The problem isn't spending $40 on a shirt. The problem is spending $10 on a shirt every two weeks. My shirts might average $25-$35 each but most of them are well over five years old and I'm going to keep wearing them until they're visibly damaged. I spend a fraction of what fast-fashion addicts spend on clothes and they last me a long damn time. Fast fashion encourages a culture that makes people spend more money for shitty clothes because they want something new every few days. Vendors like Shein don't exist to clothe economically disadvantaged people; they exist to let people push the dopamine button with retail therapy.
I suspect the people making the "classist" argument are doing so because they like consuming fast fashion and don't like someone implying that they're part of the problem.
Yes, people conflate fashion with clothing, the necessity, and they believe they should be able to enjoy fashion affordably as though it’s a necessity.
There are other things like this. People expect to be able to access the things they like without friction, and luxuries become necessities. Meat is a similar example in North America, where it’s terrible for the environment and extremely resource and labour intensive, yet people get upset when they can’t get a pound for pennies.
Both industries benefit greatly from people thinking of the product as a necessity or close to it.
Thats usually the case with these types of articles. A lot of times they arent written out of good will, but to pose something the author does not like as a bigger problem than it actually is. In this case, like you said, the author feels like they are not part of the problem and shouldn't "count."
I tried to spend $60+ on t-shirts and guess what, the same crap that turns “shoddy” after a short while. Part of a problem is that bad fashion mimics the normal one and if you aren’t into brand tracking or what they call it, you can’t make good guesses.
I decided to not worry much about my clothing cause my look-matters phase is long gone anyway. When it’s official, I wear a decent official look. When not, I look like a basic dude and let it hurt their fashion/status feelings.
My experience is that there is a difference in quality between ~10 € and ~40 € T-Shirts, where the 40 € shirts look a lot nicer after about a year of wear. (But it obviously depends on the brand.)
Thrift shops are selling used goods for prices similar to fast fashion. Many don't enjoy this experience as it no longer feels satisfying to get a bargain.
When I lived in Toronto, my favorite place to find clothes was the thrift shop. Especially when my first child was born. Often I was able to get like-new looking brand-name clothes for a fifth of the price, which was especially great for children's clothing that are only worn a handful of times before the baby no longer fits.
Because even when you find nice clothes the sizing is often difficult. Thrift shops are often like a gold mine (I do recognize that normal shops often have similar problems depending on one's taste). Not everyone wants to mine.
Visibly damaged clothes are not good for every occasion and may just look bad on almost every occasion. Otherwise why not to wear a potato sack or rags tied with a bit of string?
Because they don't offer the same style in multiple sizes, so if the size doesn't fit, you are out of luck. For me, it's just too much work / time investment. Also, I like to just buy the same pair of trousers again, if the last one broke.
> Why not continue to wear clothes that are visibly damaged?
It doesn't really say anything about the behavior of the majority of people. A small portion can drive this number down.
As an example, say 8 out of 10 people have 7 sets of clothes, one for each day of the week, and use the same sets for a whole year. The remaining 2 out of 10 use a new set of clothes every day, so they go through 365 sets of clothes in a year. That comes to clothes being used an average of 4.64 times:
$ python -c 'print(
# average used times in a year
(
(
8 # people
* 7 # sets of clothes
* (365 / 7) # used times in a year
) + (
2 # people
* 365 # sets of clothes
* 1 # used times in a year
)
) / (
8 # people
* 7 # sets of clothes
+
2 # people
* 365 # sets of clothes
)
)'
4.643765903307888
There’s a small minority of people who do that -- not 20% of the population, but large enough to influence statistics. I wouldn't be surprised if that was 20% of women between 15 and 45-year-old. They also buy clothes that they never wear (other than trying). I’ve seen estimates as high as for some people, they never wear 40% of the clothes that they buy before disposing of them.
On the other end, I’m also surprised by the “one-year” thing: most of my clothes are more than five-year-old and they are fine. For underwear and t-shirts, I typically wear them once a week.
> On the other end, I’m also surprised by the “one-year” thing: most of my clothes are more than five-year-old and they are fine.
Because these are the minority of clothes despite being used by the majority of people in the example I gave, changing the timeframe doesn't really change the average. Changing the example to use a 5 year timeframe, for instance, only changes the average to 4.92.
> not 20% of the population
Right, and it also ought to be less than 80% that buys clothes no more often than once per year or per 5 years. Both extremes are exaggerated to not have to insert more tiers than needed into the example.
