The huge Impact of FAST FASHION in today's world

Fast fashion started with capitalism in the 80”, with the American model of “ quick response”, upgrading the machinery technology in order to increase local production and reduce imports, and moved into the market-based model of fast fashion in the late 90” and first part of the 21st century, with Zara at the forefront of this fashion retail revolution or Benetton.

The model is quick manufacturing of latest trends on catwalks, at affordable prices. It takes as little as 15 days for a garment to go from concept to completion. It is also associated with disposable fashion, because it delivers designer products to a mass market at low prices.

The Slowfashion movement has arisen as a logical reaction in opposition to fast fashion, due to both, the huge environmental impact (being fast fashion the second most polluting industry in the world after petrol), as well as for the unfair, poor, inhuman conditions of cheap labor, sweatshops, and children slavery, widely extended in developing countries.

Zara, owned by Inditex, has become the global model for how to decrease the time between design and production, and is spread over 58 countries with about 1.600 stores.

New items are delivered twice a week to the stores, improving consumer’s garments choices and production availability, increasing the number of visits per customer per annum.

Constant output of new trending clothing at affordable prices, make it easy to fall in the trap of buying clothes regardless whether we need them or not, making it really hard on the environment.

New styles come into the stores once or twice/week instead of once or twice a season, making some 50 collections per year.

The industry has grown a 21% over the past 3 years, reflecting the growing consumer desire for speed and value within retail.

Regarding labor force, there’s a huge percentage making less than 3 $/day. Cheap clothes are made mostly by under aged workers, entering the industry to be exploited as young as 6, working long hard hours (average 14 hours of intense work per day on sweatshops) for extremely low wages, while dealing with sexual abuse and harassment at the same time, and very hard, inhuman working conditions.

The fashion industry could take 125 million people out of poverty by adding just 1% of it’s profit to workers wages.

Let’s now talk about the environmental impact of our shopping habits.

Approximately 12.8 million tons of clothing are sent to landfills only in the US every year.

Co2 emissions are projected to increase by more than 60% by 2030 to 2.8 billion tons/year.

Main cotton producing countries as China or India are already facing water shortages, and with water consumption projected to go up by 50% by 2030, these cotton growing nations face the dilemma of choosing between cotton production and securing clean drinking water.

Producing just one cotton shirt takes 2.650 lit of water. One pair of jeans over 7.000 lt.

By disrupting the status quo, we have the power to change things. When we buy less and better, we send the market signals to change the system for good.

Fashion is big business, global industry estimate $ 1.2 trillion, with over $250 billion spent in the US alone.

The wasted resources it took to create a textile are just devastating for the planet. Even natural fibers go through a lot of unnatural processes on their way to become clothing. They’ve been bleached, dyed, printed on and scoured in chemical baths. Those chemicals can leach from the textiles, and in improperly sealed landfills, into groundwater.

Burning the items in incinerators, can release those toxins into the air.

Meanwhile, synthetic fibers, such as polyester, nylon and acrylic, have the same environmental drawbacks, and because they are essentially a type of plastic made from petroleum, they will take hundreds of years to biodegrade.

Trashing the clothes is also a huge waste of money. Nationwide in the US, a municipality pays $45 per ton of waste sent to a landfill. It costs NY city $ 20.6 million annually to ship textiles to landfills and incinerators.

There are some initiatives for recycling, second-hand donations etc, but that’s only a 0.3% of the 200.000 tons of textiles going to the dump every year in the city, and out of that, only a 0.1% of all clothing collected in such programs is turned into new textile fiber.

Only by controlling our consumption habits, we can make a huge social and environmental change; ethical consumption in today's world, is the biggest way of protest.

Susana Gago

Founder, CEO & Creative Director

Miss monkey pvt. ltd.