The eye-catching pieces, low prices, and affordability of fast fashion pieces have caused many to start buying from fast fashion brands. Most who already do, can’t help but continue. Rather than going to stores that are more expensive, they’d rather lose out on quality for the hottest new looks. Fast fashion is the process of mass production of clothing based on the latest trends. Shein, Temu, Zara, and even Forever 21 are some of the most known fast fashion brands.
With trends starting and ending rapidly, fast fashion companies make an abundance of clothing and accessories to keep up with competition. When these don’t sell, or “go out of style” they eventually end up in landfills. The majority of all clothing from fast fashion brands end up at the dump. People want to appear a certain way to fit in, so they keep up with the latest trends. In return, buying and throwing out cheap clothing doesn’t seem like that big of an issue. It’s the popular idea of out of sight, and out of mind.
If not landfill, then people often send their unwanted fast fashion clothing to thrift stores. But people there don’t even want to buy them due to their lack of quality. Not to mention thrift stores overwhelmingly increasing prices for all items: high quality or not. But, as soon as a thriftier finds a product from Shein, Temu, or other fast fashion brands, they tend to put it back on the rack. Why pay for something more than fast fashion sellers first sell it for? As a student for North Canyon noted, “When I go to the thrift store and I see Shein, I usually put it back. The clothing at Shein is known to be bad quality, and thrift stores are pricing the clothes more than Shein did in the first place.” This causes them to not buy their products, and unwanted items from thrift stores eventually end up in the landfill anyway.
Like stated before, the inexpensive pricing of these items causes workers to be underpaid. “[Shein]…workers get a base salary of 4,000 yuan per month — the equivalent of roughly $556 — to make at least 500 pieces of clothing per day..” states anonymously informants from China. Shein factory employees work 18 hours a day with no weekends earning just two cents per item, report finds. Parents who work often bring their kids to the factories and when they become old enough they are forced to make items as well (child labor). With about 30 days in a month, Shein workers make around 15,000 clothing articles in total. That’s averaged to be around 0.037 cents a piece.
However, underpaid labor isn’t the only way people are getting their clothes so cheap. Take a look at the majority of the clothing types from fast fashion brands. Most of them are made from polyester, which is a plastic based material. Polyester is considered a terrible fabric by many people. This is because polyester clothes have a lack of breath ability. This means the polyester clothes trap heat and sweat. This can lead to sweat stains and holding onto bad odors when the polyester is hard to clean in the first place. Polyester also has a poor durability, which leads to clothing to fade in color quickly within just a few washes. If you take a look at any clothing items on the racks of Zara or Forever 21, you’ll see that many of the items are poorly made. If the stitching, which often times already is falling apart in store, then it most definitely will be worn out after the first few wears. Not only is it a cheap fabric, but it is environmentally costly to produce. Polyester is made of nonrenewable resources ; due to polyester being made of plastic material, microplastics are produced. This means that water sources like lakes and rivers are most likely contaminated. This eventually causes food, our bodies, and drinking water to be extremely polluted.
Overall, fast fashion sites shouldn’t be supported or bought from due to bad working conditions and cheap clothing. In the long run, buying something of nicer quality will last longer. This leads to spending less money on clothing that will just end up falling apart in a few wears. Not to mention, having a clean conscious when it comes to what you are buying!
