How Fast Fashion Effects Our World
With the change in the world of fashion as well as the fast change of the internet, one big thing that we have seen is the rise of fast fashion. Fast fashion can be described as cheap clothing that was made fast and cheap to keep up with the trends in the fashion world. It takes from runway fashion as well as celebrity street fashion and replicates it at cheap, fast rates in order to make it accessible to the general public.
To start off, it is important to talk about why fast fashion came to be. Fast fashion came about when the rise of people wanting to stay on trend with the latest fashion seen on the runways and on street wear by celebrities grew bigger and bigger. In the past, the only way to stay on trend was to be able to pay for the clothes from the runway in stores, a luxury not many average people had access to.
There were always the cheap knock offs you could find in small places,but in recent years with the very fast advancement we have seen with not only social media but the internet in general, came companies in forgien countries as well as in America, that had access to seeing the things worn by celebrities and on runways who then had the equipment and manpower to mass produce cheap knock offs at extremely fast rates and were able to put it out for public consumption at super fast rates. It seems as if as soon as it is on the runway it is on some website ready to be sold as a knock off to the public so they could stay on trend.
With this, there are many ups and downs with one major down being the effect that fast fashion has on the environment. As soon as something is in trend, it is almost just as fast out of trend, and the problem with this is how fast people are to throw away the clothes they get from these cheap websites. Looking into the backstory of where they are being made, there are many forgien countries that mass produce these clothes and then ship them off to America while paying the people who make them close to nothing. You can see how little effort is put into making them ethically or paying the people who make them.
With shady practices about how to return these clothes many places have no real return policies or places to ship them back to in efforts to make it harder to find exactly where they are being made. With the mix of something not being in style anymore and the clothes also being made very poorly people don’t see any point in keeping poor quality clothing that is no longer in fashion. So what happens to these cheap unwanted clothes?
Most of the time they are neither donated or recycled, and these clothes end up in landfills or end up being incarcerated. Everything that is linked back to fast fashion with these companies comes at horrible costs to the environment. Clothes can take up to 200 years to decompose so these materials stay polluting the planet more and more. Fast fashion has affected the environment in many ways, some of these ways being water usage, microfibers, toxins,human rights, deforestation and much, much more.
To find out how fast fashion affects even the people in my life I interview two people about it. One being my older sister Emily, age 24, and my friend Jay, age 23 about it. I started off by asking my friend Jay if she finds herself shopping on fast fashion websites such as Shien, Boohoo,Romwe,Misguided etc. She said “I shop at websites like Shein and Boohoo because they have cute clothes and they aren’t too expensive so if they aren’t that well made it doesn’t make a difference”. I then asked her what she does if she doesn’t like one of the outfits that she bought from these websites. She said “if i don’t like it or I know I can only get one or two wears out of it I either just throw them out or wear them for the one time I don’t bother returning them because it would be too much work to try and find a box to ship it back to, as well having to pay for the shipping sometimes and also not even getting my money back but just store credit. It’s not worth it.”
With this it is easy to see how many people who shop fast fashion feel about it as the companies themselves also don’t really want the clothing back so it is just easier to do it that way, make it as hard as possible to return something so people don’t even feel like trying to do it. I then asked my sister the same set of questions, she said that she doesn’t really find herself shopping at those websites as she prefers to do her shopping in person at either small stores she finds in the city, or place such as H&M or Zaras where she can try things on in person or even just at thrift stores she finds in the area.
The way she shops for clothes is a much more ethical way because going to thrift stores and buying from them reduces the amount of unwanted clothes that end up in landfills as they are already second hand and by shopping at places near by if she doesnt want something she can simply go and return any unwanted pieces without having to ship it back. She continues to say “ I prefer shopping this way because I don’t like clothes that feel like they were cheaply made and can’t even survive one wash in the washing machine without falling apart. I like clothes that I know are made well and that I can keep for a while and when I’m done with them I go to the same thrift stores I shop at and sell them there.” Even this is a more ethical way of shopping that can still have people wearing the latest trends in a more ethical way.
But at the same time it is important to talk about the people who basically have no choice but to shop fast fashion. Those would be the people apart of the demographic groups who are plus sized and also poorer. While there can be a big downside to fast fast it is still important to talk about some of the positives they have in helping plus sized women have a chance to also participate in fashion trends and styles as well. Close to 70 percent of women in America are plus sized, plus sized being around a 14 or larger. And with a number so large it is shocking that it is almost never represented in the fashion world. Even in today’s world, it is harder for women of these sizes to find fashionable pieces that reflect the latest fashion trends or dont look like they are just trying to cover up their whole bodies.
These women deserve to feel fashionable as well.This is a big group of people that the fashion world very regularly and normally has ignored even up until now with many of these famous high end brands not even selling their sizes in stores if at all. That is where fast fashion comes in while admittedly only doing it for the money, fast fashion has made the choice to make all the cheap clothing they make in bigger sizes that in turn give these women the chance to participate in trends along with everyone else.
Because of this, women of plus sizes are no longer subjected to the extremely limited choices that they had in the past of clothing that they found not flattering or fashionable at all,they can now look good and comfortable and participate in the way they always wanted to. When fast fashion brands make the choice to offer bigger sizes it lets plus sized consumers know that they were thought about when making the clothes and that they have a right to be included also. While it is impossible to ignore the many faults of fast fashion it is also impossible to ignore this extremely positive part of fast fashion that benefits people of a different demographic that was ignored in the past.
Fast fashion is also good for people who simply can not afford to buy things that are better made, but also extremely expensive, so while it can have a harmful effect on the environment just like everything else fast fashion has many ups and downs. A way to try and fix the negative effects fast fashion has would be to try and recycle the pieces that the average consumer buys from fast fashion as well as having the bigger brands try and at least consider their plus sized customers as well as people who can not afford to buy such expensive clothing all the time.
Sources :
https://medium.com/@glennschlossberg/plus-sized-consumers-are-changing-the-nature-of-fast-fashion-60372edb1eaa
https://pebblemag.com/magazine/living/whats-wrong-with-fast-fashion
https://medium.com/@glennschlossberg