We keep hearing the term fast fashion these days, and although the majority of people know it’s bad it doesn’t seem to have changed people’s shopping habits that much. Can fashion ever be sustainable?
Firstly let’s get into what Fast Fashion is and why it’s bad.
What is Fast Fashion?
There are several different ways to interpret the term ‘fast fashion’.
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. – investopedia
an approach to the design, creation, and marketing of clothing fashions that emphasizes making fashion trends quickly and cheaply available to consumers – merriam-webster
the reproduction of highly fashionable clothes at high speed and low cost – collins dictionary
To me fast fashion also describes the speed at which people consume new clothing items. And the speed at which they get bored of them. With so many new, and very cheap, clothing items appearing in the shops many fashion conscious people will buy new clothes every week. Gone are the days where most people bought clothes and wore them for years. These new clothing items tend not to be as well made as they’re not really designed to last. You’re encouraged to wear them once or twice then discard them so you have room to buy more new clothes.
Why is Fast Fashion Bad?
Apart from the obvious reasons like it being a complete waste of money and encouraging ‘single-use’ or limited use items there are far more sinister reasons that fast fashion is bad.
It’s very easy to walk into a shop and think ‘wow, that’s bargain;. It’s less easy to consider why it is so cheap. If a second thought was allowed to enter our minds we’d realise that we wouldn’t be able to produce the clothes that cheaply in this country. Paying people a fair wage would mean the company makes no profit. We already know that the clothes were made abroad – an unnecessarily large carbon footprint – and that whoever is making the clothes is probably being paid a pittance. But it’s more than that. The working conditions for people making these clothes are also not great as sticking to reasonable health and safety standards would cost more money.
All of these things any reasonable person could deduce just by looking at the price. Doing a bit more research into the topic and the situation is worse than most would even imagine.
Want, want, want
“The sustainability puzzle is the problem that affects every corner of the fashion industry. Fashion’s global production chain pollutes the environment. Its factories, pushed to their limit, too often abuse an overwhelmingly female workforce. Because fashion’s fundamental operating principle rests on planned obsolescence, brands are in a ceaseless cycle of replacement and replenishment. Fashion’s job is to goad you into wanting, needing more.” – Washington Post
Every now and then there’s a backlash against ‘sweatshops’ when some horrific incident happens that kills numerous people. Then a few weeks later (or even a few days later) the whole thing is forgotten about. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver did an excellent piece on this. (If you’ve never watched Last Week Tonight please be warned – there’s colourful language involved).
Bad for the Environment
We know fast fashion is really bad for the people who make the clothes but it’s really bad for the environment as well.
- “Water pollution, toxic chemical use and textile waste” are all part of the environmental cost of fashion.
- “Textile dyeing is the second largest polluter of clean water globally, after agriculture.”
- “Many of (the chemicals used in the dyeing process) are banned or strictly regulated in various countries because they are toxic, bio-accumulative (meaning the substance builds up in an organism faster than the organism can excrete or metabolise it), disruptive to hormones and carcinogenic.”
- “when polyester garments are washed in domestic washing machines, they shed microfibres that add to the increasing levels of plastic in our oceans. These microfibres are minute and can easily pass through sewage and wastewater treatment plants into our waterways, but because they do not biodegrade, they represent a serious threat to aquatic life.”
- “Cotton growing requires high levels of water and pesticides to prevent crop failure, which can be problematic in developing countries that may lack sufficient investment and be at risk of drought.”
- “Textile waste is an unintended consequence of fast fashion.” “Increasing disposable income levels over recent generations means there is less need to “make do and mend”, as it’s often cheaper and more convenient to buy new than have an item repaired.”
– The Environmental Costs of Fast Fashion
Can Fashion Ever Be Sustainable?
Whatever clothing you buy it will have had some sort of negative environmental impact. But you can make much better choices which will make fashion much more sustainable in the long run.
Things you can do:
- Buy fewer clothes.
- Rent outfits for one-off occasions.
- Buying organic clothing from eco-friendly clothes shops is better.
- Buy ‘pre-loved’ clothes from second hand or charity shops.
- Swap clothes with your friends when you’re a bit bored of your wardrobe.
- Repair clothes whenever you can.
- Repurpose materials and make them into new clothing items.
- Give your unwanted clothes to charity rather than sending them to landfill.
- Use old, damaged material that can’t be repurposed as cleaning cloths.
- Make a rag rug out of odds and ends of material.
- Recycle textiles (your old textiles could be used for car seats, industrial blankets, padding for chairs or numerous other things). Check to see if your local council collects textiles for recycling.
If we buy less, reuse more, recycle what can’t be reused and buy more natural materials the environmental impact of clothing is vastly reduced. Less water and energy will be used to manufacture new clothes, fewer items will be sent to landfill, fewer micro-plastics will be released into the sewage systems, fewer toxic chemicals will be causing harm to the people making the clothes and their environment.
It’s a simple solution, but will enough people make the change and demand that the shops do better?
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