Fast Fashion is a Feminist Issue

By Clare Boegel

Viewing fast fashion as strictly an environmental problem forces an interdisciplinary and multi-faceted issue into a box too small to address it fully. Fast fashion has huge environmental impacts, especially in terms of resource use, pollution, and waste creation, but limiting the negative effects of this issue to environmental degradation is not enough. It confines the field of sustainability to focus on protecting the environment, which is undoubtedly a major aspect of sustainability, but it excludes looking at how our society functions. 

A truly sustainable society will allow people to coexist indefinitely with the environment and within the human experience positively. Inequality in its many forms would not exist, as we cannot be truly sustainable if issues such as food scarcity, gender inequality, and poverty exist. This is why the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals include goals 1, 2, 5, and 10, which are No Poverty, Zero Hunger, Gender Equality, and Reduced Inequalities, respectively. 

There are a few key assumptions that can be made when referring to the system of Fast Fashion. For example, the clothes are sold for relatively cheap, and the supply chain is not transparent. Concerning environmental issues, when clothes are less expensive, a greater quantity is purchased, often increasing consumption to an unnecessary amount. More clothes are made, leading to an increase in pollution and the use of resources. The price of clothes also often reflects the quality of the clothing. Cheap clothes tend to be of lesser quality and more likely to suffer damage, leading to frequent discarding of the article and the creation of waste. While this phenomenon is by no means insignificant, the actual damage caused by this cycle is much larger. 

Suppose one considers what a supply chain might look like for a cotton t-shirt. There is the farmer who grows the cotton, the person who transports this material, and the person who turns the cotton into fabric. Afterward, a worker uses the fabric to create a  t-shirt; someone transports this t-shirt to a store, where a retail worker will sell it. There are also the workers of the company who are managing and directing this sequence of processes. In the end, each individual involved in this supply chain needs to be paid. If this t-shirt costs $10, how much does each person get paid? Including wages, how can the $10 also cover production costs, such as materials and equipment? It often cannot. 

The costs of production are often externalized on the workers. Cheap dyes are used for the fabric, these dyes are often toxic, and as a result, factory workers frequently develop health issues such as cancer and lung disease. Many brands employing workers in fast fashion do not offer these workers health insurance, and that is how the costs of production are externalized on the workers.

More often than not, these employees are women in developing countries that are susceptible to being exploited due to their living situation. They may have a low income, have families to support, and no other jobs available to them. Since these factories are their only option for work, the companies can pay them ridiculously low wages without risking the employees quitting. It is a vicious cycle that hurts the environment and exploits the inequality of genders and income in our current global economy.

All parties involved in the fashion industry should consider the fairness of the price of a piece of clothing. Fast fashion brands focus on lowering the cost of their products by sacrificing the working environment and the wages of their workers. With this article, I want us, the consumers, to be aware and informed of how clothing is made and how we can protect the environment. Valuing women's rights goes as deep as knowing who makes what we buy and how those people are treated. It comes with connecting sustainable futures with a system that does not exploit vulnerable communities. People are part of the environment, and in order to protect the environment, we must protect our women, too.