Fashion Real 2.0

by Elsie Karlak

The fashion industry is a behemoth at this point, deeply invested in all of our lives, whether one likes it or not. Even if one doesn’t consider themself a fashionista, the industry’s scale means that its issues are important and have far-reaching consequences, particularly for our planet.
In 1985, Zara founder Amancio Ortega devised what he called “instant fashion” which cemented Zara in fashion history. “Instant fashion” was the forerunner of fast fashion today, capitalizing on faster turnaround times, less pieces per style, and more styles, epitomizing the phrase “quantity over quality,” in order to react to trends faster. By making designs in-house and outsourcing production to cheap labor sources, initially in Spain, but later throughout the Global South, Zara could milk trends faster than competitors, gaining more sales when consumers still found the trend fresh and new. By producing less of each design, they suffered fewer losses if a design was unpopular, and by producing lots of designs, they captured a bigger share of the market. The business model of “instant fashion” was extremely profitable, and soon was replicated by dozens of other brands, becoming the norm of the industry today. Fast fashion, the term I will use here, is the fashion industry’s model of the mass-production of clothing, quickly and cheaply, in order to satisfy an ever quickening trend cycle. It has only become possible due to the cheapening of both materials and labor, notably by outsourcing to developing countries where labor costs are significantly lower. Fast fashion brands include Zara, H&M, Shein, Forever21, ASOS, and essentially every store in your local shopping mall.
Fast fashion, as evidenced by the name, sped up the industry to lightning fast speeds. In 2020, Zara produced more than twenty collections in a single year. Compared to the paltry four that fashion houses used to produce, this is an astonishing leap in scale and speed. As another cog of the capitalist machine, fast fashion has been a boon for the profiteers of the industry. Billions of dollars are extracted by these companies from meteoric trend cycles that encourage more and more consumption. The speed with which trends come and go now means that by the time the knockoff top you bought off Shein gets to your door, it is already considered tacky and out of style. This likely means you won’t wear it as often, or even at all, turning the item into a piece of garbage almost instantaneously. Due to shoddy materials and construction, if worn, it’s likely to fall apart after just a few wears. Which also turns it into a piece of garbage. All paths of a fast fashion item end at the landfill, as fast fashion thrives off of overconsumption and the discaradiblity of clothes today.
Fast fashion, while reaping in huge profits— $3.56 billion for Zara in 2021— is devastating for both workers, and the environment. According to the UN Environment Programme, the fashion industry is responsible for an estimated 2-8% of the world’s carbon emissions, more than the shipping and maritime industries combined. This astonishing statistic starts to make sense when you consider the most common materials of today’s garments. An estimated 62% of all fibers used in the fashion industry are synthetic materials, plastics, made from crude oil. This includes acrylic, polyester, nylon, and elastane. These materials have their uses and are also, like all plastics, extremely durable. This durability also means that they will take decades to decompose, anywhere from 20 to 200 years, if at all. Even if one continues to wear them, the washing of synthetic materials can release microplastics, tiny shards of plastics that end up in our water sources, oceans, and marine life. These materials are not sustainable for our planet, due to their origins and their lifecycle. I am not advocating for completely turning our back on synthetic textiles, as they have their necessary uses, but the current amount that is continuing to be produced is unsustainable and unnecessary, and is directly contributing to climate change. But even natural materials, which decompose easily due to their biological origins, can be unsustainable for our planet. Cotton, according to the WWF, is the “most widespread profitable non-food crop in the world” and is the next most used fiber in the fashion industry, at 24% of all fibers. However, it is a water-intensive crop that can deplete soil of necessary nutrients, leading to an increased reliance on toxic fertilizers and pesticides, which eventually runoff into local water supplies. Past the raw materials, many other steps of the production chain to make garments are also awful for the environment. Notably, the dyeing process is notorious for toxic chemicals which often end up in local communities and drinking water sources, with “roughly 17 to 20% of industrial water pollution [being] owed to fabric dyes and treatments.” These practices are damaging the environment, and considering the scale of the industry, in ways that have massive and long reaching effects.
