It’s Friday evening, and you’re exhausted from the long week that you just went through. So, you start scrolling through your phone. You go to TikTok Shop, Amazon, and SHEIN for some casual shopping. You add a thing or two to your cart, a shirt, a pair of jeans. They’re only a few dollars, with free shipping and a lenient return policy. Why wouldn’t you buy them? There’s no harm. Unfortunately, this is a delusion. The harm done by fast fashion is more than any of us could imagine.
As most people shop, thoughts of where their clothes came from, who made them, and where they will end up rarely cross their minds. But for clothes to be mass-produced for dirt cheap, there is exploitation that happens on many levels throughout the production process.
Common sources of cheap labor for fast fashion brands include China, India, and Bangladesh. In some manufacturing areas, the minimum wage only covers half to a fifth of what a family needs to make ends meet. In Bangladesh, workers are paid about 33 cents per hour, while the average wage in sweatshops in India is barely 58 cents. These brands who maliciously exploit workers (often women and children) are fully aware that they are trapping them in a cycle of poverty in which they will be overworked in grueling conditions only to make cents for their work.
The deceptive marketing used by fast fashion brands is also extremely harmful to customers. The layout of department and big-box stores illustrates this perfectly. Have you ever wondered why stores present you with dollar store-style shelves of useless trinkets near exits? This layout is not a coincidence. Stores place these items in the checkout area, creating a sense of urgency as well as preying on shoppers when they are not paying as much attention to their purchases. The goal of this process is that the customer will buy these extra items that they do not need, fueling the cycle of overconsumption while creating revenue for the store.
But it is not just brick-and-mortar stores that employ these tactics. The convenience of online shopping provides consumers with an ability to bring an item to their doorstep with the click of a button. Shopping on a screen limits the customer from thinking critically about their purpose.
Fast fashion brands use methods such as providing free shipping for orders over a certain amount. Customers may find themselves adding items to their cart that they do not need or particularly want, simply to fill the requirements for free shipping. This means that once the customer receives the item that they ordered solely for free shipping, it will most likely remain unwanted and unworn, before eventually ending up in a landfill. The company does not care if you use or want the items that you buy. They only care about money, even if the tactics used to make it do not benefit the customer, who will spend their hard-earned money on junk that will not satisfy them.
Fast fashion also deceives shoppers about the fit, shape, and general appearance of clothes. This method works especially well during online shopping, when the retailer can upload a photo of an item that a shopper wants, only to deliver an item completely different from the picture. An article from The New York Times from a woman working to sort donated clothing reads: “I picked up a beige crop sweater with a hulking torso but oddly tiny T-Rex sleeves. Checking the image of the item on the superstore’s website, I found a picture with batwing sleeves. Such disparities between the online image and the actual item are common”.
In addition to that, fast fashion brands engage in a practice called planned obsolescence. Planned obsolescence is the deliberate shortening of the lifespan of a product to force consumers to purchase functional replacements. This is common among fast fashion companies as their only goal is to maximize revenue. The idea behind this tactic is that when the items are broken, customers will opt to buy a new one from the same brand. To put it simply, our clothes are awful now because of corporate greed.
Because clothes from fast fashion companies are made to be broken, they are also made to be thrown away. Many people will dispose of clothes within a year, and one study even found that garments are disposed of after no more than 10 wears. Once fast fashion items are thrown away, they go to two common places. Impoverished countries in the global south, or into a landfill.
Although sending clothes to impoverished countries seems like an altruistic act, these countries are suffering from the sheer volume of clothes sent to them by America and Europe. According to Boston University, “Only 15% of used textiles are theoretically recycled, and of those, up to half are simply shipped abroad to other countries, where they land in landfills”.
After clothes have been thrown away, destined to pollute the environment for years, the cycle of fast fashion is done. Only, it isn’t. It will happen many more times. It will happen millions upon millions of times. Fast fashion will continue to wreak havoc on laborers, consumers, and the environment all in the name of making these companies wealthier. But, fast fashion’s dominance doesn’t have to be inevitable. As a society, we can embrace the movement of “slow fashion”. We can become savvy shoppers. We can boycott these damaging fashion brands and subsequently put them out of business. Doing this personally might seem insignificant. But it isn’t. These companies rely on you. These companies rely on people. But we shouldn’t rely on them.