How to Quit Fast Fashion & Fast Fashion Brands

I wanted to dig a bit deeper into fast fashion brands in this blog post. I’ve previously discussed how I buy secondhand clothes for sustainability but from talking with some friends, I’ve realised that a lot of people just aren’t aware of the issues surrounding fast fashion and how to quit fast fashion for good.

The process for me quitting fast fashion brands for good, has been quite gradual. When I first started earning money at the age of 16, I used to spend quite a bit of that money on new clothes every month. I was young and finding my style. Gradually over time and in my 20’s I would buy majority of my clothes in charity shops/thrift shops and only buy new for a special event.

Once I had children, events were scarce and upon realising just how bad the fast fashion brands are, I made it a point to only buy all of my clothes secondhand or from ethical brands.

Why You Should Quit Fast Fashion

Some of the main reasons you should quit fast fashion are as follows:

• The clothes are generally made from poor quality fabric or poorly made in general.
• Fast fashion brands use sweatshops where the workers are often paid really low wages for long work hours.
• Fast fashion brands tend to create very similar lines of clothing meaning that you’ll end up wearing the same items of clothing as everyone else.
• Fast fashion brands often use synthetic fabrics such as polyester and nylon for their clothes and the process to make these fabrics is really polluting.
• Often the fabrics used in fast fashion are dyed with toxic chemical dyes as well. These hazardous dyes are being disposed of in rivers. In China it’s believed that 70% of the rivers are polluted from the fabric dyes.

History Behind Fast Fashion

The best way to learn how to quit fast fashion is to firstly look into the history behind fast fashion. According to Forc Magazine before the 1800’s people used to rely on sheeps wool mainly to make yarn for clothes. Fashion took off after sewing machines were created around the time of the industrial revolution.

Then between 1900’s and 1950’s quite a lot of clothes that people wore were either made at home or in small workshops. It seems that during the 60’s was when younger people embraced a new fashion style and the demand for cheaply made clothes soared. Fast fashion brands at this time has to out source the manufacturing of these clothes to developing countries in order to keep up with demand.

Definition of Fast Fashion

: an approach to the design, creation, and marketing of clothing fashions that emphasizes making fashion trends quickly and cheaply available to consumers

Fast Fashion as we know it, took off during the late 20th century as synthetic materials such as polyester and nylon made it much easier and cheaper to create clothes. Fast fashion brands tend to mimic styles seen on the catwalk and create cheaper versions for the High Street shops. The issue with fast fashion brands is that they constantly bring out new collections to encourage consumers to spend more and discard their existing clothes.

What Is Considered Fast Fashion

As mentioned above, quite a large part of the problem with Fast Fashion is the fact that the manufacturing occurs in poorer countries. Majority of the sweatshops are in China, India and Bangladesh where workers are forced to work long hours and in very poor conditions, for extremely low wages.

Sweatshops Definition:

: a shop or factory in which employees work for long hours at low wages and under unhealthy conditions

I discussed this in my secondhand clothes post, however 85% of workers in sweatshops are women 18-25 years old. There is an estimated 250 million children working in sweatshops worldwide and 22 million die annually due to poor conditions in the factories.

Not to mention that there’s been a number of incidents involving factories in Bangladesh, one in particular (where Primark & Matalan clothes are made) occurred in 2013 where the roof collapsed and 1100+ workers died as a result. This is not an isolated incident either, it’s devastating that this sort of thing is happening for the Western world to receive cheap clothes!

Fast Fashion Brands

Below are some of the main fast fashion brands and what has been individually reported about them.

• Primark, Bangladesh factories which very likely have poor wages and terrible working conditions.
• H&M, In 2018 allegedly it was reported that H&M’s factories in Bulgaria, Turkey, India and Cambodia were not paying their workers anywhere near a living wage and as a result the workers could not cover their families basic needs.
• Ripcurl, They admitted in 2016 that one of their factories was in North Korea despite having a ‘made in china’ label. It is thought that the people making the clothes they are slaves.
• Victoria’s Secret, Similar to Primark they have factories in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Where conditions have been supposedly reported as being poor. It’s been said that the workers have been made to work 14-15 hours a day, 7 days a week with only 1 day off every few months.
• Zara, In 2013 Zara was accused of having sweatshops in Argentina where similarly the Bolivian employers claimed that they were made to work from 7am – 11pm without a break, 6 days a week.
• Asos, this article states that Asos don’t pay workers a living wage in their Turkish factories and child labour is used.

I’ve recently discovered an app called Good On You, this eco friendly app is really useful to check other brands to see how they score ethically and environmentally. I checked several of the brands that are available in the High Street in the UK such as Next, New Look, Debenhams and Topshop. Unfortunately, all of these brands come up as Not good enough on this app.

If you’re interested in learning about fast furniture, you can read the full post about what to consider when buying sustainable furniture.

Environmental Impact Of Fast Fashion

It is said that the clothing industry is one of the biggest producers of CO2, producing 1.2 billion tonnes per year. 60% of the textiles are used for the clothing industry and as the manufacture occurs in China and India mostly, their power plants are coal fuelled as well.

