Is Fast Fashion Racist?

 Yes, Fast Fashion is Racist! And we need to stop pretending it’s not. The majority of fast fashion is produced in developing countries. This is because these countries don’t have labour laws, or don’t enforce labour laws, to a degree that we expect and demand in our own countries, making it quicker and cheaper to mass-produce clothing. This doesn’t dissuade the majority of fashion consumers from purchasing fast fashion items; in fact, the lure of low prices courtesy of the lack of labour laws, encourages unethical consumption.

If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone try to justify the fast fashion industry with “well, at least they have jobs” and “everyone is poor there, it’s just how their economy works” – well, I’d be writing this article from my beach house in Gracetown, not at my kitchen table in suburban Perth.

The fact that fashion consumers actively participate in the fast fashion economy by purchasing clothing deliberately manufactured in countries with labour regulation standards that we wouldn’t abide in our own countries is only due to one thing: racism.

As with all forms of discrimination, racism demands that we other ourselves from people who we assume are different from us in some (or many) ways – different enough at least to imbue them with wants, needs and desires that are inherently different from ours. This allows us to believe that those other people are content to be afforded lesser basic rights than we demand as minimally acceptable for ourselves.

Fast fashion hinges on consumers, a) turning a blind eye to the inherent contradiction of demanding rights for ourselves that we don’t demand for those that make our clothes and, b) justifying the unethical treatment of the human beings who produce those clothes by implying a level of willingness to their own exploitation due to their inherent difference from you and me (i.e.: racism).

It boggles my mind that recent current affairs had people up in arms about the electing to supreme power of a man who has demonstrated an unarguably racist and misogynist frame of reference for the world around him. Yet, the majority of these same people are happy, elated even, to pick up a bargain at the local chain store – a bargain that is the result of the exploitation of a non-white, majority female workforce who will remain in poverty as a result of this ‘discount’ economy.

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