"Fast fashion" retailers sell trendy clothes for cheap. But, the cost comes at a high price.
Definition
fast fash·ion noun 1. inexpensive clothing produced rapidly by mass-market retailers in response to the latest trends. "the high-street leader when it comes to fast fashion"
Basically, it means retailers sell trendy clothing for super cheap prices. It's a straightforward system that includes speedy design, production, distribution, and marketing, which means that they produce smaller quantities of larger product variety. That's why you can get many colors of basic pieces.
Why it's bad
Overall, fast fashion isn't a great part of the industry. I get that it does sell up-to-date clothing for super cheap, but it comes at a high price. It takes a toll on the environment, isn't a good piece to put in our closets, and usually has bad labor conditions. But, all of that can change.
The environmental impact
Some of it's impacts are the use of non-renewable energy, the release of greenhouse gases, and using huge amounts of water and energy. The industry is a large consumer of water as it takes about 700 gallons to create a cotton tee shirt and 2000 gallons for a pair of jeans. Textile dyeing is the second largest water polluter as leftover water gets dumped into ditches, streams, and rivers. And, the whole world consumes around 80 billion new pieces of clothing every year. Furthermore, every second the equivalent of a garbage truck of textiles is being burned or landfilled. Creating leather requires great amounts of feed, land, water and fossil fuels to raise livestock, and the tanning process is one of the most toxic of the fashion supply chain because the chemicals used to tan leather- including mineral salts, formaldehyde, coal-tar derivatives and a variety oils and dyes- is not decomposable and contaminates water sources. So when you buy a leather item, you're not just hurting the animal, but the earth too. Many brands use fabrics like nylon and polyester which takes hundreds of years to decompose. Even washing those clothes releases half a million tons of microfibers into the ocean every year, the equivalent of 50 billion plastic water bottles. In conclusion, fast fashion hurts the environment.
Dangerous to people
Then there is the human cost: textile workers are often paid ridiculously small wages and forced to work long hours in horrifying conditions. There is also evidence of forced and child labor. Additionally, cotton, which is in a great amount of fast fashion products, is also not environmentally friendly to manufacture. Pesticides deemed essential for the growth of cotton presents health risks to farmers. There have also been many factory accidents where many workers are injured and sometimes, killed. All in all, it poses danger to people.
Why it's bad for you
You might be wondering, ok, it's bad for the environment and the workers, but is it good for me? Is it good for me, the customer? In the grand scale of things, no. It might seem like a great investment at the time, but in the long term, it's pretty bad. One, if you buy fast fashion, a lot have people have probably seen and maybe purchased the same items you did. And the point of fashion is to express yourself, so you probably don't want to be twinning with anybody without planning or for someone to come up to you and say, "Oh my god! I have the same shirt!" Also, many fast fashion sites aren't very reliable. It's pretty easy to get your package lost in the mail and they can be very hard to return. Another thing to keep in mind is that fast fashion brands create ads to convince people to buy their clothing that you would probably wouldn't wear in a year.
All in all, fast fashion isn't good for the environment, others, or yourself. So why do we still buy it? Because not many people know the cons to fast fashion. All the dirt is revealed only when you dig for it. So your job is to spread the word. And if we all work together, we can change the world.
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