Fast Fashion

There is more to what you are wearing than you think. No, I'm not talking about the material its made of, but we will be getting into that. Fast fashion is all around us; it’s probably part of what you are wearing right now. Many stores practice fast fashion. Places like forever 21 and H&M don't have our best interest at heart, and they aren't the only ones on the list of fast fashion stores. What is fast fashion and why should I care? Fast fashion is a relatively new concept to us so many of us may think the effects don't matter right now, but they do. Fast fashion is cheap, trendy clothing, inspired by the year's catwalk or celebrity culture that then turns into garments in high street stores at an extremely fast speed.

The seasonal releases of clothing industries used to be the standard in the past, but now stores issue new pieces weekly, sometimes even daily to keep up with consumer demand. The massive production of clothing items satisfies customers, yes, but this doesn't mean there isn't a critical negative impact on the environment because of this mass production. Clothing is an essential thing in our everyday life. People don't typically want to wear the same things over and over again in a day and age where it is so easy to step out the door and find a place that will have a new shirt for less the five dollars. It's easy to impulse buy things that we will only wear once.

The problem with this kind of mass production is that there is too much coming out at once for such a low price, that it’s low quality. Ask yourself this, how can a company make a profit while they are selling things at such cheap prices? It's because they are making it cheaply in other countries, and hiring from clothing production companies that tend to only pay their workers 8 dollars a month when they work around 18 hours a day in poor conditions. One of, but not the only example of what these workers go through, would be the garment factory incident in Bangladesh where the factory collapsed killing more than 1,000 people innocent workers with families.

What can we do about the huge impact that fast fashion is having on our earth? Well we can start to avoid buying from fast fashion companies. There are a lot of businesses that have noticed the dangers of fast fashion and its impact and are trying to make quality clothing and items for us that are affordable as well. Sometimes it is hard to not buy a cute dress you saw while walking in the mall since its most likely less than 20 dollars and would look fantastic on you. One of the main things that would help our planet is if we bought less, that way we would be producing less waste. Never simply throw away your clothing. If you think someone else could use it, then donate it to charity or give it to a friend. You could also go thrifting yourself! You could definitely find some amazing one of kind pieces there. There are a lot of things we can do to help. Yes, we may be going out of our way to do them, but in the end, these small things could take us a long way.