Fast Fashion and How to Quit it

Have you heard of the term ‘Fast Fashion’? If not, no one can really blame you. It’s not exactly something the media likes to push to the forefront. But hey, let’s get into it.

To give you a basic blanket definition it’s cheap (both in price and in quality) clothing produced in huge numbers, very quickly, by huge companies and retailers to keep up with the latest trends.

I know that for myself the whole ‘latest trends’ thing was something my brain wouldn’t get around. “It’s just the latest trends, how many of them can there really be?” well, there are a lot. We’ve gone from 2 or 4 regular seasons all the way to 52 ‘micro-seasons’. That’s a new fashion season every single week of the year.

SHOPPING

We’ve all been there, the bargain bin at H&M, Boathouse, Zara, you get the gist. Living in Canada these things come with the territory and unless our perspective changes we don’t blink an eye. We grab up that cute top, thin sure, but it’s only $3.00. But stop. Put it back. Don’t do it. Exit your shopping cart. Close that tab.

Once you’ve bought one of those, you’ve bought them all. They will fall apart, get holes, and lose stitches within one wash if not one wear. Keep in mind that the reason these places can sell clothing for that price-point is because they don’t’ pay the garment workers in their factories living wages. They don’t value their safety and they don’t value our safety.

According to the Creative Director of Eco-Age, Livia Firth, an average piece of clothing will only last about 5 weeks in our closets. 5 weeks total. Not just because fashion changes so quickly, but because the clothing is so cheaply made. We can go out weekly and buy something new to make ourselves ‘feel better’ all over again. If we really think about it though, we’ll realize that all of those clothes have to wind up somewhere after that 5 weeks. 80 billion pieces of clothing wind up being thrown out, that’s the equivalent of 82 pounds per person being thrown out every year. Add that all up and it’s close to 11 million pounds of garments being tossed in the trash every year, and that’s just in the United States.

That alone was enough to make me rethink the way I shop, but there is so much more to it.

POLLUTION

Fast fashion is the 2nd highest polluting industry, number 2 only to the oil industry. The fact that our clothing is more polluting than our vehicles, farming and agriculture, and really everything else, should wake up anyone. We’re clearly doing this wrong.

The amount of chemical garbage used in the creation of fast fashion garments is disgusting. Not only does fast fashion create a ripple effect across the globe, it dumps toxic, chemical ridden waste into our streams, rivers and oceans. As one great example, let’s look at the river Ganga in India. The Ganga river provides water to nearly have a billion people and the waterway is considered holy by Hindus, but it is so highly polluted by toxins from the leather tanneries in Kanpur it’s unsafe to swim in or drink from. The side of this level of pollution that we don’t tend to see is the impact on children. There have been ongoing efforts to clean the river, since 2015 until today, but if pollutants are continuously being dumped into it the efforts will not even scratch the surface.

PEOPLE

So let’s say the pollution side didn’t convince you to change your purchasing habits. We still have yet to talk about the workers who are part of the fast fashion industry, the human aspect. Let’s put this into perspective, one in six people work in this industry. That’s not just one in six of India’s population or Canada’s population, that’s one in six people on the planet. The majority of these workers are earning less than three dollars a day, and living in Canada we can all imagine what living on that sort of wage would look like. We complain about fifteen dollars an hour and these workers are making $90 a month while working amidst chemicals in dangerous working conditions. Perspective matters.

An invisible force behind fashion are the cotton farmers across the world. In India massive numbers of cotton farmers committed suicide in the last 15 years (250,000 approximately), for one main reason. These farmers were cornered into buying genetically modified seeds from Monsanto and thus were forced into debt that they could not dig out from under. Surely there are other contributing factors, but the one thing they all seemed to have in common was debt, and a lot of it.

HOW TO QUIT FAST FASHION

How we can change our habits to benefit the Earth and all of those aboard it?

I put together a short list to help you get started on the right foot:

- Thrift before buying new.

- Buy from sustainable brands that don’t use toxic dyes or materials if you can’t thrift what you need.

- Only buy what you need, and don’t get sucked in by the micro-trends. Timeless is always the best option.

- Repair your own clothes. Darn your socks, mend the ripped seams. Just do what you can to keep your clothes functional for as long as possible.

- Re-purpose your old clothes before you throw them away. Old T-shirts make for great rags, you can even tie them up to act as sponges!

- Remove temptation. Unsubscribe from all of those shopping emails and unfollow the influencers who are just trying to convince you to buy more stuff you don’t need.

This all probably sounds very different from your usual routine, unless you’re already ahead of the curve. I assure you, it gets easier and easier once you see how much money you save while saving the planet. So put down your credit card, close those tabs, and take a step forward. You don't need to quit fast fashion in a perfect way. You should just try and change habits that our Western society has deemed normal that are truly not. You've got this!

Reference: The True Cost. 2016. The True Cost | A Documentary Film. [online] Available at: <http://truecostmovie.com> [Accessed 1 March 2016].