Sustainability and Greenwashing: Who Pays the Price for Fast Fashion?

We are obsessed with shopping. There are no excuses—no ‘I only use Shein for holidays’ or jokes about thanking the kids in India for making your Primark jumper. It’s undeniably bad and the issue appears to be people are blissfully unaware. You can tell how much society loves to consume simply by opening TikTok, “Videos tagged #haul on have been viewed more than 49bn times as of writing, and that number increases every minute” (Good On You, 2023).

Social media, however, is just the tip of the iceberg, an insane 93% of brands surveyed by the Fashion Checker aren’t paying garment workers a living wage (that’s nearly every brand you scroll past on ASOS or spot on the high street) (Fashion Checker, 2023). This article looks at how we are all suffering at the hands of fast fashion, who is to blame, and how we can help.

But what we seem to forget is the real people getting hurt by our fashion choices. Aside from making crude jokes about the matter, people seem to forget that real human beings are being exploited for their £2 PJ bottoms and the disproportionate number of women are stuck not even making a living wage due to this.

The fashion industry is horrendously labor intensive and yet women make up 80-85% of the garment industry falling victim to low wages, unsafe factory conditions, and sexual harassment and with more than half of the world's population identifying as feminists you would think we’d be doing more to help these women in developing countries instead of contributing to their pain (Robertson, 2024) (Statista, 2017).

According to The Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law “Only two percent of garment workers in the world are paid wages that cover their basic needs and up to 50% of women in the garment industry have experienced sexual harassment. Hundreds of women have lost their lives in garment factories when unsafe buildings collapsed or caught fire”.

Your everyday brit may not see the consequences of our shopping habits first-hand for a good while, but these women do, every single day.

Responsible fashion expert Lou Stokes who has over 15 years of experience in the fashion industry stated “I think it's a lot to do with greediness and I think brands need to understand that they can't keep on doing this, that they have to have some integrity and treat their workers well no matter where they are in the world and give them fair pay...they need to have a decent life and that means good working conditions, financial benefits, health...lots of these people that are working in like dyeing and tanneries, they're working with chemicals that are really damaging to their health.” It’s easy to forget the real humans behind our clothes when all we see is the end product folded neatly on a shelf or sat in an online basket. But behind every £3 T-shirt is a chain of exploitation that we keep fueling every time we choose to ignore it.

There are so many reasons to ditch fast fashion and go second-hand, and honestly, no good reason not to. A few bonuses that come with buying vintage or thrifting are:

1. You’re cutting down on waste and giving clothes a second life (instead of letting them rot in a landfill for 200 years).

2. You’re not wasting stupid amounts of water or polluting rivers with toxic dye.

3. You’re supporting small businesses or local sellers—not billion-pound brands that underpay their workers.

4. It’s way more original. Why look like every other person on your feed when you can have something nobody else owns?

5. It’s cheaper, it’s better for the planet, and it actually means something. (Tru Earth US, n.d.).