What is Fast Fashion?
Fast fashion refers to Mass-produced clothing items. These items are cheap, Quick, and trendy. Nowadays, fast fashion has become the talk of the town. People want the runway items in their wardrobe as soon as possible. Gone are the days when our parents used to have 4-5 clothing items, and they were enough for the season. Now people with walking wardrobes and separate dressing rooms are still complaining about insufficient clothing items.
Consumers and fast fashion marketers aim to get runway styles into shoppers’ hands as quickly as possible, without caring much about the quality or external costs. These fast fashion clothes are not highly durable and might throw up after 3-4 washes. But people don’t even care as they have not invested much in them.
With the increasing trend of fast fashion, environmentalists are concerned about its hazardous aspects.
Consequences of This Fashion:
What are the destructive effects of fast fashion? How is it affecting Earth? And how to stop them? These all are the most critical questions related to Fast fashion.
- Carbon Emissions: As explained earlier, Fast fashion clothes have a small life span. Hence they are responsible for carbon emissions. According to the experts, the fast fashion industry released 10% of total carbon dioxide, even more than all combined flights and transportation. This carbon release is not only dangerous for plants, animals, and humans, but they are causing some adverse effects on the environment too.
- Deforestation: As clothing industries require a vast place. These industries are built away from the residential areas after clearing massive forests, which results in extreme deforestation. Cutting trees is causing global warming, affecting humans, animals, and nature simultaneously.
- Polluting water bodies: Clothing industries release a considerable amount of industrial waste into water bodies, which eventually goes to seawater, polluting it. This waste makes the water dirty, and at the same time, it becomes hazardous for sea life.
- Exploiting workers: Fast fashion adversely affects the lives of workers who work in dangerous environments. They work for low wages and without fundamental human rights; in addition, these workers work with toxic chemicals that can devastate their physical and mental health.
How to spot a fast fashion brand?
Fast fashion is dangerous for humans and the planet we are living on. Hence it’s essential to boycott all fast fashion brands and play our role in making Earth a better place for every human being. Below are some critical tips to spot a fast-fashion brand.
- Millions of new and trendy designs.
- Extremely short life span. They became useless after 5-6 washes.
- Short turnaround time between runway catwalks to the shelves of stores.
- Extremely low-quality fabric and lousy stitching.
- Low prices to attract the maximum number of customers.
How to Stop?
One of the best ways to stop the fast fashion trend is by boycotting these brands. As a human, it’s our responsibility to protect our environment and everyone living around us. We all should buy fewer clothes and learn to style a single clothing item in tons of different ways. Wasting too much money on buying new clothes every week is not a very wise thing to do. Instead, reuse your old clothing items and give them a new look. Like old denim jeans can become an excellent shorts for summer? Convert a baggy shirt into a handbag, use your old t-shirt, make a cropped top, etc.
Here is all you need to know about fast fashion, its effects on the environment, and how to stop it? What is your opinion about it? Please feel free to share your views with us in the comment section below.