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This post by Evelyn Wang17 years old, one of the Top 11, from Naperville North High School in Naperville, Illinois winners Learning Network Ninth Annual Student Editorial Competitionwe got 16,664 entries for it.
We publish the work of all winners and runners-up next week and you can find them. here as they post.
How Fashion Got Faster – and Worse for the World
The spring dance is in two weeks and my friend needs help choosing a dress. She calls me to her phone, where an endless mosaic of elegant dresses dances before my eyes, costing no more than $20. After thinking for a long time, she donned a stunning sapphire dress with pleated details on the bodice. Two weeks later, the dress was carpeted under a landfill, only worn once.
Welcome to the world of fast fashion.
Fast fashion is a relatively new phenomenon. In the 1990s, retailers began offering trendy, cheaply priced, poorly made clothing on a weekly basis to keep up with the high speed with which fashion trends were moving. Style became inexpensive, useful, and consumable.
But fast fashion is ultimately a privilege. It’s a privilege to buy clothes just for their style, and it’s a privilege to ignore the environmental consequences of doing so. In reality, the aggressive consumption cycle driven by fast fashion means that the clothes we wear are now more than ever part of the 92 million tons of textile waste produced annually.
With stores closing during the pandemic, consumers have opted to abandon fast fashion items like H&M and Zara and instead order from e-commerce social media influencers like Shein and Asos. (Shein is now worth $100 billion, more than H&M and Zara combined.) These brands represent both the escalation of fast fashion and environmental damage.
Newcomers to this fast fashion have been successful during the pandemic thanks to their unique business models. They are available entirely online and allow them to ship the thousands of new styles they release daily to consumers directly from their warehouses, avoiding supply chain disruptions and US import duties in the process. Meanwhile, reliance on cheap overseas labor and synthetic textiles keeps prices irresistibly low.
But these practices are harming the Earth more than ever before. Because these retailers rely solely on international shipping to transport their products, they only exacerbate the billion tons of annual greenhouse gases released through shipping. Almost all of these brands sell clothing containing petroleum-based, resource-intensive synthetic fibers such as polyester and nylon. Over their lifetimes, these fibers are responsible for 35 percent of the microplastics that pollute our oceans, which can then take centuries to decompose in landfills.
While fast fashion represents an understandably attractive combination of style and economy, now more than ever, we cannot measure the true cost of our clothing with a price tag. When consumers want to update their wardrobes, they can do so in a sustainable way by saving money, reworking old clothes or researching environmentally responsible brands.
For now, I’ll be rocking the dress I wore last year at my next school dance.
Quoting Works
Beall, Abigail. “Why Is It So Difficult To Recycle Clothes?” BBC Future, 12 July 2020.
Monroe, Rachel. “Ultra Fast Fashion Eats The World.Atlantic, 6 February 2021.
Nguyen, Terry. “Shein is the Future of Fast Fashion. Is this a good thing?Vox, 13 July 2021.
Okamoto, Katie. “Your laundry is holding harmful microfiber. Here’s What You Can Do About It.The New York Times, April 21, 2021.
Saul, Jonathan. “The Share of Sea Freight in Global Carbon Emissions Increases.Reuters, 4 August 2020.
Williams, Laura. “Rise of Shein Tests an Industry’s Commitments to Green.Bloomberg, April 10, 2022.
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