19 Summer Fast Fashion: The Ignored Truth

Summer Fast Fashion:

The Ignored Truth

By: Noëllie Inard Staff Writer

TW: Forced Labor, Abuse.

Summer is coming and with it, a change of our wardrobe. With the arrival of summer, we all want to look and feel our best, which sometimes comes with buying new summer clothes. We want clothes that are cheap, trendy and ship quickly — which is why we usually turn to fast fashion.

According to www.merriam-website.com, fast fashion is defined as “an approach to the design, creation and marketing of clothing fashions that emphasizes making fashion trends quickly and cheaply available to consumers.” This includes brands such as Shein, H&M, Zara and Pretty Little Thing.

Not everyone, especially students, have the means to buy clothes that are not a part of fast fashion, as buying from local or environment-friendly brands can be more expensive. However, when we choose to buy clothes from brands that are part of fast fashion, we need to be educated about what comes behind the product.

As consumers coming from different backgrounds with different privileges, there is no right or wrong way to consume fashion, but it is important to learn more about the implications of our choices regarding our consumption, even if it is ugly.

As of today, one of the cheapest sites to buy clothes from is Shein. Shein is a Chinese online fast-fashion retailer which quickly became popular due to extreme marketing on TikTok. It became the symbol of fast fashion, encompassing values such as low prices and quick shipping. However, the company became infamous for their blatant disrespect for human rights and the environment.

An investigation by the Public Eye, a sustainability-oriented organization, showed that the condition of their workers is miserable. In addition, according to the Public Eye, “Shein workers are working eleven to twelve hours a day, which is 75 hours of work per week with only one day off per month. In addition, workers do not sign any contract which means that they don’t have any insurance and can be fired at any time for any reason, which violates Shein’s supplier codes as well as Chinese labor laws.”

Nevertheless, the secret that most fast fashion brands want to hide is their affiliation with the Uyghurs, a Turkic ethnic group native to Xinjiang in China. They are an ethnic and religious minority victim of a genocide, arguably an ethnocide.

They are incarcerated in “re-education” camps, also known as concentration camps, without any legal process. Children are separated from their parents and sent to “boarding school.” The adults inside the camps become victims of indoctrination, and they are forced to renounce their religion and culture, perform hard labor, and suffer sterilization, abortion and abuse.

Many brands take advantage of the forced labor of the Uyghurs in China in order to benefit from their supply chains. A study by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, estimated “Between 2017 and 2019, 80,000 Uyghurs were forced to transfer to factories whose subcontractors are major brands.”

Even though many alternatives exist like thrift shopping (Vinted, Depop, etc.), local small businesses or reusing clothes, as student consumers, it can be hard to deal with our moral engagement and our economic resources. Being educated about brands and fast fashion and choosing to buy or avoid it makes you more responsible for your choices. It gives hope that one day, if your lifestyle and resources are more in agreement, you will make the active choice to avoid fast fashion and its ugly truth.