FAST FASHION - FOR ELEPHANT JOURNAL
Published December 13th, 2016: Five Ways to Actually Save the World (& $$) Through Fashion
My second article published on Elephant Journal reflects on the current state of fast fashion and the dire impacts the industry has on the environment.
You can read an excerpt below.
When we see these pictures, these Vogue editorials, these storeys-high ads in Times Square or your local metro station, it’s easy to forget that what we’re viewing is a highly-curated snapshot of an ideal; a feeling encapsulated in a single moment frozen in time. A moment that is staged and very much outside of what your or my day-to-day reality looks like.
We do not see the garment being worn in various climates, being cleaned, fading in the wash. We don’t see the girl in the heels attempting to walk to the bar, we don’t see the factory worker in Bangladesh stitching the seams together, nor the chemicals dumped into the water supply during production.
In a world that’s progressing at breakneck speed, jumping from one fad to the next almost faster than it takes to create it, fast fashion dominates the market and our buying trends. And it doesn’t have time to consider the more practical matters that exist when it comes to dressing ourselves.
As a society, we’ve created a non-renewable, impossible to recycle, steam-rolling industry of garbage clothing.
Garbage clothing.
And we’re throwing out this clothing at such a rate that “84 percent of unwanted clothes in the United States in 2012 went into either a landfill or an incinerator.”
