In a marketplace full of seemingly infinite choices, every piece of clothing purchased could be construed as a moral quagmire. Are you a bad person if you buy leather? What about vegan leather? Conversations about the relative importance of various, often opposed ethical concerns are rightly packed with tough, worthwhile questions and considerations.
There are a million and one lines to draw, all dependent on a person’s particular value system. But there’s one clear-cut distinction that anyone should be able to understand: We can all do more to buy less (or, ideally, nothing) from fast fashion giants.
When you say something like this in public, though, there are a few types of pushback, with differing degrees of validity and popularity. One of the most common — and effective — is that fast fashion is accessible. This is true and entirely to the point. Fast fashion is accessible to people of lower incomes, and often accessible to people in a range of sizes — two extensive problems in the fashion industry. With fast fashion, people who otherwise might not be able to can express themselves through trends. This is, in a vacuum, a nice thing, VOX reported.
This nice thing also exists in a much broader and more complicated context.
Academics, human rights activists, and experts who work in fashion and sustainability have spent years sounding the alarm: Clothing overconsumption is awful for the environment and hurts the poorest of the world’s poor. The boom of fast fashion — the breakneck business model where retailers mimic trendy runway or streetwear looks to mass produce them at lower price points — has normalized a culture of constantly buying new clothes without thinking twice about the consequences to other people, animals, or the planet at large.
Every piece of clothing comes with two costs: the one we pay as consumers and the actual one, which takes into account the climate effects of production and shipping and the impact on the people who make the production and shipping possible. If a T-shirt retails for $5, what does that say about the wage of its constructor and of the materials that went into making it?
Companies are incentivized to cut corners when it comes to paying workers fairly, sourcing materials ethically, and ensuring the living conditions of animals. I’ve previously written about how our stuff — from blenders and bras to telephones and tractors — has gotten worse in the last decade because of the corporate pursuit of overproduction and overconsumption. Given the speed needed to keep up with trends, it’s not physically possible to quickly mass produce something that is of a decent quality, ethically made, and affordable.
The problems endemic to the fashion industry, however, are relatively under-discussed, and there’s a reluctance among consumers to take a good, hard look at their own purchasing habits. There isn’t enough clear information about the environmental or human rights impacts, the topic of fashion itself is seen by some as shallow, and the discussion is frequently derailed by related conversations. It’s not simple — nor is it solely our individual responsibility when policymakers and brands can step up — but none of that means we have to buy into a narrative that normalizes a culture of overconsumption.