What Everyone Should Know About Fast Fashion

I created this blog to educate women and girls on why they should boycott fast fashion and start their slow fashion journey. I started my journey about a year and a half ago and it is not always easy. However, the more I educate myself on the fast fashion industry, the harder I try to be a more conscious shopper.

To help you understand why it’s important to fight fast fashion, I have complied a list of things that you should know about the industry.

What is ‘Fast Fashion’?

The first thing that you need to get yourself familiar with is what exactly fast fashion is. Does it mean I can only buy secondhand clothing? No. Should I stop buying from my favorite brands? Well that depends. According to the Good Trade, fast fashion is “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.”

Clothing companies like H&M, Zara, and TopShop all run on this type of format. Up until about the middle of the twentieth century, clothing was only made for the four seasons, but in order to stay trendy today, clothing is made every two to four weeks—quickly and cheaply.

How Fast Fashion Affects the Workers in the Garment Industry.

Making clothing cheaply and quickly means that companies skimp on a lot of safety issues and they tend to create clothing factories in third world countries where they pay workers very low wages.

According to Good on You, “1 in 6 of the world’s workers are employed in the fashion industry and around 80% of those workers are female”. A McKinsey and Company study found that since 2000, there has been an increased demand for fashion. To meet these demands, the fashion industry has moved their labor to developing countries where they can pay low wages to the laborers.

There are horror stories of what these women go through. In Bangladesh, women tend to have increased rates of bladder infections because of the lack of bathroom breaks and they are also forced to take contraceptive pills, so that they will not need time off for maternity leave. Even if a woman did get pregnant, she would not be allowed to take maternity leave. These women also face sexual harassment, unsanitary work spaces and are underpaid.

How the Industry affects the environment.

Yves Saint Laurent used to say, “Fashion fades, style is eternal”. Today that just is not true. Clothing is not made to last. The fast fashion industry makes cheap clothing that is made to end up in the landfill. According to the New York Times, “more than 60 percent of fabric fibers are now synthetics, derived from fossil fuels”. Which means that when clothing ends up in landfills it does not decay. That goes for the clothing that ends up in our oceans, too.

Ten percent of emissions worldwide come from the fashion industry and the amount of water it takes to make clothing is insane. According to Savvyaf.com, it takes 700 gallons of water to make one cotton shirt.

Jeans are the perfect example of what the effects of fast fashion are on the environment. It takes 2,600 gallons of water to create one pair of jeans—that’s equivalent to 200 showers. The chemicals used to dye jeans are polluting. For one pair, it takes 100 feet of farmland to produce the cotton needed and jeans cause 70 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions—that’s equivalent driving 100 miles in your car.

How You Can Fight Fast Fashion!

It’s time to take action. The fashion industry does not need shut down, but it does need to be revamped. If women were able to have access to the financial resources they need and were offered better working conditions, the fashion industry could be “a tool of empowerment instead of exploitation.”

On the other side of things, the same brands that refuse to give women laborers a living wage, are also producing clothing that ends up in landfills and are made of toxic chemicals. In order to produce ethical and sustainable clothing we need to fight back.

Fashion Revolution’s Who Made My Clothes campaign offers you the chance to act. To find out how you can take action against the fast fashion industry visit their page, send a letter to your favorite brand, and learn how you can be a more conscious shopper.