They don't. They cycle through the same 3-7 sets of clothes until they go threadbare, and ignore everything else in their closet unless they need something for a special occasion.
That’s the average. Many pieces of clothes are worn hundreds of times. Which means the median is probably lower than 6. Many pieces of clothes are probably only worn once or twice.
Oh I wish people would stop deciding every event/fundraiser/ employer needs a hideous screen printed t-shirt advertisement no one will wear outside the event and maybe painting a room. That and the stream of useless junk gifts - the low powered USB charging sticks, plastic water bottles and tumblers. Last year my employer gave every employee a
Enough. Nobody actually wants these. It's direct to landfill for 99% of the things you're giving away.
I start saying no, not that it impacts items already ordered. Figure if they start ending up with thousands of t-shirts after an event they'll stop ordering them.
Buying cheap clothes and wearing them until they fall apart is fine. Buying cheap clothes and wearing them once is not. Lower class people are not the ones causing problems with fast fashion.
Lower class people are the ones being exploited for fast fashion. If you buy a $10 shein tshirt and own it till it's thread bare, it's less environmentally destructive than tossing it after 3 wears, but some desperately poor people were underpaid to sell it at that price.
Not to mention the other dangers of turning a blind eye to production--kids clothes tainted with lead? Heads should roll for that.
Expensive clothes are typically more environmentally to make individually, but it’s very unusual that they are worn once. Top brands are resold. Others are typically purchased by people who plan on keep wearing them.
As a poor college student, I was surprised hearing the stores I went to described as fast fashion. For me, thrift stores or hand me downs were the sensible choice for clothes, and h&m or forever21 were splurges for $30 pants or whatever. Obviously the price points and quality that these fast fashion brands output don't lend themselves to being deliberate, long term "investments", but spending twice as much on pants that I was already hesitant to buy was unthinkable.
I also think buying some chinos or button down shirts at these places made it a lot cheaper to get business casual work clothes as I transitioned from fast food/retail to actual internships etc. I think it's really good for young people or people turning their life around to have very low barriers to entry when it comes to "looking respectable" or fitting in with the workplace as they grow, and fast fashion helped do that for me (and some of this could be addressed by loosening dress codes if you're hiring college students/young people/whatever).
You can be against fast fashion and be empathetic with people who can’t afford expensive clothes. There is a way to inform people of the consequences of their choices without blaming them for making the choice.
I wish people would stop writing like we can’t hold to competing ideas in our minds at once. Being concerned about thing A doesn’t mean you’re against all instances of thing A or all people who do thing A
Or choose a camp so we can all win the culture wars. That is, dismantle our morally-superior overlords whether progressive or conservative, and build actual freedom/equality by the people for the people.
There are only two sides to the barricades. Only one of them is interested in elections and the face of who runs the shitshow.
why even bother trying to solve this through individual consumer purchasing habits, all it accomplishes is turning powerless common folk against each other
yes, why do you think for instance big oil was behind (as in campaigns, big funding) promoting plastics recycling and getting everyone to focus on that and their neighbors' behaviors. it's valuable to give people a framework they can follow to correct a problem and feel satisfied or feel enraged at their neighbor with zero systemic impact besides enabling unchecked greed at scale
What’s “fast fashion” and what class do I belong to when I don’t know?
Edit: yes I’m aware the article attempts to explain it and Google offers the same but I still don’t get how a fashion trend can change in a matter of days.
The article answers the question of "what is fast fashion" pretty thoroughly. It's a long article, but there is a section labeled "What is Fast Fashion?" that you can skip to if you don't want to invest much time.
As for "what class do people belong to when they don't know what fast fashion is?" The answer is: any class. I didn't really understand fast fashion until I read this article.
Oh I must have missed that headline. I read the paragraph but didn’t quite understand anyway.
Fast fashion isn’t just cheap clothing—it’s cheap and trendy clothing. The term “fast” refers to how a company brings a product to market.
Not sure I get it still. What difference does days vs months make in fashion? Trends like colors or width of jeans legs moves like glaciers.
Is this some TikTok phenomenon thing where there is a viral video or a famous artist wearing something and in response these companies try to rush similar stuff to shelves?
Trends come and fade very fast now. So you can't use the "old" and slow method of designing clothes one year in advance, produce them in China and then ship them across the world. If you want to wear the very latest trend, it was likely designed only a few weeks ago, perhaps more locally (at least Zara produces a lot close to or even in Europe for the European market to decrease time-to-market).
