5 Ways to Stop Buying Fast Fashion & Help Save the Planet

Fashion is one of the top three polluters in the world and inasmuch as brands must be held accountable for how and how much they produce clothes, we the consumers must be accountable for our consumption as well.

Fast fashion, or high street fashion, includes brands like Zara, H&M, Forever21, ASOS, and Bershka that offer trendy clothing for a low price. But not only is the garments’ quality subpar, their environmental impact is catastrophic. They produce too much, dump unsold garments in landfills, lure with a low-price-trendy-fashion two-punch, and essentially enable the consumer to spend more and more. Which needs to stop. That “more is more” mentality also leads to more pollution of our beautiful oceans — a single synthetic garment can generate more than 1900 micro plastic fibres in one washing machine cycle. And that’s just scratching the surface. In the past decade, fast fashion grew more than 10 percent and globally, we now consume about 80 billion new pieces of clothing every year—400% more than we were consuming just two decades ago. Fast fashion companies put out 150 billion clothing items every year, most of which end up in a landfill.

Fast fashion also violates human rights protection laws by employing cheep labor in third world countries, who produce 24 collections per year (Zara) and between 12 and 16 collections per year (H&M).  According to an April 2016 Oxfam report, more than 60 million people work in the garment industry to fuel fast fashion: more than 15 million of those are based in Asia and more than 80 percent are women, often young and from poor rural backgrounds. I hope those are enough reasons to stop supporting this awful industry.

⁠One of the quickest ways to do that is by not buying fast fashion. Period.  Here are five ways to help you downsize your fashion footprint and stop buying fast fashion forever:⁠

• Do a regular audit of everything you have, so you know exactly what you need – and what you don’t.⁠

• Don’t be afraid to repeat an outfit. ⁠Since when is an outfit repeat considered bad? Come on!

• Before buying anything, ask: will I wear this at least 30 times? If the answer is no, don’t buy.⁠

• If you are not going to wear something more than once, don’t buy it, borrow it. From a friend or a rental service. ⁠

• Learn to mend your clothes, do not discard them for the tiniest imperfection. ⁠

Happy Earth Day, friends! Let’s do our best to save our planet before it’s too late. 🌍⁠