Ethical fashion agency The Helm's founder Nicole Bennett pinpoints why fast fashion should consider slowing down.
Fashion is an extremely powerful art form – it shows the world who we are and who we want to become. More than this, the industry as a whole is extremely powerful. It is a multi-trillion dollar industry, as well the most labour intensive industry in the world, employing one sixth of its population. The name of the game is ‘fast and cheap’. You don’t win by placing huge mark-ups on your clothing; you win by selling an extraordinary amount.
Fast
The traditional business model was six months design and three months production.Today, fast fashion brands can go from concept to store in as little as three weeks.
Cheap
Clothing is the only commodity that has decreased in price. Look at coffee, movie tickets, petrol – everything has increased except for clothing. Clothing used to be pricey and precious and we would invest 17% of our income into our wardrobe; today we spend less that 4%.
Quantity
In the 1920s, the average woman owned nine pieces of clothing; today the American woman purchases an average of 64 pieces a year. This statistic reflects worldwide production: 20 years ago, we produced 20 billion garments, today we produce 80 billion – that’s a 400% increase in two decades. These three ingredients – fast, cheap and quantity – are having a cascade of consequence on both human kind and the environment. Let’s look at how the fast fashion system is affecting both people and the environment involved in the fashion supply chain.
Fibre
Fast fashion doesn’t care where or how cotton is produced, it just needs huge quantities of it and once it arrives and is processed and sewn into a million pairs of knickers or denim jeans, you’d be hard pressed to know anything of its origins. In fact, only 7% of retailers know where their cotton comes from.
Child labour
Uzbekistan remains the planets 3rd largest exporter of cotton, despite being known for their child labour. In 2009 1.5 million children were pulled out of school and put to work in the cotton fields for two full months. The conditions were horrendous – there were no amenities; they had to drink from the irrigation channels; many wound up with kidney problems due to the pesticides. They had steep quotas to meet and if they failed to meet them, they were fined or punished.
Water usage
Uzbekistan used to share (with Kazakhstan) the 4th largest lake in the world – the Aral Sea. The Aral Sea was the lifeblood for 35 million people. It is now full of salt - the depth has been reduced by an amazing 19 metres. This is due to cotton – the government thought it would be a great idea to use this lakes water to irrigate the cotton fields.
Cotton does use excessive amounts of water. It takes 25,000 litres to produce 1kg of cotton, 2700L to create one t-shirt and 11000-20,000L for one pair of jeans.
Pesticides
Cotton uses 25% of the world’s pesticides and 82% of Indian cotton farmers are in debt due to pesticides and when the debt becomes too much, sadly many of these famers commit suicide. So much so that one Indian cotton farmer commits suicide every 30 minutes.
Fabric
There is no such thing as an ecologically blameless fabric. It is more a question of finding the ones that are less bad. But again, the biggest problem is the terrifying scale at which they are now being produced. When fast fashion retailers are trying to reduce the RRP, they need to look at reducing the fabric cost, as this takes up 70% of it. This is why we so much of polyester now, as it is cheap. The demand for cheap leather, for example, is high and when you breakdown the leather production, you will see it is one of the grittiest parts of the fashion industry. In Kanpur, India’s leather export capital, the tanneries pour 50 million litres of toxic waste into the Ganges daily.
People in that area are in the tight grip of tannery pollution. The local environment is contaminated; soil is contaminated; the only drinking water source – groundwater – is contaminated with chromium. The local population’s health is affected. Citizens suffer from skin rashes, boils, even numbness in the limbs. People have stomach ailments; they may have cancers also. That’s not even looking at the affect of the 1.5 billion cows on the planet, which accounts for 18% of the world’s greenhouse gases, and is 70% of the reason why 1/5 of the Amazon rainforest has been lost since 1970.
It makes sense why Stella McCartney’s shoes are not leather.