Fast Fashion and textile industry

Fast Fashion and Textile Industry

The fashion business emerged in the 1980’s with the creation of the sewing machine (Price drop) and an increase of manufactured clothing. These factors democratize and accelerate fashion business.

These method cause an mass production, homogeneous and standardized items.

Fast Fashion describe the new trend in the fashion industry with innovative and excessive production and distribution. They often copy luxury brands items and produced all the year different items with no more seasons. This causes a quick turnaround and low prices. But the fashion industry answer to the increase of the demand of new products.

Some brands : H&M, Zara, Stradivarius, FashionNova, Nike, ..

The Fast Fashion accounts 2.5 Trillion dollars ans employs 75 Million people, it’s the one of the biggest industry. The fashion retailers grow by 9.7% from 2010 to 2015. And represent 10% at 20% of the total amout of the fashion market in 2019, and continue to grow on e-commerce.

And the fast fashion companies have it all, the make low prices, student’s reduction and now paiement at delivery.

The drawbacks of Fast Fashion, characterized by buying clothes that we do not need which we keep for only 35 days, and wear them less than five times are :

They begant and opening develop i poor countries to increase profit by using cheap labor. Pay a low wage and work in dangerous concitions like in the collapse of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh which killed around 1.100 workers.

The environnement is also a drawbacks, the clothing industry is the second highest polluter of clean watter, using more pesticides than any other crop in the world. The pollyester most commonly use in the produstion of clothes and take hundred of years to break down come from limited oil suplies and the cotton production uses large amounts of watter. The Bamboo increasingly used as cotton replacement is a semy synthetic fabric and involves chemical such as caustic soda.  

Around 70 million trees are logged every years and turns into fabric like rayon, landfill pollutes the air, and toxic products poured into watter that can make reverse too dangerous  for the human. Deforastion, the overproduction of raw materials make irreversibly damage to flaura and fauna but on animals to.

An american generating today 82 pounds of textile waste every year. And British consumers will trow away around 680 million items of clothing this year.

Fast Fashion is a compromise as come as huge social, environnement and human cost.

To avoid this overconsuption people need to start buy long lasting clothes and not thrown it away early, it’s true that every garment produced has an impact on the environment. But in the sustainable fashion the materials would e recycled or reused, and unwanted clothes redisgned into new items. The WRAP (Waste and Ressources Action Programme) promotes these longer-lasting garments.

Other solution are proposed like the « producer responsability » where every producers would pay 1p tax per garment to improve clothing collection and recycling. Some contries like Sweden reduced The VAT (Value added tax) on clothing repair service to promote long lasting clothes.

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