What is Fast Fashion?

A business model focused on speed and low cost must have drawbacks.

Fast Fashion

How many of us have bought a piece of clothing, worn it once and then let it collect dust in the back of our closets? This is what fast fashion companies do. Fast fashion is a business model focused on producing cheap clothing immediately after a new clothing trend hits. Hours after a celebrity posts a picture in a designer outfit, companies start churning out cheap look-alikes.  

It is easy to think that fast fashion is a genius model devoted to creating cute, affordable clothing, but the true costs of fast fashion are often overlooked.  

Fast fashion negatively impacts the environment: contributing to climate change and creating massive amounts of waste. It impacts the workers who make the clothes and are paid very little, forced to work in dangerous and unhealthy conditions. Additionally, it impacts the environments of the workers by polluting primary water sources and incorrectly disposing of chemicals from the clothing-making process. Fast fashion companies often use materials that are harmful to the environment like cotton, synthetic materials and animal-derived materials. Not only is the production of these materials harmful and irresponsible, the processing of them also creates a lot of toxic chemical waste. This causes a slew of dangerous health conditions that could be avoided if companies were more responsible with their waste disposal.  

Fast fashion companies use clever marketing and complicated language to disguise the environmental impacts. Many fast fashion companies have launched "eco-friendly" lines to make people believe they are helping the environment, when really, the companies are just using marketing and vague language. For example, a company may say that they have a new "sustainable" line of clothing, but they don't specify how it is more sustainable. Companies will use statistics that are misleading to make you believe you should buy clothes from them. When they publish the full information, they use confusing language that makes it hard to understand what they are really doing. 

This issue is easy to cast a blind eye on, but it is our responsibility to understand and prevent the harmful effects of our actions. It is not fair to let others suffer because we want convenience. 

“While people bought 60% more garments in 2014 than 2000, while they only kept the clothes for half as long.”

— Impakter