What is Fast Fashion?
Imagine with me if you will, a time when buying clothes was seen as a seasonal expense, where fashion and function merged and garments were well made, easily and affordably tailored to fit, and withstood the effects of washing and drying.
Trends were revealed in seasonal magazines and newspaper ads and you couldn’t wait until Friday’s weekend coupon books that told you all the deals you could take advantage of.
Fast forward to the modern age, where the internet and hand held devices have made it excruciatingly easy to find out what will be a trend 20 minutes from now.
Our desire for instant gratification, appearing to be trendy at a fraction of the cost, and blindly buying what is marketed to us by influencers has plummeted us into a world where we no longer care how our clothes were made, why they are a certain style, and who made them.
As a expectation for better quality at cheaper prices becomes the status quo, brands are facing higher and higher demand that they’ll never be able to live up to.
I heard it once said that the price of the garment represents how many times you can wear it before it begins to deteriorate.
SO What is Fast Fashion?
Fast Fashion transforms catwalk, celebrity and influencer culture to easily made, low end, trendy garments that are made available at most high profile stores in record time.
They are sourced by companies who can order vast quantities of garments and accessories from third world countries at a fraction of their cost to make millions of dollars on trends that will be discarded after just a few wears.
What are the effects of Fast Fashion?
1. The subconscious effects of fast fashion say that reusing your garments is inappropriate and your worth and relevance is directly attached to the trendiness of your style.
By focusing so much on what (or better stated “who”) people are wearing, we’ve created a culture that is allowed to bully and tease anyone who doesn’t keep up with the latest trends, or, God forbid, reuses their clothes.
2. The wastefulness effects are vast and wide because of fast fashion. It has polluted not only what we wear, but what dishes we use, what soap we wash our hands with, how we organize our pantries and what type of yard games we buy.
In fact, by setting seasonal color pallets, what you bought last year can no longer be considered trendy because this season's colors are completely different. So we throw things away, or take the added step to donate them while we go buy another set of the same items in a more updated color.
And that is just our contribution as consumers. Manufacturers are throwing away the cutoffs of these products at alarming rates with no intention to reuse material, properly dispose of it and therefore source it ethically.
3. Which leads to the humane effects that Fast Fashion has contributed to. We can all agree that there are major issues with labor laws in many of the countries that employ the workers who make our garments, but we’ve generally been too many steps removed from them to actually care.
However, in 2013, when the Rana Plaza in Dhaka collapsed and killed over 1,100 people, the world stopped and took note.
This was a factory of human beings working in terrible conditions for low wages to supply garments a half a world away. And their lives were ruined because of fashion’s insane demands.
We all quickly learned who these people were working for, and many of us realized what we had taken part of inadvertently. In fact, despite our continued desire to shop for clothes at reasonable prices, we subconsciously know that a price is being paid somewhere, even if it’s not by us.
What Should We Do?
It’s time to ask yourself some serious questions. It’s time for you to decide whether you’ll investigate what you are buying, where the hard earned dollars you have in your bank account are going to be supporting unethical practices or not.
And then come to terms with the fact that in many ways, you may have to be ok with that. You need to have grace with yourself that you can’t change all your habits over insight.
But you can become more strategic! If you have to buy a winter coat this year, make sure it’s well made, that it will last several seasons, that it’s timeless, and that the brand is transparent in the way their clothes are manufactured.
>> Make a list of the items you wear the most frequently and consider the next time you need to replace one of them, that you do so by supporting an ethical company and making sure that the quality will also last you a long time.
>> Find your local Buffalo Exchange (or equivalent) and sell the items you don’t need anymore and use that as credit to shop for other garments already there.
Why Does it Matter What I do?
You can’t be in charge of changing the whole world, but you can be in charge of changing your world. You work hard for the money that you’ve earned and therefore when you use it, you’re exchanging your value for that which you buy. Make sure that how you spend your dollars represents who you are and what you value.
And if you make these conscientious choices, even if it’s just about your jeans and your coats, influencing your two best friends to make the same changes, well then you’ve started a pretty awesome chain reaction.
Let’s do this together!
Lys
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