The Actual Way to End Fast Fashion

A People's History of Fashion

The modern #fashion #business did not appear out of thin air. We can start to see how fashion is closely related to the emergence of fossil fuels, the beginning of the industrial revolution, and the spread of capitalism if we go back in time from Instagram shopping to malls, through catalogues, to storefronts, and the textile mills of England in the 18th and 19th century. Before the development of the automated textile mill, garment production took place on a much smaller and more planned scale. Frequently, you either manufactured your clothing or knew the person who did.

But it became much simpler to produce huge quantities of clothing and cotton items on a large scale with the invention of the water-driven textile mill, and then the coal-driven textile mill. However, there was no rapid increase in garment output following the development of these technologies. Capitalists facilitated that. The late 1700s and early 1800s textile mills served as prime instances of capitalist exploitation. Over the course of nearly two centuries, a variety of laws and regulations drove former peasants from the English countryside off their property, leaving them with nowhere to go except into mills and towns.

These landless and unemployed peasants went to the textile manufacturers' smokestacks for money to live, but the surplus of labour allowed the factory owners to pay out pitiful salaries and treat their employees like slaves.

Fashion, with its never-ending cycle of seasons and fads, is the ideal illustration of how our economic system turns something that was produced for pennies on the dollar into something that can be sold for millions of dollars. Let's be clear: the people who make the clothing never see a penny of those earnings.

From Clothes to Fast Fashion

Capitalists required consumers to buy everything they were making as textile output accelerated during the course of the 19th and 20th centuries—a result of both automation and the exploitation of the working class. Fashion trends have also always existed, but when industrial capitalism seized hold of the world's marketplaces, the cyclical character of fashion's use became much more apparent. According to Tansy E. Hoskins, author of the book Stitched Up, "people are tied into a worldview where having is more essential than being under capitalism. Instead of finding satisfaction inside ourselves, within our work, within our community, or within nature, we only learn to enjoy things when we own them.

Therefore, as individuals are valued according to their material possessions in capitalism, an item of clothing is far more likely to sell if exclusivity, belonging, #money, and power are associated with it. And indeed, that is what took place.

The Planetary cost of fast fashion

A river flows an iridescent blue in Xintang, China, the denim capital of the world. The river can occasionally resemble a vat of hazardous chemicals due to colours leaking down the channel from the denim mills that border its banks. We can see a small portion of the environmental damage caused by the textile industry in this river. A significant imprint has been left by the steady flow of new clothing. According to estimates, the total annual carbon emissions produced by the textile sector account for between 2 and 8% of all emissions worldwide. For just one industry, that is a considerable sum.

The fashion industry uses an estimated 79 trillion litres of water annually and generates over 92 million metric tonnes of garbage. Additionally, customers go through clothing at a faster rate than the fashion industry. The typical American buys apparel every 5.5 days, and from 1996 to 2012, fashion purchases in Europe climbed by 40%.

How can we stop fast fashion?

Going to the thrift shop or purchasing purportedly ethical or sustainable apparel will not put a stop to the existing environmental and human exploitation of the fashion industry. While these actions do make a tiny difference, they ultimately amount to sanding away the edges. The feeling that there is nothing we can do but cross our fingers and hope that the capitalist class will realize the errors of their ways and change may come off as a little dejected. If that's what you're hoping for, capitalism's profit model and competitive nature sadly make that desire unattainable.

However, if we are aware that real environmental and ethical change must originate at the site of production, it follows that those who work in sweatshops, textile factories, and clothing manufacturing facilities have a significant amount of influence. These workers have the power to stop fashion capitalists' simultaneous exploitation of people and the environment completely. The largest advances in environmental justice and worker emancipation didn't come from cutting back on purchases or shopping more sustainably. They originated from protesting textile workers.

Future Fashion

There are various ways to adopt more moral and sustainable clothing habits. A future in which the production of clothes is not based on waste, pollution, or worker exploitation would be one in which the textile factory employees collectively control it and democratically select what is produced. a workplace where designers are both employees and workers are designers. In this economic paradigm, production is focused on how much we need to be comfortable and content rather than how much we can produce and sell.

According to Tansy Hoskins, "Socially organized production would halt overproduction because nobody who isn't dependent on wages is going to vote to work 15-hour days, seven days a week, on an assembly line to manufacture 20 billion pieces of clothes. Under community ownership, their function would have been eliminated. The only individuals who require such enormous quantities of garments are those who sell them for a profit. Additionally, communal ownership puts an end to catastrophes like the collapse of the Rana Plaza since no worker will want to work in dangerous conditions.

In essence, the socialist model would abolish the exploitation, waste, and pollution that are essential to the production of clothing under capitalism. However, transforming our economic structure won't happen quickly. Workers must organize, increase their power, and create networks of support across industries. We can put strategies in place to lessen the harm caused by the present industry while we develop that electricity. This might take the form of using hemp fibres instead of synthetic, fossil fuel-based materials in clothing manufacture, increasing salaries, producing and purchasing clothing that lasts 10 years rather than ten days or even figuring out methods to repurpose textiles that have already been damaged or shredded.