My Clothes Come from Where?
Do you shop at clothing retailers like Forever 21, H&M, and Shein? These are some of the biggest fast-fashion retailers in the world. Fast fashion is when corporations mass-produce trendy clothes and sell them at a very low cost. Sounds like a great deal. Who doesn't like clothing for a cheap price? But with fast fashion comes many underlying repercussions.
Sweatshop workers get paid close to nothing for stressful work hours. About 80% of apparel workers producing clothing for U.S. retailers are working in sweatshops. The average sweatshop worker works 14-16 hrs a day and gets paid 3 U.S cents per hour! Their working conditions often consist of bad air quality and extreme heat due to all their machinery. Working conditions can be so extreme that several workers have died working in sweatshops. From 2006 to 2012, 600 workers died while sewing clothing in sweatshops for GAP, H&M, JCPenney, and Abercrombie. It’s an absolute tragedy that these human beings are putting their safety and lives on the line for just pennies a day.
The garments these workers make are usually for big fashion industries in America and numerous countries worldwide. These companies strive to make the most trendy clothing so they can get buyers to buy. But fashion trends today don't last very long due to social media, meaning that all these clothes are bought and thrown out as soon as the trend dies out. We have seen this many times with fashion trends such as skinny jeans, checkered pattern clothing, and that one TikTok dress everyone was obsessed with; you know that green one. The average lifespan of a trend is about a month, but recently I have seen fashion trends last for a week because of social media.
After these fashion trends die out, they usually end up in places like thrift stores and the trash. Ideally, this wouldn't be a problem for thrift stores, but clothes made in sweatshops are made out of fabrics that aren't very high quality, such as polyester. Polyester takes over 500 years to decompose, resulting in more time filling up land mines than being worn.
The major problem with fast fashion is that it makes clothes so cheap, and not everyone can afford to shop sustainably, so this is how most people end up getting clothes. Thrifting is an alternative to shop sustainable, but in the past couple of years, there has been an influx of resellers buying a ton of clothes from thrift stores and reselling them online for ten times the price it was sold for in the store. So this leads to people going back to fast fashion. Consumers of fast fashion aren't the bad guys here either, and they are simply doing what they need to get clothes. Whenever possible, consumers should invest in really good high-quality clothes that are ethically and sustainably made. There are some things the average person can do to lessen their contribution to fast fashion. Closet switches are a really good fun way to switch up your wardrobe. You can find a family member or friend to switch wardrobes with, and then when you are done, you can switch back. There are a few places where you can rent clothes as well. You can also take a trip to your local thrift store. There are many local stores such as Goodwill, Salvation Army, and Plato's closet.
In the end, the consumers aren't the ones at fault. It’s the big corporations who are the masterminds behind all of this corruption. They are the ones with all of the money and can quickly put an end to their workers’ horrible working conditions. So the best thing we can do to dismantle this problem is to try and buy more sustainably and try not to contribute to fast fashion whenever possible.