In 2013 a garment warehouse in Bangladesh collapsed, leading to the death of 1,134 workers and the injury of 2,500 workers. These employees were women and children who worked in a factory that paid them less than minimum wage and forced them to work in inhumane conditions. The culprit? The Fast fashion industry.
Fast Fashion is a global industry that has plagued our earth. They mass produce for cheap and the low-quality textiles reflect it. All the clothes are designed for trends and consumerism. The garments are practically disposable, useless after a handful of wears and washes. They are a scourge that stands as the second biggest water consumer and bears responsibility for around 10% of carbon emissions. For a single cotton shirt, it takes an estimated 2,700 liters of water, which is enough to sustain someone for 2 years. Rivers and lakes dry up in the name of fashion, even when 85% of the clothes end up in a dump each year.
Behind each textile is the story of someone paying the true cost. Fast fashion is a labor-intensive industry that employs over 60 million industry workers. Employees are heavily exploited and underpaid. Workers earn less than 2% minimum wage, suffer in harsh conditions, and draining hours. Modern textile brands are designed for efficiency and results, ruining the art of fashion.
Fashion has slowly become an art of destruction. Society’s obsession with mass producing and efficiency has led to suffocating overproduction, drowning our world in waste. To keep up with trends, brands release new lines every month, causing the production of billions of textiles that end up in a dump by the end of the year. This leads to toxic pollutants and greenhouse gasses killing our home. The cotton cultivation for clothing depletes our water sources and pollutes rivers. The synthetic materials, used to reduce cost, are made from fossil fuels and shed microplastics that contaminate our body and oceans. The dyeing and finishing processes throw the environmental impact a mile over the finish line, filling our waters with toxic chemicals. Fast fashion has transformed our world’s natural resources into waste that has begun to kill us, all for the fleeting moments of joy when purchasing clothes.
In our search for style, we have become victims of consumerism and materialism. Our concern for our earth has turned into worries of what we are going to wear to school. This promotes shallow values based on attire instead of on quality self-expression. As a society, we have begun normalizing waste, leading to the casual disposal of clothing that erodes our planet. The convenience of it all has led to the emotional detachment of individuals who do not realize their true impact. For money, we have continuously undermined creativity and authenticity, slowly turning fashion into imitation. We must take the moral responsibility for what we have done and break down the moral complacency we have all experienced.
Fast fashion is an industry built on suffering and exploitation, tearing away from its roots of creativity. The devastation has begun too much for our earth and it is time to stand up to it. We can choose to dress with conscience, not convenience. We have lost fashion as an art, transforming us into mindless consumers. It is not too late to become better than our impact. True change begins with awareness.
Works cited
https://sustainablecampus.fsu.edu/blog/clothed-conservation-fashion-water
https://www.wwf.org.uk/articles/fast-fashion-disaster
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