Fast Fashion
Vertical farming could be the future of food in dense cities like Singapore. (Epoch Images)
Shopping for clothes used to be infrequent. It only happened a few times a year, perhaps when your children grew too big or the seasons changed. Dozens of years ago, the culture of shopping began to change. Since the industrial revolution, clothes have flooded the market at the price of spare change, trends transformed at faster rates, and shopping sprees became a large part of our culture. But through all this consumption, we forget that wearing our cheap, fashionable attire a few times, before discarding and moving on to a new trend incurs a significant toll on people, animals, and our environment. Fast fashion is not free.
Fashion wasn't always fast. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, fashion was slow. Everyone sourced materials, prepared them, weaved them, and made clothes to last years. Children frequently wore hand-me downs and clothing was repurposed by adjusting the hems or re-using decorative lace on other dresses. Fast forward to the era of sewing machines and mass production - making clothes easier to make. Fashion became attainable to the middle class in abundance. Clothes were a form of personal expression. The fashion industry with the output of new styles has only gotten faster. New stores brands like H&M, Zara, and Topshop took over the high street with cheaper clothes that were replicas of those produced by high-end fashion houses. While they brought cutting-edge style to everyone, they also brought many hidden costs.
Good on You explains, "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." And that speed truly breaks necks. In 2013, the Rana Plaza clothing manufacturing complex collapsed, killing 1132 garment workers. The event was a slap across every western culture. The clothes they were wearing weren't just clothes. People made them. People who worked overtime with no pay, children fighting for food, and abused labor practices. The Rana Plaza collapse woke the world up to the stark realities of fast fashion.
Fast fashion doesn’t just affect people but has a significant impact on our environment. One pair of jeans takes 3,781 liters of water to make with 33.4 kilograms of carbon emissions. But that's only one pair of jeans. Each year, the entire industry emits 10% of the world's carbon and consumes 93 billion cubic meters of water. 20% of wastewater comes from dying processes that add color for fast fashion. Every year, half a million tons of plastic microfibers from factories, consumed clothing, and packaging are dumped into the ocean, the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles. These microfibers cannot be extracted from the water, and they spread throughout the food chain. Fast fashion is ruthless, and we need to slow it down.
Luckily, as a consumer, you can become slow fashionable! Instead of buying in quantity, buy in quality. Ensure that your wardrobe is ethical to both people and the Earth. Eliminating fast fashion is one step we can personally take to ensure a sustainable future. It's up to you to make the change.
