Villains don’t always exist in movies. Sometimes, they live in our closets.
The name of this particular villain is ‘Fast Fashion’.
Fast fashion brands have built an entire industry by introducing endless trends every year and convincing customers to buy substandard clothes at cheap prices so that they can continue racking up profits with each new purchase.
Fast Fashion has had such deep-reaching psychological impacts that consumers now experience some sort of Cinderella-syndrome where if you wear an outfit a couple of times, it’s likely that you’ll never wear it again because society tells you that repeating clothes is an unforgivable sin. Trying to keep up with these ever-changing norms and fashion trends can be financially catastrophic and emotionally overwhelming.
Nowadays, fashion trends are introduced like Oreo flavours - there’s just too many of them. Social media’s “Outfit of the Day” culture has led us to consume fashion in a way that is transient and performative. This has created an impulse to shop more and more often, leading us to buy from fast fashion brands which offer the latest trends at such absurdly low prices that we find ourselves picking up an item in every colour.
Fast fashion brands are wildly infamous for exploiting labourers in developing countries like India, China, and Bangladesh to keep their prices as low as possible. These brands are notorious for indulging in sweatshop labour where the “employees” are overworked, underpaid, often underage, and subjected to deadly, slave-like working conditions.
To make matters worse, fast fashion is destroying our planet. Companies seem to only care about profits while they continue to dump toxic dispose into our rivers and overflood landfills with non-biodegradable waste. About 8000 different chemicals are used in the production of fast fashion, many of which are scientifically known to cause cancer and other such fatal diseases.