So What's the Deal with Fast Fashion?
First off, I want to say hey and welcome to my blog! If you are reading this you likely found it via my Instagram @FindingtheFair. I recently started it as a place to help inspire myself and others to be buying Fair-Trade. The Fair-Trade movement is one that seeks to provide fair wages to exporters and those in developing countries, protect the environment by implementing sustainable practices, and protect those who are producing. There’s a lot to it, which I will be going in depth in later blog posts.
Right Now, I want to talk a bit about what drove me to to buying only Fair-Trade:
Fast Fashion
What is fast fashion? This is something that just shy of a year and a half ago, I would not have been able to fully answer. Now, after pulling back some of the curtains of the fashion industry, the term leaves a pit in my stomach.
According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, "fast fashion is an approach to the design, creation, and marketing of clothing that emphasizes making fashion trends quickly and cheaply available to consume." Think H&M, Forever 21, Topshop.
The fashion industry use to have four seasons: fall, spring, winter and summer. Today, there are 52 seasons - and no I am not exaggerating. Every week, retailers and designers are pushing to churn out new styles at a low cost.
It use to take about 6 months to design and produce a line of clothing. Today, it averages about three weeks.
Is this a bad thing? Before I knew better, I might have said no. I also love fashion. As Orsola De Castro, co founder of Fashion Revolution once put it, "Clothes are our chosen skin.” Like an art, it is a way of expressing ourselves. I see nothing wrong with that. I am pretty money savvy and use to constitute finding great prices with being responsible. WIN for everybody!
WRONG.
There are quite a few reasons why Fast Fashion does not settle well with me now, but I’ll start with just one today:
We have created a price war. We are winning, but at the expense of other's livelihood and in some cases, their lives.
Have you ever heard of the Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh? Sadly, I hadn’t until just last year. Rana Plaza housed a massive clothing factory in Bangladesh. In 2013, the factory collapsed killing over 1000 workers. What makes this even more devastating, is that all those deaths could have been avoided. Workers had mentioned to management on a number of occasions their concerns with the state of the building they were working in. In fact, on the day of the collapse, workers were asking for a mandatory evacuation. The evacuation was not permitted. Was it because management was made up of a bunch of evil, heartless people? No, they had a quota to meet, the pressure was on, they couldn’t miss a day of work. Does this seem dramatic? A little.
But there’s a much larger system at play. One that we, in our $15 T-shirts, are blindly driving.
Two decades ago, the world of fashion and consumption looked very different. The amount of clothes the average American buys each year has doubled from just 15 years ago. The amount of time we have clothes before throwing them out has been cut in half.
My mom told me that when she was younger she remembers getting $100 at the beginning of every school year to buy her outfits. That was it for the year. She came from a pretty average middle class family. Even if we account for inflation, that still wouldn't fly today for the average Westerner.
We are always shopping.
Even when we aren't shopping, we are receiving messages from media, tv, and social media, that still have us subconsciously “window shopping” and priming us to make the buy.
Globalization has made this mass amount of production and consumption possible. It use to be that the majority of clothes were made on our soil. Prices were a little bit higher and the production took a little bit longer.
When companies discovered that they could outsource to developing countries and that their costs could be significantly decreased, they moved their production.
Unfortunately, this was done in a manner that has caused a gross cyclical pattern.
Today's trade transactions play out a little something like this:
Factory A sells T-shirts to Fast Fashion Retailer at price of $5. Fast Fashion Retailer finds Factory B that is willing to produce T-Shirts for $4.50. Fast Fashion Retailer tells Factory A, “Sorry we found someone to produce at a cheaper cost. We no longer want to work with you.” In desperation, Factory A says, “ Okay, we will produce T-shirts for $4.”
With their buying power, Fast Fashion Retailer is now working with the same factory but for a whole lot cheaper. To some, this may seem like a fabulous thing! After all, that is a bit of supply and demand at play. Capitalism!
However, something is very wrong with this, for when does the cycle end?
Essentially, we keep driving prices down and the makers are paying the cost.
Are production costs for them going down? Definitely not. In fact they have been steadily increasing with inflation. So where are they cutting costs in order to meet the demand of the buyers? In wages, in safety, in quality. 80% of Bangladesh’s foreign trade is in the fashion sector. The minimum wage for garment workers is about $30 a month. How did Rana Plaza get to the point where it collapsed killing over 1000 precious lives? Because, factories where cutting corners in order to meet the pressure. Simple as that. This is the narrative that rings all too familiar in many places across the world.
1-6 people on this earth work in fashion industry. It is not a machine driven industry. It’s a people driven industry. One that grew rapidly on a grossly messy foundation.
Sadly, it is a system we have created and it’s going to take time, commitment, and sacrifice in order to iron out. Am I saying “stop buying”? No, the global economy would crash and burn. I am saying to just buy smarter!
Lets not be reckless drivers of the economy.
Know wear your clothes come from; know who made them. Support companies who support those in their supply chain. Stand by the companies who allow more than just the big man upstairs to benefit from the profit.
Choose Fair-Trade
