Fast Fashion: What you don’t know…

Throughout our lives, fashion has become a form of expression; what you wear says something
about you. Fashion is a huge part of our culture. According to the World Bank, people all
around the world, have spent 1.1 trillion dollars on clothes in the holidays alone!

In the 1980’s, the average person bought about 12 new articles of clothing every year; but now
in the 21st century, the average person buys 68 articles of clothing every year. Now that is
largely because of a dominant force in the clothing industry: Fast Fashion; is about making
trendy clothes quick, cheap and disposable. Now, there are a lot of fast fashion retailers but the
big ones are FashioNova, TopShop, H&M and Zara.

Fast Fashion is popular because it has democratized ‘High Fashion’ and they have done that by
essentially counterfeiting designer brands at scale.

For an illustration, the shoes on the right are the original Balenciaga Shoes which cost about
800 dollars and soon afterwards, Zara started selling the shoes on the left for just 60 dollars.
This entire business model has changed the world. Fast Fashion is fashion now. Conducting a
questionnaire, I have found that 8 out of 10 people buy at least 60 new pairs of clothing every
year; half of which are worn three times or less and 6 of them get their clothes from H&M and
Zara due to the average price point of sale. There is a reason why Zara and H&M became the
world’s biggest clothing retailers: they pioneered and perfected the fast fashion business
model.

Generally, legacy brands like Levis release a huge number of clothes in a few seasonal releases.
They spend months designing lines, buying and treating fabrics, manufacturing in bulk and
distributing. It’s a process that can take nearly two years but in terms of fast fashion, it’s a
whole new story. In the 90’s, Zara completely changed the fashion game by combining two
techniques; the first is ‘quick response manufacturing’ which basically means counterfeiting a
design, keeping raw materials on hand, only make more if it’s popular and streamline
distribution. So when new ‘trends’ break, these companies catch the wave with lightning speed.
The second pillar in the business model is ‘Dynamic Assortment’ which simply means that new
clothing lines come through every season with in a week; that’s 52 seasons a year.

This means that we are now drowning in clothes each year and this now has an extensive effect
on the planet. In 2015, textile production created more greenhouse gases than the emissions
from international flights. Thus, the problem starts from where the clothes start. Synthetic
fabrics like polyester, nylon and spandex use almost 342 million barrels of oil in production each
year. Another Fast Fashion fabric called viscose is even worse as wood from forests are
chopped down and only 30% of it goes into making the fabric. We, the public, aren’t aware of
the wasteful processing that goes into making clothes. To manufacture fabrics, processing,
finishing; you have to use a lot of toxic chemicals which often times just get dumped in rivers
near villages, like the Chitarum river in Indonesia where there are factories that H&M and Zara
have worked with. A blue denim jeans, is usually made out of 100 percent cotton and according
to BBC Three, growing the cotton to make the jeans will have taken 10,330 liters- 24 years of
drinking water for one person.

Keep in mind, up until now I have just been talking about making clothes- getting rid of clothes
is even worse. Conducting a survey, I have found that the average person throws away about
25 old pairs of clothing; which is about 60 pounds, each year. Another factor to consider is
donating clothes, but most of the clothes we donate are still trash. Just one Salvation Army
Centre in the UK creates 18 tons of unwanted clothes every three days and if donated clothes
aren’t sold in a month, most of them end up in the developing world like Africa. In places like
Africa, much of last year’s fashion is filling up this year’s landfills. Of all the fabric used for
clothing, 87% ends up incinerated or in a landfill. Eminently, companies know this is a problem
and they know we care about the environment, which is why you have probably seen some
brands show us how ‘woke’ they are.

These are all great examples of ‘Green washing’. That’s when companies market themselves as
being green to an extent.

Moreover, the donating bins say to bring in your old clothes, but almost 90% of clothes end up
in trash or burnt, so companies like H&M and Zara get to look green but they also get you to
shop more by giving you a discount to buy even more clothes you’ll soon be “recycling”. These
companies even have eco-friendly clothing lines. But the problem with these clothing lines is
that so many of the “green” claims they make are meaningless and they do that by using words
that have no set definition, like: ‘Green’, ‘Eco-Friendly’, ‘Ethical’, ‘Responsibly-Made’ and
‘Sustainable’. These words have no legal meaning and they are only used to throw the public
off. So the fact is that a lot of the claims these companies are making right now are to deceive
the average customer.

Coming to a conclusion, this is an issue where everyone can make a difference, just by wearing
your clothes longer or buying one secondhand item, you can reduce your ‘carbon footprint’ by
30% overall.