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What is Fast Fashion?
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Fast Fashion is the industry that massively produces and sells cheap and trendy clothing, reproducing at very fast pace ideas from the runways, to sell them in the stores at a very low price.
I know this sounds very familiar to us, but the fashion industry was not always like that. 200 years ago, clothing production was very slow. You had to prepare your garments yourself, waving or sewing them, and you even had to source your own unprocessed materials for that, like leather or wool.
Many years later came the Industrial Revolution introducing the sewing machine, transforming with it the making of clothing into a cheaper and easier process, so the middle class was able to afford it.
Years passed, and by the 1960s -1970s clothig became a way of personal expression for young people. However, it was not until the 1990s and 2000s that big retailers started selling low-cost fashion that resembled the high fashion creative design, but in a faster and cheaper way. By that time, everyone was able to dress trendy as a fashion model or celebrity. Trend cycles sped up and shopping became a form of entertainment. With the possibility of buying clothes so easily, people started tossing away their clothes more easily too.
This was the beginning of Fast Fashion as we know it. These days we can buy fashion items for as cheap as $5 in any big retailer or online. We have new trends and collections coming up constantly and huge amounts of the same item in the stores and online, so you can always have something that you like, in your size, and within the reach of your pocket, immediately. Sounds good right? Too good to be true, actually. Of course, all of this came at a cost.
The Impact of Fast Fashion
The pressure to produce at such speed and keeping the costs low is having a huge impact on the planet. The environment is being damaged in many ways, by the use of cheap toxic dyes and other chemicals used in the production process. The industry is producing much more than what is needed, and after that, destroying tons of perfectly good unsold products. The quality of the garments is low, and the change of seasonal trends is very fast, so the clothes get bought, used and discarded very quickly by the customers, with a high percentage of them ending up in landfills as textile waste. Fast Fashion is producing massive levels of waste and an alarming amount of greenhouse gas emissions.
Impact on The Planet:
In the last 15 years, Fast Fashion has doubled the production of clothing. Over 80 billion garments are produced annually, worldwide. In opposite, the amount of time clothing is being worn by customers before it is disposed has decreased by around 40%. The average lifetime of a piece of clothing is 3 years. When the textiles get thrown away, 73% of them will be burned or buried in a landfill.
More than 15 million tons of used textile waste is generated each year in the United States. An average American buys 60% more clothing items every year and throws away an estimate of 80 pounds of used clothing per person each year. That is a huge amount of waste, which costs cities in the United States, an average of $45 per ton to dispose of.
Yearly, the carbon emissions of one household’s clothing are around the same amount of driving an average car for 6,000 miles. That is really alarming. The fashion industry is the second largest polluter of clean water globally. In a year, the environmental impact of only one household’s clothing is equivalent to the water used to fill 1,000 bathtubs.
Natural fabrics as cotton, require a huge quantity of water and pesticides to be grown in developing countries. Once in landfills, natural fibers take hundreds of years to decompose, releasing methane and CO2 gas into the atmosphere. When animal products such as leather and fur are used, animals are commonly held in bad conditions to lower the costs, and of course, then killed.
Synthetic fabrics widely used like polyester, are derived from fossil fuels, contributing to global warming. It also releases microfibers of plastic in our oceans, not only when disposed but also every time we wash them. Those microfibers can be ingested by ocean life. Additionally, synthetic textiles do not decompose. In the landfill, they may release toxic substances into surrounding soil and groundwater. Toxic dyes are also released in waterways.
Impact on Working Conditions:
Fast Fashion impacts garment workers as well, who have been working under constant pressure, in dangerous environments, for low wages, and without basic human rights. In order to cut costs, some farmers work with toxic chemicals that can have huge impacts on their physical and mental health.
Recycling Clothes
Textile recycling is the process of recovery and reuse of old clothing. Through it, we can avoid the pollution and excessive use of energy in the production of new clothing. When clothing is too damaged and cannot be reused, it may be repurposed into other materials for reprocessing.
The textile recycling process involves the donation, collection, sorting, and processing of textiles. If the garments can be reused, the next step is the transportation of them to the final users. More than 70% of the world's population uses secondhand clothing.
Around 50% of collected clothing and shoes are used as secondhand products. If they cannot be reused, they can be used to produce polishing and cleaning cloths, fiber for insulation products, upholstery, and mattresses among others.
Changing Our Shopping Habits
Fast Fashion can also impact consumers, making us believe we need to shop more and more, creating a constant sense of need, which leads us to eventual dissatisfaction. They encourage the “throw-away” culture that is so damaging for our planet and for our own budgets, by creating low-quality products that get damaged quickly, and become obsolete very soon because of the speed in which trends are fabricated and promoted by the industry.
But there are signs of hope. A younger generation of environmentally conscious consumers is giving signs of moving away from Fast Fashion. They are demanding from brands and retailers to reduce fashion waste by producing fewer products, as a way to reduce the impacts on the environment.
Millennials are also embracing different business models with Companies like “Rent the Runway”, in which you can rent designer clothes instead of buying them. Thrift stores are also growing in popularity, as a way to contribute to the recycling of clothes, and as a way of finding special items that are not sold in retails. The resale market has grown 21 times faster than the retail market over the past three years. There are also trends such as “Slow Fashion” that are starting to draw continued attention.
Consumers can also help reduce waste by choosing clothing brands with better quality products that last more, and trying to give their clothes a longer life before discarding them. They can achieve that by fixing or repurposing their clothes when needed to give them a fresher look.
Our Print On Demand Model Helps Reduce Waste
After the huge environmental damage that happens to reach the amount of production and costs desired by the industry, when clothing items are produced but not sold, overproduction of millions worth of perfectly good merchandise is being burnt to preserve product scarcity and brand exclusivity. And this is nothing new. Stock is also routinely defaced and dumped before it was ever used. This is simply unacceptable.
In an article of McKinsey & Company published in February 2019 titled “Fashion on Demand”, it is stated that “Fashion is seeing the start of a seismic shift where products are “pulled” into the market based on actual demand rather than “pushed” based on best guesses and forecasts. The change is significant.”
This shift in the way that the fashion market is working applies to us. In the Print on Demand business model, we are able to offer a large number of options for the consumer, but we only produce what consumers actually buy. That eliminates the problem that was mentioned before. The only disadvantage of this is that the production of each individual piece of clothing has elevated costs for us compared to mass production, and the profit is smaller too, so the price of the products cannot be as cheap as in a fast-fashion retailer.
However, we feel good about working with this business model, because even if it does not eliminate every single aspect of the problem, like any other model that currently exists -for example, we still need cotton for the production of t-shirts, and we still need to ship products to the customers- it completely eliminates unsold stock and overproduction, making it much friendlier for the environment, significantly reducing waste and the environmental cost of massively producing clothing that may never be sold.
Besides that, we try to base our products’ design in personal styles, rather than fast-changing trends, so hopefully, customers will want keep their products for a longer time.
We hope, for the sake of our planet, that we all become more aware of the ways in which we can help to reduce this fast-fashion/fast-waste growing problem. If you have any other ideas on how consumers may contribute to reduce fast fashion impact, feel free to post a comment : ) Thank you!