Welcome to the Fast Fashion Run(a)way!
I am Chermaine, a final year Environmental Studies student at the National University of Singapore (NUS). I started my journey in NUS with a blog on Sustainable Development in Singapore. Four years later, I find myself writing another blog in my last semester – I’ve come full circle! This time, my blog will share about the fast fashion industry.
Why write about fast fashion?
Relevance and relatability
We all love cheap thrills, especially cheap clothes of seemingly decent quality. 1-for-1 sales, 11.11 sales, Black Friday sales and the convenience of online shopping platforms have led to impulse buying.
Business Insider reports that consumers bought 60% more clothes in 2014 than in 2000 on average (McFall-Johnsen, 2019). In Singapore, revenue for clothes and apparel on e-commerce platforms have increased by more than eightfold, hitting more than S$400 million by 2020 (John, 2021).
At some point in our lives, we may have fallen victim to fast fashion trends in one way or another – I must admit that Cotton On and H&M used to be some of my favourite retail stores as a teenager. Furthermore, with ever-changing fashion trends, clothes tend to be out of fashion almost as soon as they are produced, fueling an insatiable demand for new clothes. The unprecedented growth of the fast fashion industry has also manufactured another monster – ultra-fast fashion which consists of seamless transactions, even shorter lead times and vertical integrations within the supply chain (John, 2021).
An interesting paradox…
The growth of the industry has drawn censure and criticism not just over its dire environmental consequences but also issues of socio-environmental injustice: The fashion industry releases more carbon emissions than international flights and maritime shipping combined (McFall-Johnsen, 2019).
This brings me to the fashion paradox – If fast fashion is so bad, why is it still here and why do we still love it so much? Even as I write about fast fashion, turning away from the industry entirely is still something I find hard to do…How can consumers like us reconcile this paradox within ourselves, and how do we justify it to others? McNeill and Moore (2015) explain that the lucrativeness of the industry and its popularity among consumers has somewhat legitimised its role in the economy and protected it from obsolescence.
Overview
Fast Fashion Run(a)way will focus on the environmental pollution caused by the fast fashion industry, and there will be three key chapters:
- Prelude to the fast fashion industry
- Problems associated with the fast fashion industry (environmental pollution, impacts of pollution and issues of socio-environmental injustice)
- Initiatives to counter the socio-environmental impacts of the fast fashion industry, critiques against these initiatives and some of my experiences in sustainable/slow fashion
Runaway from fast fashion with me!
Cheers,
Chermaine
References