Transparency Item: The Perspectives section of the Graphic is comprised of articles based on opinion. This is the opinion and perspective of the writer.
A person’s style is often a defining characteristic of how you picture them. The kinds of clothes they wear, the choices between a graphic or non-graphic tee and more form an external image that many people care about.
Fashion trends are appealing to many people, and fast fashion seems like a straightforward way to keep up to date with the current trends. Unfortunately, it comes with a cost.
Fast fashion is a business model focused on capitalizing on current, short-term fashion trends, usually by creating cheap and quick-to-make clothes, according to Merriam-Webster. Some examples of fast fashion companies include SHEIN, Zara, H&M and Uniqlo.
Oftentimes, these clothes are of low quality, allowing for cheap mass production and high profits. The large variety and amount of clothes that can be so easily produced encourages consumers to buy and throw out clothes frequently to stay on top of trends, according to The Economist.
For some, this frequent consumption and waste cycle might create a sense of discomfort, sparking debate around engagement with these practices versus avoidance. Fast fashion should be avoided because of the ethical and moral problems that it creates.
In my experience, one of the most commonly known negative impacts of fast fashion is the environmental impact.
Fast fashion’s model creates a lot of clothing, but also a lot of waste. Estimates claim anywhere from 80 to 150 billion garments of clothing are produced a year, a statistic that is not only hard to objectively measure but also over 10 years old, according to good on you.
It’s difficult to have a recent measure of the amount of clothing produced annually because most companies refuse to share this information, and sharing is not legally mandated. In addition, knowing only production amounts isn’t enough, because this must be compared to the production of all companies and might not include classifications like licensee products, according to Vogue Business.
With the explosion of brands like SHEIN in recent years, it’s likely clothing production is even higher. SHEIN alone adds about 6,000 unique clothing pieces to its website a day, according to Earthday.org.
It takes about 700 gallons of water to produce a single T-shirt, so much water that a single person would take around two and a half years to drink all of it, according to the World Resources Institute. Not only is that a lot of water for a single shirt, but that’s a lot of water for the billions of clothing garments produced to create low-quality fast fashion each year.
Fast fashion also produces a significant amount of microplastics and carbon emissions.
Many of the materials used for fast fashion clothing are polyester or other plastics, as they are incredibly cheap, resulting in 35% of all microplastics produced in the world being from the textile industry alone, according to a 2017 report by the IUCN, Global Marine and Polar Programme.
While the textile industry is not exclusively fast fashion, fast fashion also creates anywhere from 2-8% of all global CO2 emissions every year, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. This number is around and may even exceed the entire European Union’s emissions of 6%, as reported by the European Parliament.
The environmental impact of the fast fashion industry is enough to stop buying from it, but it doesn’t end there.
The fast fashion industry in general is known to have harmful practices when it comes to worker safety and rights, but this has never been demonstrated more than by the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in 2013. A factory collapsed with thousands of workers inside, even after warnings about instability.
The event caused 1,134 deaths, and thousands more were injured, according to The Guardian’s reporting. Following the tragedy, an accord was created by the GIZ Agency and IndustriALL to work to ensure future worker protections and safety.
The accord’s creation highlighted underlying problems that continue to plague workers in the industry to this day. Several North American corporations were resistant to the accord’s requirements to change their practices, including companies such as Walmart, according to HuffPost.
Shortly after these corporations failed to sign the accord, they announced their own workers’ safety agreement. This agreement was criticized for offering less safety and less accountability for adherence to these new safety standards, according to the New York Times.
It feels as though these corporations were resistant to making changes that protected their workers, indicating that the problem likely persists to the current day. Even worse are the impacts on women in the industry.
It is estimated 80% of workers in the garment industry are women, and this is intentional to allow for the subjugation of women through gender stereotypes, according to the Clean Clothes Campaign. The impacts of these safety changes, work accidents and practices such as paying less than 2% of workers a living wage disproportionately affect women.
The impacts of fast fashion extend beyond the immediate and the material. I spoke with Chris Doran, professor of Religion and coordinator of the Sustainability Program, about these impacts.
“We don’t often think about the difference between needs and wants,” Doran said.
He said the issues with fast fashion boil down to this idea: Fast fashion plays into our lack of thought about this difference, leading us to spend and consume more than we need.
When we don’t consider this difference, we take excess from available resources that could instead be consumed by people who have a more dire need.
“They’re [fast fashion consumers] no longer acting like they’re part of a community,” Doran said.
This leads to a dehumanizing effect for those who don’t have a lot, but also for us as excess consumers.
“What are the questions that you are asking, and which are ones we are failing to ask because we really don’t want to?” Doran said.
Considering how our actions affect others in society helps prevent harm to others and opportunities for discrimination. Instead of mindlessly consuming fast fashion, considering the question Doran proposes is more thoughtful.
One of the arguments that might be in favor of fast fashion is its cheapness, making clothes easily accessible to people of limited financial resources. Even so, the reason that these clothes are cheap is because of the outsourcing of labor described above, and the disregard for worker and environmental impact.
While fast fashion makes clothes cheaper, the human, environmental and ethical costs that come with it are not worth it. What can you do instead, though?
There are many options available to you outside of buying fast fashion.
Thrifting is an easy way to find cheaper clothes and prevent usable clothes from reaching a landfill, which you can do here in Malibu or elsewhere. There are also other methods, such as renting clothes, swap programs and local initiatives.
Rather than investing in unsafe labor and harming the environment, ask yourself questions about what you’re buying before you buy it, and say no to fast fashion.
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Contact Noah Burton via email: noah.burton@pepperdine.edu
