FAST FASHION Fizzah Mansoor
E
ight years ago, Rana Plaza—an eight-story building in Bangladesh’s capital city of Dhaka that housed several factories producing clothing for several clothing brands—came crashing down, killing approximately 1,130 people and injuring thousands more. Criticism was aimed primarily at the building’s local managers, who failed to keep it up to date with international security standards, and, more harshly, at the fast fashion industry. Fast fashion brands produce pieces to get the newest style on the market as soon as possible, thereby shortening the length of a fashion “season”. They emphasize optimizing certain aspects of the supply chain for the trends to be designed and manufactured quickly and inexpensively while allowing customers to buy current clothing styles at a lower price. Profit driven and enormously popular, fast fashion has seen one of the most unique social and technological advancements of the past fifty years. However, these advances come at a serious humanitarian cost- since multi-billion dollar companies are willing to outsource labor to countries like Bangladesh (where daily wages are as low as 1 USD per day and workers lack the power to unionize). In addition, due to an exponential increase in demand for new and cheap clothing, the fast fashion industry generates an enormous amount of waste, contributing nearly 10 percent of global carbon emissions and nearly 20 percent of global wastewater.
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At the same time, fast fashion is hailed as a great equalizer; runway trends and the latest innovations are now available in budget prices at online stores like FashionNova, which create cheap knockoffs of the latest designer trends within days of their appearance on runways. Since its advent and popularization, fast fashion has allowed the lower classes access to luxury that they were deprived of for much of history: the aesthetic and appearance of wealth. Much like other heavily priced-
