What you need to know about fast fashion. Part 1

Part 1 of 2: Set fast fashion.

Imagine a full suitcase, almost too heavy for a domestic flight. Each year the average Australian throws 23 kilograms clothing. At the same time, they gain 27 kilograms.

Whatever your interest in the runway, your wardrobe is part of the global fashion business. The US$2.4 trillion fashion industry is a hidden monster on the environmental scene according to the UNresponsible for 2 to 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and consumes 215,000 billion liters of water every year.

And, despite the growing trend of environmentalism, it is becoming more and more intense. The rise of fast fashion over the past decade has seen more and more clothes being sold, and therefore thrown away.

Fast fashion is a clothing business and manufacturing process that relies on cheap, ephemeral clothes appearing on shelves quickly. The term was first used to refer to retailers such as Zara and H&M, which pioneered the business model in the early 2000s. Thanks to tight supply chains and careful trend monitoring, stores were able to deploy new collections at low prices every week or fortnight.

Now, spurred on by the pandemic, super-fast fashion sites such as SHEIN and Boohoo are offering hundreds, if not thousands, of new designs every day.

One could actually argue that what we would call value retailers, or affordable retailers, also use fast fashion principles, says Dr Alice Payne, associate professor of fashion at Queensland University of Technology.

We see it even in the high end. The rapid change of seasons, more styles than ever before, a kind of fast fashion mood has entered high-end brands and higher-end brands as well.

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This is an overall acceleration in the speed at which the product moves through the market. And it is at all levels.

It’s not so much cost that defines fast fashion, though you can bet it took someone over $4 of their time to make this $4 t-shirt. It’s the rate at which new clothes become available and the assumption that they will be discarded after a few uses.

This might be textbook information for you. Or it could be a foreign concept. According to Erin Skinner, a PhD student in psychology at the University of South Australia, the term fast fashion is still unfamiliar to many Australians.

This is an overall acceleration in the speed at which the product moves through the market. And it is at all levels.

Dr Alice Payne, Queensland University of Technology

Skinners’ unpublished research began with an online survey of 209 Australians, asking open-ended and closed-ended questions about participants’ shopping habits, views and opinions on clothing.

Among other things, we asked them, have you ever heard of fast fashion? Skinner said.

And the result was one of the most surprising things that most people don’t have.

Payne thinks the story is more nuanced. I think people are confused as to what that actually means, she said. And whether you define it as your most affordable retailers or just consider it the kind of specialty apparel retailers that have fast-changing trends.

Beyond your forgotten and filled suitcase, what are the effects? The industry continues to grow. According to a McKinsey & Company Reportclothing production doubled between 2000 and 2014. Much of this clothing is unworn. often sent straight to landfill, and other objects can remain intact in the cupboards. The water and energy used to make these unused garments is exorbitant, UN estimates are conservative, compared to others. And beyond just landfilling, microplastics from polyester clothing and dye waste can have more damaging environmental effects.

More insidious are the effects on the people who make these garments. The fabric is just too soft to be heavily industrialized at the moment, the garments require manual labor. Every piece of clothing in your suitcase has been cut by someone and driven through a sewing machine by someone’s hands. Someone took a pair of scissors and cut the dangling wires that machines invariably leave hanging. Statistically, it is likely that most of these people were women and few are properly reimbursed.

This is public knowledgebut Payne worries it’s not as well understood as the environmental effects of fast fashion, citing a study 2021 she co-wrote in the Journal of Fashion Marketing and Managementwhich included interviews with 21 Australian fast-fashion consumers.

People were pretty well aware of the environmental impacts of fashion, Payne says. And that’s often where there was a feeling of overwhelm, we called it ethical overwhelm in the article where people feel there are so many decisions to make that they don’t know where to go. Often it was worker welfare that was last for this reason. It was as if environmental issues were better understood by them.

There are a variety of imperfect solutions to this in play. Sites such as Of course, you and Ethical Clothing Australia can help find brands that don’t adhere to the fast fashion matrix.

Even the original authors, H&M and Zara, throw themselves into the action, with recycling and repair programs. Recycling or replenishing tissue holds promise, but the industry at its current size cannot keep up with the gargantuan production.

There’s a growing sense that people understand that buying used is a more sustainable option, if you will, Payne says.

And so we’re seeing this massive growth in reselling and reselling platforms around the world.

Used clothing, while almost by definition better than new, is not the closed loop one would hope for. Fifteen million used clothes pay to Accra, Ghana, weeklynearly half of which end up in huge piles of trash.

There’s that kind of mindset, which is about continuous change and continuous consumption, Payne says. It is this state of mind that must change.

Ultimately, it seems that the people who buy these clothes must also have a role to play in slowing down fast fashion, not precisely in the brands they buy each time, but in the speed at which they buy.

There is a lot of talk in the sustainable fashion community about [how] we shouldn’t focus on the consumer, we should really only target the industry,

Erin Skinner, University of South Australia

The other way to look at it is that you can buy from a fast fashion store, but you might have that item of clothing in your closet for a long time, Payne says.

Because you keep using it, mending it, etc., it almost becomes a slow piece of clothing, even if it was bought from a fast fashion store.

There is a lot of talk in the sustainable fashion community about [how] we shouldn’t focus on the consumer, we should really just target the industry, says Skinner.

I think it’s really important that consumers are aware of the problem and motivated not necessarily that all consumers will be able to make massive changes in their lives, but the more we are interested in as individuals, as people, as voters, the more likely we are to really push the government to put in place regulations like the ones we see overseas.

The next part of Skinners’ research will test a way to change consumer behavior around fast fashion.

For many people, fashion is kind of a frivolous thing, not a concern, she says.

It has huge impacts, social and environmental, and it needs to be taken seriously.

Next week in Part 2: We take an in-depth look at consumer attitudes and how they could be changed.