We all love to shop
and these days the new styles in clothes
are cheaper than ever.
You can literally snag a dress for 4 bucks,
which is basically the price of a vanilla latte.
But buying cheap comes at a high cost.
And I know, I know, I hear you. You're like
"Whembley, what does that actually mean?"
And that basically means that
fast fashion just works on exploitative labor conditions
and it's destroying the environment.
Over the last two centuries
as the world has changed
our relationship with clothes has dramatically changed too.
From an era where clothing was bespoke
or tailor-made for each individual
to the ready-to-wear era
where pre-made clothing came in standardized sizing
and the current era of fast fashion.
The fashion industry, today,
looks nothing like it did in the past.
And, of course, not all change is good.
An obscene amount of clothes,
stealing independent designers' ideas
low wages, unsafe conditions and harassment,
factory works sewing pleas to help in their clothing.
Yikes.
But before we get into all of that
what exactly is fast fashion?
You're right if you think it sounds like fast food
It's cheap, quick and of questinable quality.
Back to the topic at hand
If fast fashion isn't bespoken, isn't ready-to-wear,
then, what is it?
To answer that question
we need to travel to a small village
in Galicia, Spain, of La Coruna.
In 1963, a man named Amancio Ortega Gaona
launched a company which would go on
to become the biggest fashion retailer on Earth.
That company is now known as Zara Inditex.
You may have recognized its most famous holding, Zara.
Ortega's Zara pioneered the fast fashion model
There are four major points:
First, vertical integration
That's just a fancy way of saying
the company does it all in-house
from design and manufacturing,
and selling clothes.
This helps streamline cost
and optimize production processes.
Fast fashion is all about feedback.
Designers receive data on what sells
and what doesn't, as often as daily.
They often conduct field research on what's trending
and it's pretty much by just going out and seeing
what people are wearing on the street
onto speedier design-to-retail cycle.
In fast fashion, the emphasis is on fast
the time it takes to make clothing is now
a fraction of what it once was.
For Zara, which leads the industry,
it just takes five weeks
instead of fixed seasonal collections.
Fast fashion outlets generate the lion's share of profits
through designs produced in season.
Ready-to-wear collections are made and debuted
one full season ahead of time.
FInally, fast fashion is dependent on cheap labor
and those savings are passed on to the customer.
Fashion has always run on people power
more than anything else.
Currently, one in six humans on earth
works in the fashion industry
It's massive!
And for the most part
those humans live in developing countries.
But cheap labor comes at a high cost.
With globalization, the world's economies
became increasingly late.
The promise of fast fashion was
trendy clothes at a low cost.
Therefore, "democratizing fashion"
in the words of Amancio Ortega.
At the same time, companies like Forever21 and H&M would
provide jobs for workers in the developing world
It didn't work out exactly like that.
Fast fashion companies have come under fire
for exploiting workers
This has meant everything from child labor
to forcing workers to handle dangerous chemicals
and being grossly underpaid for long hours without a break.
In 2013, a preventable structural failing
caused a building in Bangladesh to collapse
More than 1,100 garment workers were trapped inside
and injuring more than 2,500.
The Rana Plaza disaster was the deadliest
garment factory accident in history.
And while we now spend less than
3% of our annual income on clothing
compared to about 10% in the 50s,
we have an absurd amount of clothing
because fast fashion means that
clothing is disposible.
Fashion is also terrible for the environment.
Long story short, more clothes made
much more quickly, for a fraction of the cost.
Means a glut of cheap clothing
piling up in our landfills.
To get a sense of the sheer volume of clothing
we are talking about here,
let's do a quick rundown a fast fashion's
environmental impact by the numbers.
150 billion,
the number of new garments produced each year.
That's more than 20 garments per person on Earth.
2.5 billion,
the number of pounds of fabric waste
removed from the waste stream,
according to the Council for Textile Recycling
60, the percent by which
the amount of clothing we own
has increased between 2000 to 2014
according to Greenpeace.
But we keep clothes for half as long as
we did just 15 years ago
leading to a massive amount of waste.
10, the percent of the global carbon footprint the
fashion industry is responsible for.
There is no question that fashion is contributing to the
effects of climate change.
While clothing is recyclable
the amount of clothing produced
has far outstripped our capacity to recycle it.
It's gotten so bad that in April,
China, which was previously a top destination for recycled textiles,
has officially banned them.
And in North America, the city of Markham,
Ontario, in Canada,
is the first municipality to ban
textile waste from landfills.
But wait, it gets even worse!
Fashion is the second biggest polluter of
clean water on the planet.
Toxic chemicals used to dye and treat clothing have
been linked to miscarriages,
birth defects and cancer.
You have to ask yourself:
Is it worth it?