased focus on sustainability within the fashion industry?
Simply put, research shows that the fashion and garment industry is one of the most polluting industries globally. Different sources put it at various spots within the top 5 most-polluting industries, but any way you look at it, it’s not great. Unfortunately a large part of it is due to fast fashion, overproduction, tax breaks for destroying unsold stock, and a resistance to changing business practices.
This $2.5 trillion industry is transforming slowly, however as of 2018, the UN reported that 10% of global carbon emissions are attributed to the production of fashion. Mainstream fashion brands often have extremely long and opaque supply chains and energy-intensive production.
Textile waste is as sad as it looks. Photo source: Fashion Revolution
A few other astounding statistics for you:
85% of clothes end up in landfills around the world. That number was published by a Paris fashion event that wanted to dedicate an event to the 50th celebration of Earth Day.
1.7 billion tons of CO2 are produced yearly, more than international flights and shipping combined, reported WBUR.
Less than 1% of clothes are recycled into new forms of textiles. With polyester (an oil-based plastic) being a prevalent material, what this means is water pollution from microfibers getting into our waterways as clothes are washed and landfills being clogged by materials that won’t degrade for potentially hundreds of years,
20% of industrial wastewater pollution originates from the fashion industry.
How can we do better as consumers?
Organizations like Fashion Revolution, Good On You, and the UN Alliance for Sustainable Fashion all do incredible work in researching, raising awareness, and holding fashion brands accountable for publishing more transparent statistics about their supply chain, and reducing their environmental impact.
The good news for us is that this gives us information at our fingertips to make better choices to lower our own carbon footprint. Information is a powerful tool, and there are tons of ways to support these organizations and what they’re doing, in addition to voting with your wallet to support brands that have sustainable practices.
Fashion Revolution Week just passed in April, and is held every year in commemoration of the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh. The main goal of this initiative is to push brands to have more transparency around their labor practices. This event grows every year, and you can check out more here: https://www.fashionrevolution.org/about/get-involved/.
The simple take: there’s a lot that we can do.
The information can be overwhelming, and I don’t mean to make this sound like a lost cause. Is the impact on our planet terrible? Without a doubt. Is it a hopeless cause? Well, as you can see, there’s a lot of room for improvement for manufacturers, brands, and every player along the supply chain process before as an industry (consumers included), we can say that we’ve done our best. I think there’s a long road ahead, and like any effort that aims to create long-lasting change for our little blue dot, it’s going to take a lot of awareness raising, collective effort, and eventually, legislation.
From voicing our concerns, getting involved in events to raise awareness, and voting with our wallet, I’ll be sharing more ways to take action. I’m just getting started here! As I learn about more initiatives that we can support as conscious consumers and global citizens, I’ll be sharing them both here and on my Instagram, so keep an eye out in both places!
Until next time, here’s some great informative entertainment from Hasan Minhaj. His Netflix show has a great episode on fast fashion’s impact on the environment and I encourage you to check it out: The Ugly Truth of Fast Fashion.
Leave a comment below if you have questions or comments on anything I’ve written about! Changing this industry will take a collective force, and dialogue and discussion are a big part of that!