In addition to the industry’s effects on the environment, it is also detrimental for workers. The environmental effects of garment production have the greatest impact in the communities where factories are located and where workers live. Because factories are often located in the Global South, where the labor laws are much laxer and unions have even less sway, wages for the average garment worker are just $147 a month, according to research by the Workers Rights Consortium. WIth poverty wages and no job security, garment workers have no way to raise issue with unsafe working conditions, unless they want to lose their jobs. Dangerous practices like sandblasting, which involves literally blasting denim with sand to achieve a distressed look and can cause incurable lung diseases including silicosis, are still commonplace in factories even after supposed bans. Factories themselves are also often dangerous, as the tragic 2013 Rana Plaza collapse illustrates. An eight-story building, which was not coded for the heavy machinery of garment-making, but nonetheless filled with multiple factories producing clothes for Prada, Walmart, and Primark, among others, collapsed, killing over a thousand people and injuring thousands more. Shops on the lower levels were closed after cracks had appeared in the building, but factory owners threatened to withhold a month’s pay from garment workers who did not come in. It is easy to forget when you walk into a Forever21, but every single item in that store was made by human hands. And every item in the store next to it in the mall, and the one after that too. Our clothes are made by people.
The environmental and labor repercussions of fast fashion are damning evidence for the villainous machinations of the industry unless, of course, you are a supervillain who only cares about profits. And consumers are realizing this. Consumers in the Global North have, in the past ten years or so, been slowly inundated with more and more content and news about the horrors that our consumption brings to the Global South. While shocking, the constant flood of guilt tripping content leads to desensitization, apathy, and a feeling that this state of affairs is “normal” and unchangeable by political action. WIth UNICEF ads about poor children working in sweatshops ending with calls for donations, the conscious consumer wants to change their shopping habits and bring good to the world, by buying more, as money is seen as the solution rather than true political action.
So what is the marketing strategy for consumers, now that fast fashion and destroying the planet isn’t cool anymore? A few approaches have been workshopped in the past few years, with varying levels of malintent. The most popular course of action, particularly for fast fashion brands, has been “greenwashing.” Greenwashing is a form of deceptive advertising that attempts to paint products in an environmentally friendly light using misleading information. Using vague language, often with no set definitions, brands can get away with making themselves seem much more sustainable than they actually are. For instance, “sustainable” has no legal definition, which means a company can use the word to mean whatever they want. A report from the Changing Markets Foundation found that an astonishing 96% of H&M’s claims about sustainability were misleading. What’s more, their “Conscious Collection,” had a higher percentage of synthetic fabrics than their regular collection. Greenwashing is incredibly prevalent within the industry and makes it incredibly difficult to tell the difference between true sustainability and lies.
Greenwashing is part of a larger growth in recent years of conscientious consumerism – “vote with your dollar” – and the generally false notion that buying more is a way to fix structural issues. It moralizes consumption, and because our identities are now intimately tied to the brands we associate with and the things we consume, we moralize oneself (and others) through consumption habits. If you buy fast fashion, you’re bad. If you don’t, and you buy the better, good fashions, you’re good. It is, of course, more complicated than that. Consumerism, of any kind, will not solve an issue that is at its roots, caused by said consumerism. Some habits may mitigate the problems caused, but a true solution lies in fixing or replacing the problematic system. Because in the end, this is all marketing to ensure that people continue buying things constantly and unendingly. All of it is strategies to ensure that they have percentage points of increased profits to show the shareholders at the next quarter.
Alongside greenwashing there has been a parallel trend within the fashion industry. If fast fashion is the antithesis of where consumers wish to place their money, then slow fashion (very cleverly named) is the new hope for the fashion industry. Slow fashion aims to right the environmental and labor wrongs of fast fashion, typically with transparency about where their workers are located, fair wages for all in the chain, natural materials, and generally more eco-friendly practices. If greenwashing is the scummy hiding of poor practices behind a veil of agreeable promises, slow fashion is those promises coming to fruition. And before I get horribly cynical again, true slow fashion brands are doing inarguably good things! If you have the means to buy from these brands, you should!
