The Problem With Fast Fashion | Teen Vogue

Do you love those cheap, fashionable, clothes you can find at places like Zara and H&M? The rise of "fast fashion" has changed the way we buy and wear clothes, but at what cost?

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The Problem With Fast Fashion | Teen Vogue

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?