Fast fashion is destructive and exploitative—and yet millions of people rely on it for work. In a new book, J.B. MacKinnon explores these complexities.
The 21st century has brought a critical dilemma into sharp relief: We must stop shopping, and yet we can’t stop shopping.
At the turn of this new millennium, according to the UN, consumption surpassed population as our greatest environmental challenge. When it comes to climate change, species extinction, water depletion, toxic pollution, deforestation and other crises, how much each one of us consumes now matters more than how many of us there are. The average person in a rich country consumes 13 times as much as the average person in a poor one.
For decades now, we’ve witnessed a near-continuous increase in the consumption of every major natural resource. We are using up the planet at a rate 1.7 times faster than it can regenerate. At this rate, by 2050, resource use will have tripled in the 21st century alone.
Fast fashion is one of the worst offenders. We didn’t demand it, but we did take to it with enthusiasm. The number of garments sold each year has approximately doubled in the last 15 years and now exceeds 100 billion.
A feedback loop has been engaged, in which lower prices encourage shoppers to cycle through clothes more quickly, which drives companies to make clothes that won’t hold up to more than a few wears. The lifespan of clothes has decreased more sharply in the 21st century than ever before.
In a major report in 2017, the UK-based Ellen MacArthur Foundation identified “increasing the average number of times clothes are worn” as perhaps the best way to reduce the environmental impact of the clothing industry. Doubling the use of our clothes would, for example, cut the garment trade’s climate pollution by nearly half. Shutting down worldwide clothing production for a year would be equal to grounding all international flights and stopping all maritime shipping for the same time period.
Yet once again we land on the horns of a dilemma, because millions of people earn their livelihoods making those clothes. Most of those workers are in poorer countries that are highly dependent on the industry. The greatest clothing producer is China. The second-greatest is Bangladesh, which has a population half the size of America’s in a space that is a fraction of the size.
In Bangladesh, over a third of manufacturing jobs and nearly 85% of exports come from the apparel industry. In a country where one-fifth of residents live below the national poverty line, the garment industry provides jobs to more than 4 million people. Six out of ten of them are women.
Abdullah al Maher is CEO of Fakir Fashion, a knitwear manufacturer for major brands such as H&M, Zara, Pull & Bear, C&A, Esprit, Gina Tricot and Tom Tailor. Maher told me that Fakir Fashion’s towering factory on a narrow road in Narayanganj, a town just east of the capital city of Dhaka, employs more than 12 000 people. During peaks in the fashion cycle, the company manufactures a mind-boggling 200 000 articles of clothing every day—and they are adding more production lines. Fakir Fashion and its workers would seem to be utterly dependent on shopping as we know it today.
Suppose that shopping stopped, I said to Maher. Suppose that consumers worldwide suddenly paid heed to those critics who say we should buy fewer clothes as a way to lessen the impact of the industry. What would happen?
Maher paused. When he spoke, it was with the tone of one sharing a secret. “You know,” he began, “it wouldn’t be so bad.”
Over the past 20 years, Maher has watched major clothing brands make demands on suppliers in Bangladesh to lower their prices while also completing orders faster and constantly improving their workplace and environmental standards. Fakir Fashion has implemented certified projects to treat its wastewater, harvest rainwater, use more solar power, provide meals and child care for workers, hire workers with disabilities, build schools in the local area and more. They have been unable to pass on any of the expense of these improvements to apparel brands or consumers, who continue to want more for less.
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