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Fast Fashion: A Crook’s Passion

  • February 17,2021 ​

Bertha Hutchinson

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Photo Credits: Womens Fitness

In this day and age, people expect quick services for products at low cost. Whether it be food, internet services, clothes, or videos, many feel entitled to have these things regardless of income. The media can push the idea that people deserve all this and more without any repercussions.  Of all these, clothes have become something that people buy online quite often during this pandemic. Due to the accessibility on the internet, people are able to see and buy knock-offs of the latest fashion items.

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This trend has been made worse because of fast fashion; which is the making and buying of cheap clothes to follow with the latest trends. Many consumers may not realize that they are buying fast fashion since the most common online stores that do are Wish, Aliexpress, and Shein but stores like Romwe, Zara, Urban Outfitters, and Zaful are also contributors to this issue.

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Impoverished women working under poor conditions in a garment factory that profits from fast fashion.

Companies that make fast fashion clothing treat workers poorly and make them work long hours with little to no pay. Companies that do this are just modern-day sweatshops. As Forbes states, “It’s not in China, but in America that workers put in grueling 12 hour days, making garments that will be sold for anywhere from $5 to $75 for around three cents apiece paid out.” Workers hardly get paid for the amount of work they do. Companies just care about how much they produce and not how much time it takes to be made and the labor that goes into it.

 

Forbes also says, “The American factories they use owe over $3.8 million in wages to workers, with those same workers making an average of $2.77 an hour,” which means if they work an 8-hour shift, they get paid about twenty-two dollars a day. Whereas, in other places, with a minimum wage of $7.50 an hour, if the employee worked for eight hours, they would earn sixty dollars. 

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Besides the low wages, these companies have used poor quality materials to make their products. According to Think Sustainability clothes are made out of, “synthetic materials – polyester, nylon, spandex, etc. – that are commonly used for many different types of clothing; each year, 342 million barrels of crude oil are used to produce these synthetic fibers.”, which is extremely bad for the environment. Not only this, but the fabric that these companies discard is not biodegradable and once the fabric is thrown out, it may rot or will not be reusable for other purposes. Therefore, if the demand for fast fashion keeps going up, so will the negative effects it has on the environment. 

 

Fast fashion is, unfortunately, something that people have to resort to during the pandemic. However, there are still alternative stores that are more eco-friendly and treat their workers properly. One thing people can do is buy used clothes from thrift stores or yard sales. Another substitute is to make your own clothes from old or unused fabric. As Forbes has said, “it’s all right for fast fashion to be an ethical corrupter if we value money over the cost of a human life.”

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