RESOURCES | fast fashion

Fast Fashion

How it changed the way we shop, and why it’s costing us more than we think

Fast fashion can seem like a lifesaver for busy, tired parents. With kids outgrowing clothes so quickly, the promise of an endless variety of affordable options to quickly replenish their closets is hard to resist. In a country where the cost of raising children keeps rising, fast fashion isn’t just convenient—for many families, it’s the only viable option.

It’s deeply unfair that parents are forced to choose between what they can’t afford and what’s better for their kids, the planet, and the people who make their clothes.

For those with a little more financial flexibility, understanding how fast fashion works, and why it’s worth seeking alternatives, can help inform better choices and move toward a more sustainable future, one step at a time.

1) Overproduction

Fast fashion brands churn out hundreds of new styles each week, fueling a cycle of constant consumption and overproduction. Globally, the fashion industry now produces over 100 billion garments each year—more than double the amount made just two decades ago, fuelled in large part by the rise of fast fashion brands.

  • We’re buying more, wearing less: The average American buys five times more clothing than they did in 1980. Fast fashion’s cheap prices and rapid trend cycles encourage purchasing items that are meant to be worn for only one season, or even just one occasion.¹

  • Mountains of excess: To keep up with demand, brands overproduce and then offload unsold stock by burning, shredding, or dumping it—often in countries like Ghana and Chile, where it clogs landfills, pollutes waterways, and burdens local communities.²

2) Labor Exploitation

To meet the relentless pace and rock-bottom prices the fast fashion model demands, many brands rely on factories where labor is criminally cheap, protections are minimal, and oversight is lacking. In this system, human safety is often sacrificed for profits.

  • Rana Plaza was not an isolated tragedy: The 2013 garment factory collapse that killed over 1,100 workers in Bangladesh—most of them young women sewing clothes for fast fashion retailers—was the deadliest disaster in fashion history, but the conditions it exposed—wage theft, unsafe environments, and worker exploitation—are widespread across the global garment industry.³

  • Pressure to produce leads to dangerous conditions: Ultra-fast fashion production schedules and low profit margins put pressure on factories to cut corners, leading to unsafe buildings, long hours without adequate breaks or time off, and poverty wages. Brands rarely own the factories and outsourcing allows them to deny responsibility for what happens inside them.

3) Pollution is Built Into the Business Model

Fast fashion isn’t just fast—it’s dirty. The model relies on cheap synthetic materials and low-cost processes that are highly polluting.

  • Petrochemical fabrics are standard: Polyester, a plastic fiber made from fossil fuels, is the most commonly used fabric in fast fashion because it’s cheap, but it sheds microplastics into waterways with every wash.

  • Toxic dyes are used to save time and money: To cut costs and speed up production, many fast fashion suppliers use inexpensive dyes that contain toxic chemicals like azo dyes and heavy metals without proper wastewater treatment systems. Fast fashion brands often rely on unregulated factories that discharge untreated wastewater into rivers.

  • Brands choose regions with weak enforcement: Many fast fashion retailers outsource production to areas with minimal or poorly enforced environmental laws. In the race to meet tight deadlines, suppliers often skip crucial safeguards like wastewater filtration or emissions controls in order to save time and money.

  • Local ecosystems suffer the consequences: In many production hubs, it’s often the poorest and most vulnerable communities who bear the brunt. In Indonesia, the Citarum River, once a vital water source, is now one of the world’s most polluted rivers, clogged with dye runoff and textile waste from nearby garment factories supplying global brands.⁴

4) Waste Culture Warps Our Habits

Fast fashion hasn’t just changed how clothes are made. It’s changed how we relate to them.

  • It’s teaches us to see clothes as disposable: When items cost less than lunch, they lose practical and emotional value. Over time, we start to think of all clothing as short-term.

  • It feeds an endless cycle: New collections drop weekly, fueling a sense of constant trend-chasing. It’s easy to feel like we need to keep buying when we’re shown new clothes non-stop, and over time, it trains us to seek more even when our needs have already been met.

What You Can Do (If You’re Able)

Not everyone can avoid fast fashion entirely, but every choice can move us in a better direction.

  • Buy less, choose better, wear longer: A few high-quality pieces, whether new or secondhand, go further.

  • Shop secondhand and hand down clothes: Try to keep perfectly good clothes in circulation (and out of landfills).

  • Support brands invested in environmentally-friendlier practices, even if imperfect: Your dollars guide change.

Sources:

¹ Fast Fashion by the Numbers - PIRG.org

² 10 Concerning Fast Fashion Waste Statistics - Earth.org

³ A Decade on From Rana Plaza, Fast Fashion Still Reigns - Has Anything Changed for Gen Z? - The Guardian

⁴ Worse for Wear: Indonesia’s Textile Boom - Undark.org

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