Is it classist to be against fast fashion?
putthison.com
putthison.com
I wouldn’t be surprised if a large percentage of clothes bought in rich countries are worn once or never.
But I say that as someone who gets told by his wife that he needs to throw clothes that fall apart away, so it’s just a guess ;)
As an example, say 8 out of 10 people have 7 sets of clothes, one for each day of the week, and use the same sets for a whole year. The remaining 2 out of 10 use a new set of clothes every day, so they go through 365 sets of clothes in a year. That comes to clothes being used an average of 4.64 times:
$ python -c 'print(
# average used times in a year
(
(
8 # people
* 7 # sets of clothes
* (365 / 7) # used times in a year
) + (
2 # people
* 365 # sets of clothes
* 1 # used times in a year
)
) / (
8 # people
* 7 # sets of clothes
+
2 # people
* 365 # sets of clothes
)
)'
4.643765903307888Anyway, it's just an example to show how that number can be easily influenced by a small minority. The real numbers are going to be different.
On the other end, I’m also surprised by the “one-year” thing: most of my clothes are more than five-year-old and they are fine. For underwear and t-shirts, I typically wear them once a week.
Because these are the minority of clothes despite being used by the majority of people in the example I gave, changing the timeframe doesn't really change the average. Changing the example to use a 5 year timeframe, for instance, only changes the average to 4.92.
> not 20% of the population
Right, and it also ought to be less than 80% that buys clothes no more often than once per year or per 5 years. Both extremes are exaggerated to not have to insert more tiers than needed into the example.
Enough. Nobody actually wants these. It's direct to landfill for 99% of the things you're giving away.
I start saying no, not that it impacts items already ordered. Figure if they start ending up with thousands of t-shirts after an event they'll stop ordering them.
An adverse ROI with regards to time and effort invested.
Why not continue to wear clothes that are visibly damaged?
I do keep them for dirty work at home, but eventually they get to the point they're more useful cut up for shop rags than as clothing.
Visibly damaged clothes are not good for every occasion and may just look bad on almost every occasion. Otherwise why not to wear a potato sack or rags tied with a bit of string?
Because they don't offer the same style in multiple sizes, so if the size doesn't fit, you are out of luck. For me, it's just too much work / time investment. Also, I like to just buy the same pair of trousers again, if the last one broke.
> Why not continue to wear clothes that are visibly damaged?
Social conventions.
Wearing clothes that are visibly damaged incurs social judgment.
So does wearing clothes that are out of fashion. Draw the line where you want to but don't judge others for choosing differently.
There are other things like this. People expect to be able to access the things they like without friction, and luxuries become necessities. Meat is a similar example in North America, where it’s terrible for the environment and extremely resource and labour intensive, yet people get upset when they can’t get a pound for pennies.
Both industries benefit greatly from people thinking of the product as a necessity or close to it.
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.
Not to mention the other dangers of turning a blind eye to production--kids clothes tainted with lead? Heads should roll for that.
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).
There are only two sides to the barricades. Only one of them is interested in elections and the face of who runs the shitshow.
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.
Possibly a FIRE bastard.
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.
Fast fashion isn’t just cheap clothing—it’s cheap and trendy clothing. The term “fast” refers to how a company brings a product to market.
Not sure I get it still. What difference does days vs months make in fashion? Trends like colors or width of jeans legs moves like glaciers.
Is this some TikTok phenomenon thing where there is a viral video or a famous artist wearing something and in response these companies try to rush similar stuff to shelves?
I think my social class is old fart
Personally I've found awareness of traditional menswear style to be a fun hobby, but 99% of the time I am still wearing a t-shirt and workout shorts.
The class you belong to is "unwilling to google a strange term which is also defined in the article".
Is a concrete example that you’d push a hat found in a viral video to production? Then I get it
Half of the sold hats get worn for three months, but then teenagers will point and laugh if you still wear that hat, so there are now two thousand hats donated to thrift shops and four thousand more in the trash.
It's fashion, it arrives fast and it gets turned into trash fast.
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 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.
So is racism and sexism, it's still has a negative connotation. Not because of the "ism", but because of who use that word and what for, or we wouldn't be here having that discussion at first place since the context is the linked article.
Class is both mutable and is definitionally about acceptable and unacceptable behaviours.
Race and sex are neither. They're not comparable at all.
Classism isn't "discrimination" in the same sense because you're directly attacking a behaviour rather than ascribing group dynamics.
If you disagree, explain.
You can't make up a definition just to suit your argument either. There is an article and you can question its definition but within the context of that article, classism is deemed having a negative connotation, which it does anyway whether you claim it doesn't or not.
Classism is absolutely discriminatory, by the very definition of the word. Accusing somebody of classism is derogatory.
The whole point here revolves around the question of whether being against fast fashion is akin to shaming poor people for not being able to afford more expensive clothes thus classism.
However, one can advocate against fast fashion in a classist way.
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.
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.
If you understand German, I'd watch Simplicissimus's video on this, it's quite well made in my opinion
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.
- 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.
It's still very not durable. Do you imagine Ikea furniture passed down from generation to generation? Besides the obvious problem that all IKEA furniture is bathed in various chemicals that slowly kills your entire family, the furniture is just not solid enough for this process to take place.
I can't count how many IKEA furniture i've stupidly damaged over the years, and i can even less so count how many i've seen on the street headed straight for the landfill (or local waste disposal equivalent).
Traditional furniture is heavier and more expensive, but the wood can usually be reused, and certainly keeps solidity/value over time.
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?
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.
It's amazing how the brattiness and the loudness of punk has virtually taken over the culture, but the anti-conformity of it has remained like hen's teeth.
Perhaps fashion - not just fast fashion, but fashion in toto - is the problem here.
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.
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-...
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.
Your prescription to buy domestic is a noble end goal, but it's out of reach to the working class. What do you think are the intermediate steps to get there? How do we make over-consumption stop being normal?
And no, reselling is no excuse...
The attitude of “if that group can cause harm then I can too” is how we got to the current situation and why we can’t get out of it. It doesn’t allow us the leeway to solve even the first problem on the list.
Well we have entered the capitalocene era. The monkey in us is not at fault, private property and hierarchy are the main culprits who organized the colonization, subjugation and destruction of much of the planet, including all cultures who differed in their will to fuck up everything.
It's not too late to burn all banks and police stations and suddenly with these barriers removed you'll see humanity has a lot of creativity and lucidity after all. It's just an unfortunate situation that the lucid people who try to stop this madness get beaten/imprisoned by the cops or assassinated by multinationals.
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.
Obviously, no.