How to Avoid Fast Fashion: 8 Rules for Conscious Fashion Consumption (2024)

FAQs

How to Avoid Fast Fashion: 8 Rules for Conscious Fashion Consumption? ›

There are many alternative options to buying fast fashion including shopping at second-hand stores, organizing a clothing swap, renting clothes, and adopting new habits to help you resist the urge to buy fast fashion items. Here is a complete list of the top tips for avoiding fast fashion: Buy second-hand.

There are many alternative options to buying fast fashion including shopping at second-hand stores, organizing a clothing swap, renting clothes, and adopting new habits to help you resist the urge to buy fast fashion items. Here is a complete list of the top tips for avoiding fast fashion: Buy second-hand.

Buy second-hand and/or through clothes swaps.

Buying from op shops or thrift shops will not only reduce the consumption of new clothes, but by doing so you can also support the work of charities and not-for-profits.

Fast fashion is a design, manufacturing, and marketing method focused on rapidly producing high volumes of clothing. Fast fashion garment production leverages trend replication and low-quality materials (like synthetic fabrics) in order to bring inexpensive styles to the end consumer.

The pressure to reduce costs and speed up production time means environmental corners are more likely to be cut. Fast fashion's negative impact includes its use of cheap, toxic textile dyes—making the fashion industry the one of the largest polluters of clean water globally, right up there with agriculture.

Negative impacts include worker harassment, diseases due to toxic chemical use, poverty, wage theft, increased green house gas emissions, biodiversity loss, and resource and soil depletion. As you can see, fast fashion companies work under a system that has dire social and environmental impacts.

Fast fashion has an enormous environmental footprint for both its production and disposal. Clothing production requires a considerable amount of energy and resources, while it depends on toxic fabric dyes and other chemicals that contaminate fresh water. Fashion produces a tenth of the world's carbon emissions.

The key to breaking the cycle of fast fashion is to only buy what you need, when you need it. This will help you avoid purchasing clothes which end up sitting in the back of your wardrobe never to be worn. This can be a difficult habit to get in to, especially in our current culture.

Plastic fibres are polluting the oceans, the wastewater, toxic dyes, and the exploitation of underpaid workers. Fast fashion is big business, and while the environmental costs are rising, experts say there is another way: a circular economy for textiles.

What is most affected by fast fashion? ›

The Dark Side of Fast Fashion

It dries up water sources and pollutes rivers and streams, while 85% of all textiles go to dumps each year. Even washing clothes releases 500,000 tons of microfibres into the ocean each year, the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles.

Affordability is a major factor that drives consumers to choose fast fashion over sustainable options. While some brands offer more affordable sustainably-made items, fast fashion brands can produce garments at a much lower cost than sustainable fashion brands, allowing them to sell their products at a lower price.

Social impacts

This means fast fashion companies can get away with paying workers very low wages. In some cases, workers are paid so little that they cannot even afford to feed themselves or their families. This often leads to workers being forced to work long hours, as they need to earn enough money to survive.

All seven factors (Perceived Price, Perceived Quality, Brand Consciousness, Fashion Consciousness, Hedonic Shopping Value, Store Environment, and Sales Promotion) influence positively Purchase Intention of Millennials towards fast fashion products.

Across the Atlantic in America, the Fashioning Accountability and Building Real Institutional Change Act—known as the FABRIC Act—is the first federal fashion bill which aims to improve the labor rights of garment workers and encourage reshoring of the American garment manufacturing industry.

The rapid change in clothing styles leads to excessive clothing waste that can be difficult to recycle. Fast fashion is often produced in sweatshops and other low-wage labor environments, where workers are subjected to long hours, low pay, and hazardous working conditions.