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The Long Life of Fast Fashion
By Anne Pringle, Local Buttons, Fashion Takes Action Member
Despite what you might think, fast fashion does have a long life. One garment has a significant impact on both communities and the planet, even before we wear it. Once we wear, wash, give it or throw it away – it still lives on – in a landfill or second-hand clothes market . . . somewhere like Haiti.
 Attempting to understand and navigate the ethical fashion scene is not for the faint of heart. As a conscientious consumer, one often has a hard time determining which company’s claims are putting a “green” or “natural” marketing spin on their products, and which ones are truly ethical. As a social enterprise, we at Local Buttons are wading into these new waters with our eyes wide open. We are launching an ethical clothing line linking young Toronto designers to tailors in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, who will produce our items from refurbished textiles found in the local second-hand markets. One of the core values of our business is to consider the full life cycle of clothing – before and after it gets to us. We are aiming to create a human element with each purchase, so that each transaction connects the consumer to the life of the garment and the people who have been part of its creation. Beyond this, we want to operate our business as ethically as possible, upholding strict labour and wage standards, and making sure that our “greenness” is not marketing spin, but the real thing.
The type of clothing Local Buttons is developing is increasingly relevant. We are a culture infatuated with speed and quantity of cheap stuff – and are blissfully ignorant of the true cost of our convenience. In other words, it's a perfect environment for fast fashion to thrive. Canadians spent $21.5 billion on fashion in 2009 (Stats Canada Consumer Report 2009). That’s an average of $630 spent by each one of Canada’s 34 million men, women and children. Considering that trends fly in and out the door faster than you can take off that pair of jeggings, we can guess that most of those garments were not “made to last”.
Every garment that we purchase leaves a footprint, both ecologically and socially. Take a look at your labels. You are wearing the world on your back, literally. Most of the cotton produced in the US is shipped to China and other countries where labour standards and wages are low. Each conventional t-shirt takes 7 bathtubs of water to produce. The US grown cotton is then shipped to China where it is woven into fabric, cut, sewn, labeled, and shipped back to North America in order to satiate our appetite for the latest trends, at the cheapest prices. Currently 30% of the world’s apparel exports come from China (UN Commodity Trade Statistics Database), leaving a significant carbon footprint from shipping in the wake. The impacts of these cotton garments accumulate a “life” of their own, completely ignored by the average fast fashion shopper.
So where does the clothing end up once the trend has passed? If not in landfills, it is donated to the Goodwill. When more clothing is donated than meets the demand, the excess is exported to less economically developed countries, where it is sold on the streets and local markets. This has been going on since the end of WWII, when mass production in the textile industry meant cheaper clothes, less guilt about buying new, and few qualms about disposing unwanted items. In the next Triple Stitch, we will explore the possibilities of a second life for those garments that become “tossed aside”.
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