Fast fashion: is it worth the fad?

By Wisley Lau

I am not a fashion guru or obsessed with looking fancy, but I do sometimes go to shops and buy some nice clothes to make me look good. Often the shops that I go to are shops like Zara or H&M because of their cool clothes and cheap prices. These shops are some of the most successful brands in fast fashion.

Fast fashion is a part of the fashion industry that designs, manufactures, and sells new types of clothing at a swift rate. The fast fashion industry earns so much money it has a retail revenue larger than legacy brands that sell expensive clothing and is the only segment of the fashion industry that has won appeal and popularity among consumers. But behind the scenes, the way the clothes that are made and the environmental impact of the manufacturing process means it is worth having second thoughts when you want to buy new clothes.

First of all, the fast fashion industry has a problem with dealing with sweatshops in southern Asian countries. From 1995 to 2013, there have been four news reports related to Gap hiring children to make their clothing, and children working there have almost no identification checks. For example, in a news report in 2000, children who are teenagers lied to get a job at a Gap clothes factory while monitors did not question their ages. Now here is the time I have to say, Gap has openly admitted its wrongdoings and promises to take child labor more seriously, but I doubt they even care about it when there are four reports on their wrongdoings, each time the company claiming it will do better. 

The factories also have poor safety regulations. One Gap factory in Bangladesh making Gap clothing caught on fire and killed 29 workers, while in Bangladesh in 2013, a building collapsed and killed 1100 people. That building was the place where they made clothing for Joe Fresh and The Children Place. They are all linked to poor safety management in the factories. And this isn’t just a few companies: major brands like Forever 21, H&M and Zara have all faced accusations of sweatshops and poor safety regulations.

Not only that, but the main idea of fast fashion is also related to the dynamic assortment. The dynamic assortment is just a fancy way of saying to sell new clothes regularly and periodically. Typically in a normal clothing brand, designing, manufacturing, and selling an item of new clothing takes nearly two years, while fast-fashion shops shrink that time to four months, and they update and sell new clothes once every week. But dynamic assortment has done terrible things to the environment. In 2015, textile production created more greenhouse gasses than all international flights and maritime shipping combined. It leads to wasting a lot of resources: for example, a jacket needs the same amount of water to provide a human to drink for 24 years. And with synthetic clothing, the environmental impact is worse. Polyester, nylon, spandex require almost 342 million barrels of oil a year, which basically means your clothes are made from black gold. Extra fabrics like rayon and viscose are extracted from forests and that extraction is shockingly wasteful, and only 30% ends up on garments you wear. And we are not discussing chemical processing, a process waste pollutes rivers nearby affecting the health of nearby villagers who require the river for fresh water.

After thinking about all of this, maybe it is better that I get my clothes from a second-hand store or keep wearing my old clothes rather than heading to the shops and getting myself some new clothes: not only can you look fancy wearing old clothing, you might be doing a big favor for the planet and help stop child labor.