Fast Fashion's You Better Don'ts
With so many collections produced in a year, fast fashion also leaves behind a lot of waste that's never properly managed.
Elizabeth Cline, in her book "Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion," says the affordability of fast fashion has created a shift in the value of clothes.
People get easily bored with their not-so-old clothes and they don't think twice about throwing them away and replace them with the latest in high street fashion.
Fast fashion manufacturers can produce up to 42 collections in a year, which easily results in overproduction.
Most of them burn their unsold stock. H&M burnt around 19 tons of jeans in 2017 and Burberry burnt $38 million worth of unsold stock in 2018.
Dana Thomas in his book "Fashionopolis" says fast fashion brands don't design their products to last long, because more than 60 percent of fabric made today are made from synthetic materials rather than yarn so it will be cheaper to produce new clothes than to recycle the yarn from the unsold clothes.
A report from the Ellen McArthur Foundation said the fashion industry is still using an outdated make-wear-throw away economic model that produces heaps of waste and pollution, costing the industry $500 billion per year.
Fast fashion also poses a serious threat to the environment. The solution: fashionistas and their wannabes must change their consumption behavior while the government must redesign the industry's model into one based on environmentally-friendly principles.
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