The problem isn't the cost to customers, it's about externalities. Those cheap clothes are subsidized by slave labor and pollution. If you turn a blind eye to that you're complicit.
1. https://fashionchecker.org/
2. https://wikirate.org/Clean_Clothes_Campaign+Living_Wages_Pai...
I do think the scale and the race to the bottom in terms of price and disposability is slightly worse with these newer companies, though.
Nike, Adidas, Levi’s, all sorts of brands have been under attack by people in the West for decades!
Western activists have been successfully fighting them to improve their supply chain for at least as long as I have been alive.
If you buy 10 pieces of clothing for the price of 1, but those cheaper ones last for 1/100th the number of uses the more expensive one does, and the more expensive one can also be repaired to further extend the life, are those 10 pieces actually cheaper?
What’s really annoying are comments like the GPs which essentially complain about even doing research on identifying whether there is more to something beyond the surface.
It’s such an awful attitude I can’t even understand how people come up with it. Especially since many are the consumers themselves who will benefit from the information being identified. Ive started wondering whether there is a significant (if not majority) of people who are aggressively defensive of their ignorance and prefer it to knowledge.
There's a pretty big difference between knowing full well something comes at a huge cost of human suffering and turning a blind eye to that, and inadvertently participating in something that turns out has unanticipated externalities. The two are not the same, and relying on the possibility of the latter scenario to justify the former is bad faith.
Well over half the things I need in life fall into the category of "I know this came at the cost of human suffering". There's not a lot of options for me as a consumer.
Much of the food I buy in supermarkets are harvested and processed by people in misery. I can't afford a car and when I Uber/Lyft to the hospital, I know the drivers aren't making ends meet and the nursing assistants make paltry wages that cannot pay rent in my city. When I do eat in a restaurant, having worked in restaurants for quite a few years, I'm fully aware that many of the staff aren't making living wages. When I visit my family, I know that the rookie flight attendants on Southwest Airlines are making just $22,000/year[0]. The maintenance workers at my apartment complex aren't able to afford fixing their car to take their kids anywhere and have to eat the fast-food chicken at the gas station next door (only food within 3 miles) unless they splurge on UberEats that they can't afford. Their children are being supervised by substitute teachers making $12/hr with very limited and sporadic hours each week.
What can I do differently as someone barely treading water myself?
From the article:
> This is an era of Shopping as Entertainment—shopping not out of need, but to scratch an itch, to feel like you did something, to kill time.
Maybe this is the difference. I only have enough money to buy a tiny bit more than I need. I actually really need to make the money stretch.
0: https://www.reddit.com/r/SouthwestAirlines/comments/18dz7cl/...
It's an entire ethos that fashion requires constant change. It's no longer seasonal, but weekly.
If that's not you, don't worry about it.
Yes, if something is cheap, it must necessarily have been produced by either (1) a person who wasn't paid very much ("slave labor"), or (2) a machine (which means pollution).
Is the conclusion that it's bad for things to be cheap?
Alternatively, a slightly different conclusion is that in some situations it is bad for the market to optimize for cheapness over quality. E.g. perhaps it would be better if we optimized for people to have fewer, higher quality garments. This conclusion gets into the boot theory of poverty.
These statements are true about the fast fashion industry. The clothes are cheap because these things are true, they aren't true because they are cheap.
They are accidental properties of cheap clothes, not necessary properties; but they are still properties of the fast fashion industry.
To the extent that that claim is true, it is equally true of future clothes, unless those clothes are very expensive. Nothing you've said here connects to what you said above.
You appear to be arguing the position that, if this year we produce X tons of clothes at the cost of emitting Y tons of pollution, and next year we produce 2X tons of clothes at the cost of Y tons of pollution, next year's clothes are not being subsidized by pollution, even though this year's clothes are. But that position is self-evidently insane. Were you trying to say something different?
you'll occasionally get things with high costs of production being cheap because they are subsidized [0][1].
Although I agree that in the general case, price reflects production costs :)
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/technology/farewell-mille...
[1] https://www.ifpri.org/publication/food-subsidies-developing-...