What’s the impact of fast fashion?

We need to rewind a tiny bit to understand how fast fashion has come to be. Fashion was sluggish prior to the 1800s. You had to buy materials such as wool or leather for yourself, prepare them, weave them, and then make the garments.

Like the sewing machine, the Industrial Revolution incorporated new inventions. Clothes have become smoother, faster, and cheaper to produce. To cater to the middle classes, dressmaking shops appeared.

Teams of garment workers or home workers were used by a number of these dressmaking shops. It was during this time when, along with other familiar safety concerns, sweatshops appeared.

The first major tragedy in the garment factory was when the New York Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire broke out in 1911. This took the lives of 146 clothing workers, many of whom were young immigrants and women.

How to spot a fashion brand that is fast?

For fast fashion brands, there are several main reasons that are common:

Thousands of designs that touch on all the new innovations.

Very limited cycle period from whether a fashion or clothing is shown on the catwalk to when it reaches the racks, or in celebrity newspapers.

Offshore processing, where labor is the cheapest, through the use of low-wage workers without proper rights or safety, as well as complicated supply chains with poor visibility outside the first tier and subcontracting.

A concept pioneered by Zara is a small quantity of a single fabric.

But also "natural fabrics" may be a concern on the scale of quick fashion specifications. Conventional cotton in developed countries requires huge amounts of water and pesticides. This causes drought threats which creates tremendous levels of tension on water basins, as well as competition between businesses and local populations for energy.

Quick fashion affects textile workers who have been discovered to work in unsafe conditions, with poor pay, and without fundamental human rights. The growers who can deal with harmful substances that can have adverse consequences on their physical and mental health are further down the supply chain, a plight illustrated by The True Cost documentary.

Quick fashion, the radioactive dyes that are produced in rivers and the microfibers that are frequently swallowed by aquatic life often affect wildlife. Animal protection is put at risk as animal items such as leather and fur are used. Numerous scandals indicate that actual fur, like cat and dog fur, is frequently sold off to anonymous shoppers as fake fur. The irony is that in fur farms there is so much natural fur being produced under horrible conditions that it is literally cheaper to manufacture and purchase than fake fur!