Fast-fashion: the cost

According to Good On You, ‘fast-fashion’ is “cheap, trendy clothing, that samples ideas from the catwalk or celebrity culture and turns them into garments in high street stores at breakneck speed”.

It relies on new collections being released every month, week, or day, deliberately not made to last, produced as cheaply as possible, so that they can be discarded from one day to the next. According to the Guardian, one in three young women consider garments worn once or twice to be “old”.

But the cost of fast-fashion is unsustainable: both for the women making our clothes and for our planet.

Fast-fashion is fuelling modern-day slavery (Changing Markets, 2019). It is reported that 97% of items are being made overseas, by roughly 40 million garment workers in the world, roughly 85% of which are women (The True Cost). Many of these women live in some of the world’s most economically deprived communities, with little to no employment or social welfare protections.

Following interviews with female garment workers across India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Cambodia and Sri Lanka - and corroborated by our own travels across India from 2016 to 2018 - a report by Global Labor Justice documents the human cost of fast-fashion, exposing the daily violation of even the most basic of human rights, reporting:

physical abuse: one female garment worker in India reported that: “…[o]n September 27, 2017, at 12.30 pm, my batch supervisor came up behind me as I was working on the sewing machine, telling ‘you are not meeting your target production’. He pulled me out of the chair and I fell on the floor. He hit me, including on my breasts. He pulled me up and then pushed me to the floor again. He kicked me…”;
pay below the living wage: research by the University of California found that women and girls from the most marginalised communities in India are working for as little as 15 cents an hour;
deprivations of liberty: garment workers in Sri Lanka reported production targets of 200-250 pieces every thirty minutes, with workers not completing their targets being preventing from taking their lunch break. For workers refusing overtime, the consequence was typically dismissal from work and/or physical and verbal abuse;
unsafe working conditions: the Cambodian National Social Security Fund identified 1,603 cases of fainting across 22 factories, exacerbated by poor ventilation and inadequate nutrition. The report refers to the death off Meas Sreyleak in 2017, a 25-year old Cambodian woman who “died on her way from the factory to the hospital after she fainted at work and hit her head on the sewing table… [w]omen who worked with Sreyleak reported that she had been feeling unwell on the day that she died. She had a sore throat, but was made to work two hours overtime…”; and
coercion and threats: one female garment worker in Indonesia reported that: “…[w]e are briefed. We are told that if we want to work at the company, then we cannot provide any information to anyone who asks about the company”.

The environmental cost also cannot be ignored. Fast-fashion is driving the use of non-biodegradable fabrics which, once discarded, make their way into our rivers, lakes and oceans. It is reported that:

polyester, now the most commonly used fibre in our clothing, uses almost 70 million barrels of oil each year and takes more than 200 years to decompose;
three out of five fast fashion items end up in landfill (Clean Clothes Campaign, 2019). American consumers reportedly dispose of about 12.8 million tonnes of textiles annually and UK consumers hold an estimated $46.7 billion worth of unworn clothes in their closets; and
more than 60% of textile fibres are derived from petrochemicals (Journal of Cleaner Production, 2018). According to the UK House of Commons’ Environmental Audit Committee Report in 2019, textile production contributes more to climate change than international aviation and shipping combined.

Images (from top to bottom): Rethink Retail, Codogirl and Stan Honda-Agence France Presse-Getty Images.