The High Price of ‘Fast Fashion’ – The Wall Street Journal

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Experts predict that the world’s population will swell to 8.5 billion by 2030 and that GDP per capita will rise by about 2% a year in developed countries and 4% in developing ones. If these estimates are right and we don’t change our consumption habits, the world will collectively buy 63% more clothing, Boston Consulting Group reports—from 62 million tons a year to 102 million.

All this is by design. In airports, you can pick up an entire new wardrobe on the way to the gate. In Tokyo, you can score a tailored suit from a vending machine. Love that outfit on Instagram? Click and it’s yours. Walk into a fashion store: Techno thumps, surfaces gleam and the light is desert-sharp—the better to see the abundance of offerings. Price becomes almost moot. We’re often so beguiled and overstimulated that we forget to consider such fundamentals as quality or to ask if we really need yet another sweater or dress.

This isn’t sustainable.

Since the invention of the mechanical loom more than two centuries ago, fashion has often been a dirty, unscrupulous business, exploiting humans and the Earth alike. Slavery, child labor and prison labor have all been integral parts of the fashion supply chain at one time or another—including today. On occasion, society has righted some of these wrongs through legislation or labor-union pressure. But greed and trade deals without human-rights and labor protections have often undercut those good works.

Until the late 1970s, the U.S. produced at least 70% of the apparel that Americans purchased, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Thanks to the New Deal, for much of the 20th century, brands and manufacturers were expected to adhere to strict national labor laws. But in the late 1980s, a new part of the industry cropped up: “fast fashion,” trendy, inexpensive garments mass produced at lightning speed in subcontracted factories and hawked in thousands of chain stores world-wide.

Fast fashion gets a great many of its design ideas from fashion shows. Guests lining the runways upload pictures and video clips on social media, and fast-fashion design teams peruse those images, note the number of “likes”—a free, instant market study—and choose which ones they want to steal, loosely reinterpret and produce for pennies apiece.

To keep prices low, fast fashion slashed manufacturing costs—and the cheapest labor was in the world’s poorest countries. The sector reset the way that all clothing—from luxury garments to athletic wear—is conceived, advertised and sold. In 30 years, McKinsey & Company reports, fashion has grown from a $500 billion trade, primarily domestically produced, to a $2.4 trillion a year global behemoth.

The fallout has been vast. Labor in wealthier countries was hit first. In 1991, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says, 56.2% of all clothing purchased in the U.S. was American-made; by 2012, it was down to 2.5%. Between 1990 and 2012, the bureau reports, the U.S. textile and garment industry lost more than three-quarters of the sector’s labor force. U.S. factories sat empty even while apparel and textile jobs globally nearly doubled, from 34 million in 1990 to nearly 58 million in 2012.

The reason was simple. According to a 2016 AP-GfK poll, when given the choice between buying a $50 pair of pants made offshore or an $85 pair manufactured in the U.S., 67% of respondents said they’d go for the cheaper pants. The response was the same even if their annual household income was more than $100,000.

Fast fashion has been hugely lucrative for the apparel industry’s top players. In 2018, Forbes reported, five of the world’s 55 richest people were fashion-company owners (and that isn’t counting the three Waltons of Walmart).

To be sure, the offshoring of clothes production has been a tremendous economic engine for poor countries, lifting millions from extreme poverty. Take Bangladesh: According to the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, the country’s $28 billion textile and apparel industries are vital to its economy, “generating 20% of GDP and over 80% of export earnings, while employing 4.5 million people, mostly women.” As

Siddiqur Rahman,

president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA), told me in 2018, “Our economy is dependent on it.”

But the human cost is high. Worker safety remains a major problem, as the catastrophic 2012 Tazreen factory fire and the 2013 Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh proved. Between 2006 and 2012, more than 500 apparel workers died in Bangladesh in factory fires, reports the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF). And even with international industry-led reforms like the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh—which was founded after the Rana Plaza tragedy and counts PVH Corp.,

Fast Retailing

and

H&M

as members—conditions have been slow to improve. Earlier this month, the BGMEA reported that only one out of eight factories passed recent inspections under the accord.

Fashion—from factory to retail floor—employs one out of six people on Earth, according to the 2015 documentary “The True Cost,” making it one of the most labor-intensive industries. Yet fewer than 2% of garment workers earn a living wage, the amount economists deem necessary to cover essentials such as housing, food and clothing, according to reports by Oxfam, Human Rights Watch and the ILRF.

Another victim of fast fashion has been the environment. The World Bank estimates that the sector is responsible for nearly 20% of all industrial water pollution annually. The fashion industry releases 10% of the carbon emissions in our air, according to McKinsey, and uses a fourth of all chemicals produced world-wide.

Of the more than 100 billion items of clothing produced each year, some 20% go unsold. Leftovers are usually buried, shredded or incinerated. The Environmental Protection Agency reported in 2015 that Americans sent 10.5 million tons of textiles (the majority of it clothing) to landfills that year. And most clothing contains synthetics, and most synthetics aren’t biodegradable.

Thanks to advocates, creators, innovators, investors and retailers—and a rising generation of conscientious consumers—segments of the apparel industry are slowly moving to more principled practices. The self-described “conscious designer”

Stella McCartney

has led the way, first at Kering, the Paris-based luxury group that formerly owned half her company, and now at

LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton
,

which recently named her a “special adviser” on sustainability. Zara and H&M have launched capsule collections made with sustainable materials. And H&M has pledged only to source organic, recycled or sustainable cotton by 2020 and to be “climate positive” by 2040. “We are going to be in this industry not for the next three years but for the next 30 years,” H&M’s sustainability chief,

Anna Gedda,

told me. “We have to make sure we have created circumstances that allow us to do that.”

But consumers will play the key role in demanding change. We can start by reading clothing labels and considering where and how items are made before buying them. For what we already own, we can wash less, repair more, toss less and consider resale. We can give our wardrobes a longer life—and be far less casual, as an ethical matter, about our clothes.

—This essay is adapted from Ms. Thomas’s forthcoming book “Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes,” which will be published Sept. 3 by Penguin Press.