While slow fashion is promising, it is also very easy for it to slip back into greenwashing. While there are third-party certifications that businesses can acquire to verify their fair labor and environmental claims, many companies decline outside observers, preferring instead to be the ones showing off how great their factories or materials are, leading to a very obvious conflict of interest. Even with brands who do live up to their sustainability claims, they are still companies who exist under capitalism. As brands, they need to compete to be good little capitalists, which means competing against fast fashion brands, who have no qualms about encouraging people to buy, buy, buy. This capitalist competition means that they inevitably end up helping promote the same overconsumption that is the norm in the fashion industry. Which is not great, as slow fashion, while mitigating some of the environmental impacts of producing clothes, is only truly sustainable if it is not also overproducing.
Of course, all of the things that distinguish true slow fashion cost money. Lots of it. So much so that slow fashion brands are usually at low-end luxury brands price points. For generations who have been raised on cheaper and cheaper clothes, usually at the expense of the workers making them, this can be a shock to take in. I think one of the most insidious things that fast fashion has done has devalued our collective sense of how much clothes are worth. We no longer view each item of clothing as a valuable commodity, one that can shelter and protect us, but as disposable. Something that can be discarded at any time, with no repercussions. This means that when we see the price tags for garments that are priced fairly, built well and meant to last, it feels unfair to us all (myself included). But what is truly unfair is that that is what we have come to expect.
There is no single solution to fast fashion or the fashion industry as a whole. It is a global system that is deeply entrenched in our current capitalist structure. Its’ issues cross so many sectors, only a few of which I have covered in this essay. Barring an end to capitalism, it is unlikely that these issues will be solved soon, and fast fashion is a positive feedback loop in that the profits that it brings in only continue to grow and expand itself, over and over, growing further out of control. The industry’s turn to “eco-friendly” marketing and greenwashing schemes is an insidious reaction to consumers’ concerns about the environmental impacts of fashion. By pointing to their own marketing campaigns, which always paint them in the best light (if not a truthful cast), companies can shift blame away from them and onto their competitors. In pointing to their marketing, companies can assuage consumer guilt over their shopping habits, leading to more “eco-friendly” overconsumption.
While this is not an issue that will be solved individualistically, I hope you take away from this essay the importance to shop critically. We will likely always need to buy stuff, but I urge you to shift your thinking the next time you go to make a clothing purchase, and ask yourself, “Do I need this? Is it made with sustainable materials? Will I keep wearing this for a long time? Is this valued in a way that whoever made this is being paid fairly? Do I really need this?” These questions have made me rethink many potential purchases in the past, because to be honest, most of the time I don’t need it! But again, this is not an individualist problem and such an outlook will not solve this (but it might help). We need systematic, global, structural change! As an aside, please do not see this as an annoying person on a high horse telling you to feel bad for your habits, because I am guilty too. There is no escaping the structure we live under.
Before I step off my soapbox, please remember your Rs. The first is REDUCE. Stop buying so much stuff! We are buying more stuff than we need! There are so many clothes on this planet that every human being on this Earth could do that stupid 2010s internet challenge of putting on as many T-shirts as humanly possible until you look like the Michellin man and we would probably still have shirts left over. Next up is REUSE! Keep wearing the clothes you already own! (even if they’re fast fashion! Better on your body then in a landfill!) Upcycle! Challenge yourself to use the same items in x number of fits! And finally, RECYCLE! Thrift! Trade clothes with your friends! Buy second hand whenever possible.
Capitalism cannot thrive without our consumption and the earth (and us, and importantly, the workers making our clothes) cannot thrive with it. It must be one or the other. While this essay focused on the fashion industry’s evils, that is only because that is what I am knowledgeable and passionate about. Be critical of other industries as well, because this is not a fashion issue; it is a capitalism issue.