Fast Fashion

0:00We all love to shop, and these days the newest styles and clothes are cheaper than ever. You can literally snag a dress for four bucks, which is basically the price of a vanilla latte. But being cheap comes at a high cost.

0:12I know, I know, I hear you. You’re like, “Wait, what does that actually mean?” Basically, it means that fast fashion runs on exploitative labour conditions and is destroying the environment.

0:21Over the last few centuries, as the world has changed, our relationship with clothes has changed dramatically too: from an era when clothing was bespoke, or tailor-made for each individual, to the ready-to-wear era, when premade clothing came in standardised sizes, and then to the current era of fast fashion. The fashion industry today looks nothing like it did in the past—and, of course, not all change is good.

0:45An obscene amount of clothing; stealing independent designers’ ideas; low wages; unsafe conditions and harassment; factory workers sewing pleas for help into clothing—yikes! But before we get into all that, what exactly is fast fashion?

What is fast fashion?

0:59You’re right if you think it sounds like fast food: it’s cheap, quick and often of questionable quality. Back to the topic at hand: if fast fashion isn’t bespoke and isn’t ready-to-wear, then what is it?

1:13To answer that question, we need to travel to La Coruña, a city in Galicia, Spain. In 1963, a man named Amancio Ortega Gaona launched a company that would go on to become the biggest fashion retailer on Earth. That company is now known as Inditex. You may recognise its most famous brand, Zara.

1:32Zara pioneered the fast-fashion model. There are four major points. First, vertical integration. That’s just a fancy way of saying that the company does it all in-house, from designing and manufacturing to selling clothes. This helps reduce costs and streamline production processes.

1:48Fast fashion is all about feedback. Designers receive data on what sells and what doesn’t, sometimes daily. They often conduct field research into what is trending simply by going out and seeing what people are wearing on the street.

2:00Once you have a speedier design-to-retail cycle, the emphasis in fast fashion is on fast. The time it takes to make clothing is now a fraction of what it once was. For Zara, which leads the industry, it takes just five weeks.

2:14Instead of relying on fixed seasonal collections, fast-fashion outlets generate the lion’s share of their profits through designs produced in season. Conventional ready-to-wear collections are designed and launched one full season ahead of time.

2:26Finally, fast fashion depends on cheap labour, and those savings are passed on to the customer. Fashion has always run on people power more than anything else. Currently, one in six people on Earth works in the fashion industry. It’s massive, and most of those people live in developing countries. But cheap labour comes at a high cost.

2:43With globalisation, the world’s economies became increasingly interconnected. The promise of fast fashion was trendy clothing at a low cost, thereby democratising fashion. At the same time, companies such as Forever 21 and H&M would provide jobs for workers in the developing world. It didn’t work out exactly like that.

The problem with fast fashion

3:04Fast-fashion companies have come under fire for exploiting workers. This has meant everything from child labour to forcing workers to handle dangerous chemicals and grossly underpaying them for long hours without a break.

3:17In 2013, a preventable structural failure caused a building in Bangladesh to collapse, killing more than 1,100 garment workers trapped inside and injuring more than 2,500. The Rana Plaza disaster was the deadliest garment-factory accident in history.

3:32While we now spend less than 3% of our annual income on clothing, compared with about 10% in the 1950s, we own an absurd amount of clothing because fast fashion has made it disposable. Fashion is also terrible for the environment.

3:45Long story short, producing more clothes much more quickly and at a fraction of the former cost means a glut of cheap clothing piling up in our landfills. To get a sense of the sheer volume involved, let’s do a quick rundown of fast fashion’s environmental impact by the numbers.

4:02150 billion: the number of new garments produced each year. That is more than 20 garments for every person on Earth. 2.5 billion: the number of pounds of fabric waste removed from the waste stream, according to the Council for Textile Recycling.

4:1860%: the increase in the amount of clothing we owned between 2000 and 2014, according to Greenpeace. Yet we keep clothes for half as long as we did just 15 years ago, leading to a massive amount of waste. 10%: the proportion of the global carbon footprint for which the fashion industry is responsible.

4:36There is no question that fashion contributes to climate change. Although clothing is recyclable, the amount produced has far outstripped our capacity to recycle it. It got so bad that China, previously a top destination for recycled textiles, officially banned their import.

4:55In North America, Markham, Ontario, became the first municipality to ban textile waste from landfills. But wait—it gets even worse. Fashion is described in the video as the world’s second-biggest polluter of clean water. Toxic chemicals used to dye and treat clothing have been linked to miscarriages, birth defects and cancer. You have to ask yourself: is it worth it?