There does exist a world where trendiness in clothing styles moves shockingly fast. Put This On in general advocates for a much more slow-moving approach to fashion (specifically menswear).
Personally I've found awareness of traditional menswear style to be a fun hobby, but 99% of the time I am still wearing a t-shirt and workout shorts.
But the article defines it but doesn’t explain it I think. What sort of trend changes in days or weeks? Any clothes chain is responsive to trends but those trends like skinny/baggy jeans take a season to change at least.
Is a concrete example that you’d push a hat found in a viral video to production? Then I get it
The idea is that the retailer discovers that the hat is sold out, so they order ten thousand more hats, and they arrive in six weeks at a cost of $2.10 each. Then they sell six thousand hats at $15 each, and the fad is over, so they keep a thousand hats in inventory just in case and throw the remaining three thousand in a landfill.
Half of the sold hats get worn for three months, but then teenagers will point and laugh if you still wear that hat, so there are now two thousand hats donated to thrift shops and four thousand more in the trash.
It's fashion, it arrives fast and it gets turned into trash fast.
> It's classist by definition to be against fast fashion because that's what class _is_. "We don't do that sort of thing".
It's not classist to question why people can't afford more quality clothes instead of that junk. It's not classist to care about the human, social and ecological consequence of the fast fashion industry and expose them. It's only conveniently "classist" according the the fast fashion industry itself to question their business model and record profits.
Remember that "classism" has a negative connotation, like racism, ageism, sexism, it's not a neutral term.
It doesn't have a negative connotation in my mind, class is an inherent part of the human experience as far as I'm concerned. It's just culture. Very different from immutable personal characteristics.
> class is an inherent part of the human experience as far as I'm concerned.
So is racism and sexism, it's still has a negative connotation. Not because of the "ism", but because of who use that word and what for, or we wouldn't be here having that discussion at first place since the context is the linked article.
> Classism isn't "discrimination" in the same sense because you're directly attacking a behaviour rather than ascribing group dynamics.
You can't make up a definition just to suit your argument either. There is an article and you can question its definition but within the context of that article, classism is deemed having a negative connotation, which it does anyway whether you claim it doesn't or not.
Classism is absolutely discriminatory, by the very definition of the word. Accusing somebody of classism is derogatory.
The whole point here revolves around the question of whether being against fast fashion is akin to shaming poor people for not being able to afford more expensive clothes thus classism.
You're defining "classist" to mean "anything that is about class", but that's not really right. A better definition of "classist" is "actions that enforce class systems", and by that definition being against fast fashion is not inherently classist.
However, one can advocate against fast fashion in a classist way.
People "don't do that sort of thing" because of class, because of nationality, because of religion, because of age, because of gender, because of marital status, and I've probably missed a few. You can't point to any specific "we don't do that sort of thing" and say definitively that it's class.
It's fine to be a critic of fast fashion. Of any type of enterprise for that matter.
We should try, however, not to blame consumers for industry practices.
Consumers are not the ones breaking deals and actually profiting from child and slave labour exploitation and from garbage overproduction. They just legally shop on government licensed stores.
It should be society role as a whole to protect consumers from even being able to buy such products, through quality assurance laws and requisites. The only reason why there even are those types of products in the first place is because society as a whole is complacent about it.
Yes, you can choose to consume consciously, and that is fine for you, but make no mistake, that doesn't come close to solving the larger problem and doesn't give you any sort of moral high ground from which to look down upon those that can't or won't do the same.
I think a lot of people have personal preferences that they feel compelled to justify morally in some way in order to rid any cognitive dissonance that could happen. So they make up reasons that it's "-ist" to be against what they like, so that they can feel good about themselves while in their own head thinking they are making the "best choice". For example, people who don't like bike lanes saying that bike lanes are ableist. Or in this case, someone who likes fast fashion saying that it's classist to be against fast fashion.
It's okay to have preferences. You don't have to justify morally literally every single thing that you ever do. And you especially don't have to say that anyone against your preferences is, in some way or another, being unjust.
The Problem isnt fast fashion itself, its the way Ultra Fast Fashion companies like Shein blatantly steal designs from smaller designers, have horrible work ethics, and do TONS of green washing
If you understand German, I'd watch Simplicissimus's video on this, it's quite well made in my opinion
It's interesting, that recent use of Marxist rhetoric in favor of mass market consumerism and ultra-capitalism. Advocates of all sort, big corporation PR, and the charity or "influencers" they finance, all are using these cheap 'inclusive' PR tricks in order to put poor people against one another and appear to be moral while making record private profits.
