Inconspicuous Consumption by Tatiana Schlossberg

Author:Tatiana Schlossberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2019-08-26T16:00:00+00:00

Fast Fashion, but Going Nowhere

Consider, if you will, the fashion industry. Take the cotton fibers woven together into a tight denim sausage casing for your leg (thank you to whoever decided we should all wear skinny jeans), and the synthetic fibers gently floating off your back into the air you breathe and the water you drink. Imagine that each of these fibers, millions of them just in the outfit you’re wearing today, is a paint stroke. Imagine using all those paint strokes, each one a fiber, together to create a painting. That painting, that masterwork, that Sistine Chapel fresco of fibers, is fast fashion, but just the part that’s in The Last Judgment—the extra hellish parts—because that’s what your descendants will think of this ever-bulging sector of the fashion industry—that it certainly portends a hellscape, if we’re not living there already.

That beautiful and poetic prelude was a way to say that without cheap textile production fast fashion wouldn’t be possible. And fast fashion, as it happens, presents a particularly environmentally damaging sector of the global economy, largely because of the scale.

What do I mean by fast fashion? I mean a brand, usually with an actual retail presence (physical stores) as well as some online presence, that sells clothing whose designs are largely derived from high(er) fashion or luxury brands but sold for much less money. They produce lots of clothes all year round and are able to produce clothes quickly, so what appears on the fashion runways can also appear relatively quickly on their racks. I think you all know the brands I mean: Zara, H&M, and nearly all of the brands they own, ASOS, Uniqlo, Topshop, Forever 21, etc., etc., and on and on forever.

Though some of these brands have existed for decades (H&M started in the 1940s),1 the phenomenon of fast fashion as I’m talking about it has only really existed since the beginning of the twenty-first century, but it has exploded: Inditex (which owns Zara) and H&M are currently two of the largest global clothing retailers.2 H&M has been struggling for the last few years, ending 2017 with $4.3 billion in unsold clothing and having to shut some of its stores. This is not, however, the end of fast fashion. Instead, some argue H&M is no longer fast enough to keep up with some other brands, especially those, like ASOS, that are online only.3

How did we get to this point? Part of it has to do with synthetic fibers and the relative ease and low cost of producing them. Synthetic fibers, unlike cotton, don’t need to be grown and harvested at the end of a growing season. Part of it also has to do with China’s willingness to open itself up to the global economy and subsequent explosion of the garment industry there. There are 15,000 textile factories in China alone, but as China begins to crack down (a little) on the environmental and labor practices of some of these mills, they’ve moved elsewhere: Vietnam, Bangladesh, Cambodia.4

Both

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