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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.
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.
Why not shop at thrift stores instead? Why not continue to wear clothes that are visibly damaged?
I saw a video claiming that clothes in America are only worn six times, in average. That horrified me
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.
Also, if we really think about it is buying expensive clothes and wearing them once any better?
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).
While I come from a much lower CoL area, 30USD gets me tailored pants with good material and tailoring
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
why even bother trying to solve this through individual consumer purchasing habits, all it accomplishes is turning powerless common folk against each other
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.
It's the production of clothing that is responsive to current trends rather than being designed to be inconspicuous for years.
The class you belong to is "unwilling to google a strange term which is also defined in the article".
The Sensible Shoes class.
Possibly a FIRE bastard.
It's classist by definition to be against fast fashion because that's what class _is_. "We don't do that sort of thing".
The headline seems needlessly provocative, really.
If class X thinks that it's OK to do Y, but I think Y is abhorrent, that might well be classist, and frankly I don't give a toss.
The real question is whether more sustainable materials are unaffordable to poor people. The answer is quite clearly no.
> 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.
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?
IKEA is disposable based on price, but I'd definitely not say they're low quality. IKEA is damn durable for what it is.
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.
Agreed, but that would not be fast fashion.
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:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-12/fast-fashion-turning-...
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.
>Is it classist
It's a total mistery to me that people even care about being called any *ist label.
>to be against fast fashion?
This is normal. Talking about overconsumption ofc, not affordable clothing.
Just buy things produced in your country, specially when you know there is decent quality control and work laws that protect workers.
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.
And no, reselling is no excuse...
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.
Wow. This is a long article but it's very well-written and handles the nuances of this conversation very well.
No, it's expected social bahavior assuming you have ever looked into what consequences fast fashion has.
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.
quite simply no. fast fashion is not a requirement for decent inexpensive clothes.
Betteridge's Law, is there anything it can't do?
Obviously, no.