They all "care" about classism while ignoring the human, social or ecological cost of their business model. But you can't question the latter, just call people who question all that "haters" in insidious ways.
Where does it end though? We have grades of quality at different price points for many things:
- organic, free range chicken that cost $20 vs factory farmed birds that cost $6.
- quality furniture built to last generations vs disposable brands like IKEA
- most materials homes are made of line windows, siding, etc.
I’ve always found it odd that clothing is the 1 thing mostly pointed out and I suspect that those on top of fashion trends who pay too dollar for the latest thing are sick of seeing the masses be able to wear derivative articles so quickly.
Nothing kills fashion more quickly than as it becomes more and more accessible to lower economic cohorts.
Clothing is called out because it’s environmental footprint is often estimated as being surprisingly high, and there is a certain pattern of consumption that encourages buying tons of extremely cheap clothes and wearing them only once.
For the first point, well, it might be an over estimate, or focused on environmental harms that are imo less important (landfill waste vs carbon footprint). But I’m not sure, I’ve read and forgotten a few of the articles, they were popular a year or two back. For the second point, everyone loves beating up on the imaginary 18 year old girl who buys on shein every day, but I don’t really know how many of those people exist. Some? Probably not that many?
It's still very not durable. Do you imagine Ikea furniture passed down from generation to generation? Besides the obvious problem that all IKEA furniture is bathed in various chemicals that slowly kills your entire family, the furniture is just not solid enough for this process to take place.
I can't count how many IKEA furniture i've stupidly damaged over the years, and i can even less so count how many i've seen on the street headed straight for the landfill (or local waste disposal equivalent).
Traditional furniture is heavier and more expensive, but the wood can usually be reused, and certainly keeps solidity/value over time.
IKEA has range of quality. The cheapest stuff is cardboard or poor quality mdf that disintegrates from most damages. On other hand some of the somewhat more expensive products are lot sturdier and longer lasting.
I think those are some concerns and it's useful to consider each of them. One is the cost/harm of producing them and another is how long they last versus the environmental impacts after they're discarded.
for example, IKEA furniture is designed to be cheap which means there are certain styles/materials/etc. that you can't get there but it's solid and 20 year old IKEA furniture which has been used daily is common (and there's a lot of considerably more expensive stuff which isn't as well made), their kitchen stuff lasts just as long as stuff costing 1-2 orders of magnitude more, etc. IKEA is affordable no-frills but generally gives a solid value for the money, has a reasonable service life compared to the alternatives, and doesn't have an unusual level of hard to recycle / reuse or pollution prone components compared to the alternatives.
Fast fashion has the problem that all of the costs of making it have to be amortized over just a handful of uses. If I buy a bunch of cheap cotton shirts at Costco, they're never going to look as nice but they can be worn hundreds of times, and being 100% cotton they won't pollute waterways for centuries after being worn a couple of times. The same applies for home materials — yes, we need to improve the manufacturing for many things but if it's something which has a service life measured in decades there is a lot of lower-hanging fruit like reducing use of one time-use plastic by the people who live in that house since that'll be a small mountain of landfill space compared to, say, vinyl siding.
Farming is tricky because “organic” means different things to different people and a lot of that is aspiration. Organic farms can be almost as harmful to the environment around them, cause just as much pollution trucking things around, treat their workers just as poorly, etc. or they can be improvements on at least some of those points. I think it's quite reasonable to expect the discussion around those topics to continue but that also speaks to the need for regulation — consumer buying habits just aren't enough to replace things like regulators routinely auditing for worker safety, pollution, etc.
No, it isn't. Buy a few pieces of clothing that you like, wear them until the threads are paper thin, or it becomes unwearable. Its frugal, it saves money, and its good for the environment.
It makes you faster at everything else you do, though, because you no longer have to think about it, so it's kinda fast. What it's not, is fashion.
It's amazing how the brattiness and the loudness of punk has virtually taken over the culture, but the anti-conformity of it has remained like hen's teeth.
Perhaps fashion - not just fast fashion, but fashion in toto - is the problem here.
What if instead of throwing them away I give all my clothes to oxfam is fast fashion still a problem?
Im much more worried about e-waste. If it costs more to run than modern hardware thats an issue for those in the used market / developing nations. E-waste becomes useless but when fashion is out of date it doesn't affect its use-fullness.
> What if instead of throwing them away I give all my clothes to oxfam is fast fashion still a problem?
