By Haniya Jaffery
It is famously said that life is a fashion show and the world is a runway. In today’s world of instant (and affordable) gratification, this has manifested in the rise and reign of fast fashion brands. Consumers are keeping up with 52 seasons of trends now instead of the previous four, and when we switch up our wardrobe that often, the fashion industry produces clothes just as fast.
A report by the UN showed that it takes the same amount of water to produce a single pair of jeans that a person drinks in seven years. With more consumption comes more wastage and the clothes we discard rest in landfills and take decades to decompose, contributing significantly to global waste and making the fashion industry one of the largest polluters in the world.
We are able to afford rapid consumption of fashion because these companies sacrifice quality for quantity and morals for profit. They benefit from child labour and their workers, mostly underpaid women in countries in the Global South, work overtime in dangerous conditions with little to no compensation.
Sure, lately there has been a spread of awareness about the evils of the fast fashion industry but companies continue to greenwash the realities on the ground.
There are alternate ways to dress fashionably in more ethical ways - and this doesn’t mean spending five to ten times the amount on a company that brands itself to be “sustainable”. Donating the clothes we have outgrown and buying second-hand or exclusively from companies whose manufacturing and textile sources are known to be “ethical” are steps we can take to rebel against this corrupt industry. Together, we can slow down fast fashion.
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