Fast Fashion Definition

Fast fashion is a term used by fashion retailers to express that designs move from catwalk quickly in order to capture current fashion trends. Fast fashion clothing collections are based on the most recent fashion trends presented at Fashion Week in both the spring and the autumn of every year.

Effects of Fast Fashion

Fast Fashion has two effects on the people who make our clothes and the earth.

1. Labour circumstances

2. Pollution

Labour circumstances

 Human rights are abused in factories, from poverty pay, long working hours and denial of trade union rights to great risks to workers’ health and safety because of unsafe buildings, heat, lack of ventilation, no access to clean drinking water and restricted access to the bathroom, and use of dangerous chemicals.Violence and abuse are normal, and workers are often attacked or even killed for joining a union and demanding better working conditions.

Long hours, often 10-14 hours a day plus forced overtime. Workers who cannot keep up with production due to pain or discomfort are fired. When pressure is on to fulfil large orders workers can be forced to work 18 hours a day. If workers refuse overtime there have been reports of them being fined or even fired.

Many factories have no emergency exits or they lock the doors and bar the windows to keep thiefs away, causing many people to when there is a factory fire. For example, the Ali Enterprises fire in Pakistan, 2012, where 254 people died and over 55 more were seriously injured as workers remained trapped in a burning building.

Factories are being set up cheaply in buildings not designed to house heavy machinery, leading to building collapses and worker deaths.

A story of a garment worker in Bangladesh

n Bangladesh, a worker interviewed in 2003 was ill at work for two months before she missed a day to go to the doctor. Her manager then deducted two days pay,and she lost her full attendance bonus. On return she was told to work an extra eight hours unpaid to catch up with her target. In total, being unwell cost her 11 days' wages.

Phan, a 22-year-old machinist in a Thai garment factory, gives this account of life at her factory:

"We work from 8 am till noon, then have our lunch break. After lunch we work from 1 to 5 pm. We do overtime every day, from 5.30 pm. During the peak season, we work until 2 or 3 am. Although exhausted, we have no choice. We cannot refuse overtime: our basic wage is too low. If we want to rest, our employer forces us to keep working".

Pollution

The Fast Fashion is the second dirtiest industry in the world, next to big oil industry.

When we think of pollution, we think of coal power plants, strip-mined mountaintops and raw sewage piped into our waterways. We don’t often think of the shirts on our backs. But the overall impact the apparel industry has on our planet is quite grim.

Fashion is a complicated business involving long and varied supply chains of production, raw material, textile manufacture, clothing construction, shipping, retail, use and ultimately disposal of the garment.

The polluters while making clothes: the pesticides used in cotton farming, the toxic dyes used in manufacturing and the great amount of waste discarded clothing creates - but also the extravagant amount of natural resources used in extraction, farming, harvesting, processing, manufacturing and shipping.

While cotton, especially organic cotton, might seem like a smart choice, it can still take more than 5,000 gallons of water to manufacture just a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. And across all textiles, the manufacturing and dyeing of fabrics is chemically intensive.

Globalization means that your shirt likely traveled halfway around the world in a container ship fueled by the dirtiest of fossil fuels. A current trend in fashion retail is creating an extreme demand for quick and cheap clothes and it is a huge problem. Your clothes continue to impact the environment after purchase; washing and final disposal when you’re finished with your shirt may cause more harm to the planet than you realize.