By: Mira Kaufman

You’re looking for a homecoming dress and Shein pops up on your screen with your perfectly trendy, cheap dress and you can’t resist the urge to put it in your cart. Pause, stop, and know what you are supporting by buying this dress. It’s cheap and easy, but unfortunately it’s just not that simple.

According to Oxford Languages, fast fashion is defined as “inexpensive clothing, produced rapidly by mass-market retailers in response to the latest trends.” Although this system sounds great, there is more to it than what we can see with the plane eye. That dress that you buy will eventually end up in the landfill, polluting our earth, and taking up to 1,000 years to degrade. This we can avoid.

Fast fashion has lasting impacts on our world. Their use of water for instance shows us how un-environmental fashion industries are. According to Nature, every year fashion industries consume anywhere from 20 trillion to 200 trillion liters every year. After we buy clothing, commonly made from polyester, we wash it, releasing plastic fibers which make up 20-35% of the micro plastics killing our oceans. The cotton that many of these clothes are made with are also farmed using pesticides which join runoff and chemicalize our oceans.

Fast fashion is not only killing our earth, but the workers too. Fast fashion companies purposely move and take advantage of countries such as Vietnam, India, and Bangladesh because they can get away with horrible working conditions due to those countries’ lack of oversight in textile production.

Brands like these are known for using sweatshops, giving people life threatening working conditions. According to Emma Ross on GW, over 75 million workers are employed and it is estimated that less than 2 percent of these workers make a living wage. This means that 98% of these workers are held below the poverty line, leading the term of these conditions to be “slave labor.” Many of these workers spend 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, and many of these textile factories exploit children into their workforce at very young ages.

Health conditions for these workers are a worry of their own. Workers are exposed to numerous chemicals, many life threatening, leading to cancers and death. These factories also admit numerous types of waste. Their emissions pollute our air, many empty their liquid waste into streams and rivers resulting in flooding poor towns with chemical waters, making children and families ill.

Fast fashion factories have the goal in mind of making as much money as possible. This not only includes giving their workers close to nothing but how their factories and facilities are built. According to Emma Ross, in 2013 1,100 were killed with more than 2,500 people injured due to the Rana Plaza Factory collapsing. This building had already been marked as expired and even so they ordered workers to continue working there and it led to this tragedy. One of many like it.

So many brands we all see online are not as incredible as they look. Many brands that do not use sweatshops still do not meet fair standards for the environment and the workers, so we must be careful to whom we grant our money and support. Common brands such as: Shein, Mango, H&M, Boohoo, Forever 21, Urban Outfitters, Primark, Zara, Victoria’s Secret, Romwe, and more are all fast fashion and follow extremely unfair standards for our environment and workers.

If you have come to understand the truth of fast fashion brands, then let’s make the transition to sustainable clothes easier for you. Common brands such as: Pact, Yes Friends, Etsy, Patagonia, All Birds, Eco Vibe, and so many more are amazing options for sustainable shopping.

Next time you click on that dress, check the brand, what they support, and make the right decision by supporting sustainability for our earth and working people.