As I state in my sustainable fabrics post, the worst fabrics in fashion are the synthetic fabrics such as polyester, nylon and acrylic. The production of these fabrics is polluting because they are made from plastic essentially. As they are very cheap to make, they are used quite a lot by fast fashion brands.

Some of the natural materials such as cotton have their own issues as well. It takes approximately 2700 litres of water to grow the cotton to make the average cotton t-shirt. Not-to-mention the fact that cotton requires a lot of pesticides to grow as well. These pesticides make their way into the air and waters in the surrounding areas and harm animals and humans along the way.

The other issue with fast fashion clothes is what happens to the clothes after people have finished with them. It is thought that a lot of people send clothes to landfill because they simply don’t know that they can recycle clothes.

A survey in 2017 in the UK stated that 2000 people found that 3/4 quarters of them sent unwanted clothes to landfill because they didn’t know they could be recycled or sent to a thrift store (charity shop). An estimated 235 million individual items of fast fashion clothing would end up in landfill due to this.

How To Quit Fast Fashion

I do appreciate that all of this is a lot of information and you may not know how to quit fast fashion yet. So I’m going to list my top tips for quitting fast fashion for good and being a conscious consumer.

1. First of all, buy clothes a lot less. Try not to get sucked into thinking that you need a new outfit every week or even month. I recently asked a question on my socials about how much people spend per month on clothes. The results actually shocked me! I had a variety of responses from nothing up to £750 a month being the highest. The average amount people spend from my research was £76. We really need to normalise repeating outfits. It really helps to put any spending apps into a folder on your phone so that you’re not looking at them constantly. I’ve done this with Ebay and Depop because I’m doing a No Buy year and it’s been really helpful for me not to be constantly looking at them on my phone. Also another tip would be to unsubscribe from any fashion brands email lists, then you won’t receive any of their marketing emails with discounts and offers.
2. Secondly, have a go at mending your clothes when they start to break. Sometimes if you catch a seam tear or similar early on, you can prevent the issue getting worse and prolong the life of your clothes. I had to fix a broken zip recently on my favourite pair of jeans and although it wasn’t perfect, it meant that these jeans will last me that much longer. Previously I would have just looked for another secondhand pair on EBay but I’m trying to mend things as much as I can these days. If you’re someone who’s pretty handy and you can make your own clothes, I’m super impressed. Sadly I don’t have this talent so I settle for fixing things the best way I can.
3. Buy secondhand clothes as much as you can. There’s a lot of different ways that you can thrift your clothes these days. People sell clothes a lot online at Ebay, Depop, Vinted and even Facebook Marketplace. Failing that you can head to a thrift shop if you have one in your area. Buying secondhand is the most sustainable choice always. I buy clothes for myself and my children all secondhand and I haven’t had any issues with this. If you want to learn more about where to thrift clothes online or offline, you can read my blog post.
4. Another thing you can do if you are getting fed up of your clothes, is to hold a clothes swap party with friends or family. This is quite a simple way that you can declutter clothes that you no longer want and find some new items of clothing without spending any money at all.
5. Although it might seem that individuals can’t make a difference, there are petitions that you can sign and campaigns that you can get involved in which are fighting against the awful practices of fast fashion brands. Fashion Revolution is one of them, they created the campaign Who Made My Clothes? following the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh – on their website you can use their templates to email or tweet brands to ask Who Made My Clothes? and encourage them to show more transparency. Ellen Macarthur Foundation have an initiative called Make Fashion Circular. They have a short 2 minute video showing that they want a more circular economy for fashion where clothes can be rented, returned and repaired and eliminate the use of synthetic fabrics which puts microplastics into our oceans. These campaigns make me really positive about the future of fashion.
6. If you have to buy new items of clothing, then pick brands that are ethically sound. I personally buy socks and pants new, it’s the only items of clothing that I do buy new so I make sure that I’m buying from a sustainable and ethical brand. Although making use of all the secondhand clothes in circulation is obviously the best choice for sustainability. If you can afford it, I do also think that it’s worth supporting brands that are using sustainable and ethical practices as well. You can check brands on the app I mention above, Good on you or you can check my sustainable and ethical brand list.
7. I’ve also recently joined a movement aiming to spread awareness about fast fashion called Slow Fashion UK, I found them on Instagram. They are aiming to get 20,000 people to commit to buying no new clothes between July and September every year #fashiondetox #slowfashionseason2021. I asked the creators of this movement to give me their top tips for quitting fast fashion and I’ll list their advice below.

“Realise it’s an addiction and break the purchasing cycle.

Surround yourself with like-minded people

Unfollow all fast fashion accounts on social media, block ads, unsubscribe from toxic newsletters, unfollow influencers that promote fast fashion.

Do a wardrobe audit (analyse what you have, check every piece of clothing to see if it needs mending, think about how to combine clothes you have)

Start discovering alternative ways of acquiring clothes (clothes swap, hand me downs, borrowing from friends, charity shops, online second-hand shopping etc)”

Slow Fashion UK

You can sign up to join this movement in 2021, on their website below.

I hope this post helps you to understand how you can quit fast fashion and fast fashion brands. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments.

I recently wrote a Boody bamboo clothing product review if you’re looking for new sustainable clothing. Alternatively I have a list of the best affordable ethical clothing brands to help you out as well.

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