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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The real cost of cheap, fast fashion - to workers and the planet

Clothes from Boohoo

It comes in red, mustard and black, in sizes 6 up to 16; the bandeau bodycon minidress, is, according to the online retailer Boohoo, “perfect for transitioning from day to play”.

It is not so much the styling and colour, but the price of the £5 dress – reduced this week to just £4 – which attracts thousands of the thriving retailer’s 5 million UK customers to add it to their online shopping bag, click and pay.

Products and prices like these have driven Boohoo’s profits to a record £59.9m, bucking the trend of struggling high street fashion stores across the country.

Made in the UK, at factories in Leicester and Manchester, the £5 dress epitomises a fast fashion industry that pumps hundreds of new collections on to the market in short time at pocket money prices, with social media celebrity endorsement to boost high consumer demand. On average, such dresses and other products are discarded by consumers after five weeks.

Missguided, an online rival to Boohoo, which also sources products from Leicester, took the low pricing even further this week by promoting a £1 bikini, which proved so popular with customers that the website crashed.

But behind the price tag there is an environmental and social cost not contained on the label of such products. “The hidden price tag is the cost people in the supply chain and the environment itself pays,” said Sass Brown, a lecturer at the Manchester Fashion Institute. “The price is just too good to be true.”

A report by MPs into the fashion industry put it bluntly: in terms of environmental degradation, the textile industry creates 1.2bn tonnes of CO2 a year, more than international aviation and shipping combined, consumes lake-sized volumes of water, and creates chemical and plastic pollution – as much as 35% of microplastics found in the ocean come from synthetic clothing.

Socially, the booming fast fashion industry is often built on low wages paid to women working in factories abroad but also increasingly in the UK, in cities such as Manchester, Birmingham, London and Leicester. There is no evidence that factories in the Boohoo and Missguided supply chains pay illegal wages. However, some garment workers in Leicester are paid an average of £3 an hour – way under the national minimum wage – MPs heard in evidence.

MPs found that the Modern Slavery Act was not robust enough to stop wage exploitation at UK clothing factories. There was a lack of inspection or enforcement, allowing factories – none of which are unionised – to get away with paying illegal wages.

In the UK, we buy more clothes per person than any other country in Europe – five times what we bought in the 1980s, which creates 1.3m tonnes of waste each year, some 350,000 tonnes of which is dumped in landfill or incinerated.

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Fast fashion: Should we change how we think about clothes?

A lot of us love a bargain outfit - we buy fast, we buy cheap and we too often wear things once and then throw them out.

But "fast fashion" is a major contributor to greenhouse gases, water and air pollution, creates problematic levels of waste, and often comes with poor working conditions in other countries.
The Environmental Audit Committee demanded the government clean up the industry, making 18 recommendations covering environmental and labour practices. The government says it is dealing with the problem.

Here's what sustainable fashion experts say we can we do to reduce the harmful effects of our shopping habits.

1. Buying less is more
"The most important thing essentially is buying less," says Tolmeia Gregory, an environmental activist who blogs about ethical fashion under the name Tolly Dolly Posh.

She says we need to get rid of the whole culture of buying clothing for specific occasions, such as nights out and holidays:

"At first people can get defensive. You can feel attacked," she says. "But we have to try our best to break through that and think of it as more of a hopeful thing."

Kate Fletcher, Professor of Sustainability, Design, Fashion at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, agrees. She says buying less clothing "is not at all some sort of devastating body blow".

She recommends going through your wardrobe and "noticing what you've already got that adds to the quality of your life".

"Many of us shop for things and realise it's the anticipation rather than the purchase that gives us satisfaction," she says.

People experience "spikes of pleasure" when they are shopping, but are often uninterested in their purchases once they have them, she says.

"In studies where people report how happy they are, beyond a level of consumption where the basic needs have been met, every additional new purchase adds very little to people's wellbeing."
Aggressive marketing by clothing brands have "overridden this knowledge", she says.

"What we actually see now is that having more tends to undermine the sense of wellbeing.

"It is linked to isolation, higher levels of depression. It's actually making us less happy and less well connected."


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High Street retailers accused of damaging the environment with 'fast fashion'

MPs are calling on British fashion retailers to take action amid claims that social media is fuelling a “throwaway culture” that is adversely affecting the environment.

The Environmental Audit Committee has written a letter to the UK’s 10 biggest high street shops, including Marks & Spencer, Primark and Next, illustrating the consequences of wasted clothing and inviting them into Parliament for questioning.

Chief executives were told that British shoppers are buying twice as many clothes compared to a decade ago, more than any other nation in Europe, which is causing an overload at landfill sites and subsequently fuelling climate change.

The 10 essential takeaways from this year’s London Fashion Week
“The way we design, produce and discard our clothes has a huge impact on our planet,” said Mary Creagh, chairwoman of the committee,

“Fashion and footwear retailers have a responsibility to minimise their environmental footprint and make sure the workers in their supply chains are paid a living wage.

“We want to hear what they are doing to make their industry more sustainable.”

The global fashion industry produced 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2015, more than than international flights and maritime shipping combined, according to a submission from the Institute of Mechanical Engineers.

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The environmental cost of fast fashion

Textile waste

It’s tough to love our clothes and keep wearing them for longer when we are faced with a tempting array of newness on offer in the shops. But before you head out into the January sales for those irresistible deals, spare a thought for the impact of fast fashion on the environment.

Fast fashion focuses on speed and low costs in order to deliver frequent new collections inspired by catwalk looks or celebrity styles. But it is particularly bad for the environment, as pressure to reduce cost and the time it takes to get a product from design to shop floor means that environmental corners are more likely to be cut. Criticisms of fast fashion include its negative environmental impact, water pollution, the use of toxic chemicals and increasing levels of textile waste.

Vibrant colours, prints and fabric finishes are appealing features of fashion garments, but many of these are achieved with toxic chemicals. Textile dyeing is the second largest polluter of clean water globally, after agriculture. Greenpeace’s recent Detox campaign has been instrumental in pressuring fashion brands to take action to remove toxic chemicals from their supply chains, after it tested a number of brands’ products and confirmed the presence of hazardous chemicals. Many of these are banned or strictly regulated in various countries because they are toxic, bio-accumulative (meaning the substance builds up in an organism faster than the organism can excrete or metabolise it), disruptive to hormones and carcinogenic.

Polyester is the most popular fabric used for fashion. But when polyester garments are washed in domestic washing machines, they shed microfibres that add to the increasing levels of plastic in our oceans. These microfibres are minute and can easily pass through sewage and wastewater treatment plants into our waterways, but because they do not biodegrade, they represent a serious threat to aquatic life. Small creatures such as plankton eat the microfibres, which then make their way up the food chain to fish and shellfish eaten by humans.

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