Sustainable fashion is seen as a thing for the hippies; for the people who can afford to care about eco-friendly fashion. With the prices of some sustainable fashion brands, one can understand why, but what if I told you that sustainable fashion, or rather unsustainable fashion, is a class, gender, race, and environmental issue?
Garment factories are economically trapped in a cycle of pitiful wages, poor working conditions, and environmental destruction. These factories don’t have any other option than to do what the fashion industry wants, which is to provide cheap clothes with the highest profit turn. A way companies get around this lack and loss of money is to ignore safety regulations. It’s been four years since the Rana Plaza disaster, where 1,135 garment workers were killed in the collapse of a building in Dhaka, India. There have been similar disasters, but none with such a high body count (thus far). The Rana Plaza disaster stands at the highest demonstration of the prices workers pay for fast fashion. As the death toll of garment workers rise, so do profits. As one garment worker, in the documentary The True Cost, heartrendingly says, “my blood is on your clothes”.
Why is fast fashion a race issue? The U.K and U.S.A outsources nearly all the fashion industry’s production mainly to third world countries. In the U.S.A, 3% of clothes are made there, with the other 97% made elsewhere. This outsourcing of production is symptomatic of the West’s disregard for people of colour, and citizens of third world countries.
Why is fast fashion a gender issue? As many people know, the employees of garment factories are women. With jobs in garment factories being pretty much the only jobs available, this is a problem. Also, in the West, we chastise women into caring waaaay too much about fashion to the extent that women end up trapped in it. It is without a doubt used to distract women. “Why don’t you just go look at pretty dresses?”, a phrase my dad would say to me every time I got angry at the news.
Why is fast fashion a class issue? The economic instability it causes is a huge issue. It traps it’s employees financially in a way that is cruel. Poverty is cruel, and the fashion industry perpetuates this cruelty.
Why is fast fashion an environmental issue? Every American citizen produces 82 lbs of textile waste each year. And due to leather production, 15 million litres of polluting chemicals pour into a widely used rivers in India. Needless to say, this is ruining the environment on a global scale, and the local environment of the people who have to deal with all the waste the fashion industry produces. The rivers that all these wasteful chemicals are poured into are some village’s main source of water.
When it comes to the things we consume, we must ask ourselves, “who is profiting from this?” The only person profiting from fast fashion is the owner of the brand. The workers aren’t profiting, the consumers aren’t profiting, which leaves only the owners. But this needn’t be the case. Fashion Revolution Week, extending over the 24th – 30th April, was set up to mark the anniversary of the Rana Plaza disaster, and has since aimed to educate the masses and unravel the myriad of issues fast fashion poses. The hashtag #whomademyclothes is sweeping the internet, as people are realising that if a company can’t or won’t answer that question, you probably shouldn’t buy from them. It’s time to demand transparency for the companies making our clothes, and also radically transform the way we approach fashion; WHY ON EARTH are there 52 fashion seasons a year?! What happened to seasonal seasons? And, more importantly, why can’t companies just respect their worker’s rights? It’s time to put the well being of workers before the wallets of a select few. It’s time for a fashion revolution.