Yes – if they're not durable, they end up in the trash and if they're made with high-pollution materials which break down into a bunch of plastic fibers they're inherently more polluting and non-repurposable than things made using natural materials. When you donate clothes, only the best portion ends up staying in-country and a lot of it is shipped to Africa where a large amount of it ends up in landfills — this story includes a video of the 60 foot mountain looming over a poor neighborhood in Accra:
I have been wearing some of the same shirts for 20 years. These are not even good shirts. Most of them are e.g. concert T-shirts, promo swag, etc.
I must look rather ratty when I am out and about, but I also have essentially one suit and some dress clothes for interviews, special events.
I'm in Canada--if I want to buy a pair of jeans made here, my options are boutique brands starting at $150.
Your prescription to buy domestic is a noble end goal, but it's out of reach to the working class. What do you think are the intermediate steps to get there? How do we make over-consumption stop being normal?
Fast fashion is helping to cause enormous economic discrepancies in the world and at the same time is driving consumerism and irresponsible and short sighted business practices leading to global warming. It might be the single worst thing that Americans are responsible for.
Honestly reading this, fashion sounds exhausting. I just buy the same basic single color shirt in 5 colors from Amazon. They cost ~$15 each. 2 pairs of jeans, a single button down and a few polo shirts and I am set for years.
Should we also attack more traditional fashion? Or maybe fashion in general? It really doesn't matter how quality or ethical clothes are if they are not used for long term.
Fast fashion isn't wasteful by definition. That's up to the consumers depending on how they use it. It's easy to just offload your responsibility and blame companies.
How many pieces of fast fashion is equal to one of those 10-minute private jet flights? How about when 400-ft yachts get “repositioned” across thousands of miles. Why should millionaires and billionaires be the only ones with wasteful lifestyles? Because there aren’t that many of them, relatively speaking?If the earth is doomed anyway, then maybe everyone should get to enjoy the last hurrah, instead of billions of people scrimping so that a handful of oligarchs can fuck the planet over to their heart’s content for a few more years. Sorry, not feeling too optimistic about the future of humanity this morning.
The argument that fast fashion is wasteful doesn’t include “and billionaires should do whatever they want”.
The attitude of “if that group can cause harm then I can too” is how we got to the current situation and why we can’t get out of it. It doesn’t allow us the leeway to solve even the first problem on the list.
Of course it’s wasteful. The entire modern lifestyle is ecologically unsustainable at our current technological level. But who is going to be the first to cut back on their own standard of living? Nobody (in meaningful numbers) is willing to do that. People give so little shit about the planet that they’re willing to use as much electricity as medium-size countries to run a magical numbers lottery. People will move to the desert and insist on green lawns and setting their ACs at 65. People will build entire ghost cities or man-made islands instead of investing in more sustainable developments. Let’s face it, our monkey brains have evolved to optimize for our own comfort in the short term and discount any long term costs. I just hope the same monkey brains will be smart enough to find a way to survive all the disasters of our own making.
> Let’s face it, our monkey brains have evolved to optimize for our own comfort in the short term and discount any long term costs.
Well we have entered the capitalocene era. The monkey in us is not at fault, private property and hierarchy are the main culprits who organized the colonization, subjugation and destruction of much of the planet, including all cultures who differed in their will to fuck up everything.
It's not too late to burn all banks and police stations and suddenly with these barriers removed you'll see humanity has a lot of creativity and lucidity after all. It's just an unfortunate situation that the lucid people who try to stop this madness get beaten/imprisoned by the cops or assassinated by multinationals.
That's not the attitude people tend to have, though. It's more along the lines of "if you're emitting way more CO2 than I am, reduce your own emissions until you're not before you tell me that I need to reduce mine". (Basically the same point being made in Matthew 7:3-5 except with respect to environmentalism instead of morality.)
Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
A corollary to this law states that "Any question whether a specific thing equates to one of the many -isms can be answered by the word no"
In other words stop worrying about whether those who like to label people are likely to label you for whatever reason, both because of the fact that they will label you anyway and because those labels don't mean a thing - they convey more about the labeller than about the labelled.
As to the conundrum related to "fast fashion" I'd say it is perfectly normal to consider this a wasteful practice worthy to be shunned. Wear your clothes until they either don't fit or they fall apart at the seams, then repair them and continue wearing them until they are worn. Keep them clean, keep them free from unsightly blemishes and holes/tears/fringes (the last two seem to be fashionable every now and then but they're also quite unhandy). Keep some more fancy pieces around for those occasions where these are called for, care for them in the same way and you're done.
