Over the past twenty years fast fashion has spurred unbridled consumerism, with disastrous consequences for the environment and human rights. In this time period, companies like Sweden’s H&M and Spain’s Zara have gone from middle-size purveyors of inexpensive clothing to juggernauts that operate thousands of stores across the world. In the last ten years they have been joined by new entrants such as UK’s BooHoo, America’s Fashion Nova, and most notably the Chinese giant Shein, which has undergone explosive growth in the past few years. All efforts to stop them have failed. It is now time for governments to step in and regulate fast fashion the way it has regulated Big Tobacco and the automotive industry. By pumping out vast amounts of clothing in countries where labor laws are lightly regulated, fast fashion companies have become some of the worst offenders when it comes to sustainability and ethical labor practices. Shein is a particularly egregious example because its operations are centered in China, which allows it to keep its manufacturing practices completely opaque and away from the eyes of Western regulatory agencies. Meanwhile, on the consumer end, the amount of textile waste generated by the developed world has reached truly staggering amounts. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, in 2018 Americans discarded 17 million tons of textiles, most of which came in the form of trashed garments. Much hand-wringing has been done to lament this sad state of affairs, and much blame has been put on the companies themselves. Fast fashion firms have enabled the shift in consumer mentality that has turned clothes-shopping into an addictive form of entertainment, making disposability the norm. Some of the blame should also fall on fast fashion consumers who treat shopping as a competitive sport, buying and discarding clothes at a historically unprecedented rate. According to a 2019 report by the UN Alliance for Sustainable Fashion, “The average consumer buys 60 percent more pieces of clothing than 15 years ago. Each item is only kept for half as long.”
I’ve been trying my best buying responsibly sourced clothing with organic cotton and washing cold/delicate and air drying. Gotta say, the clothes are lasting a long time but they’re so damn expensive that I feel like I have to treat them with such care.
It’s hard to blame people for not wanting to spend $200 on a lifetime lasting shirt in this economy when they can get one for $10 and have it last maybe a year and just buy new clothes.
Perhaps as part of regulation, there’s subsidies for responsibly/ethically sourced clothing.
France introduced, some time back, a government credit of some kind for clothing repairs. It was a fun concept.
So what then, clothes must cost at least $xxx? And the government gets to decide what that is, either directly or through a labyrinth of new trade regulations?
A durability compliance requirement would increase the cost to enter the market and reduce competition and therefore consumer choice. Fine if you’re rich and can afford to have your clothes custom made, not so great if you have a job interview and $25 might buy you a nice enough shirt at Express. How many people are going to buy a Halloween costume if it costs $200 because it has to meet a minimum durability rating even though it’s going to be worn for ONE day?
The whole concept is elitist nonsense. Why can’t people buy bullshit clothes? God knows fashion magazine editors have their fair share.
So what then, clothes must cost at least $xxx? And the government gets to decide what that is, either directly or through a labyrinth of new trade regulations?
Nobody suggested any of that. Where did you see anybody recommend anything like that?
A durability compliance requirement would increase the cost to enter the market and reduce competition and therefore consumer choice.
People are aware that per unit costs will go back up. I’m actually not sure why you think cost to enter the market would go up—fast fashion is produced at extremely large scale, and durable clothing is usually produced at much smaller scale.
And laws like this usually have exemptions for smaller companies. Your objection has a trivial solution, you just felt like whining.
Fine if you’re rich and can afford to have your clothes custom made, not so great if you have a job interview and $25 might buy you a nice enough shirt at Express.
Thrifting aside, you can get perfectly well-made shirts from Charles Tyrwhitt or Spier & Mackay for around that price. They’ll be much better than the garbage you get at Express or Zara.
How many people are going to buy a Halloween costume if it costs $200 because it has to meet a minimum durability rating even though it’s going to be worn for ONE day?
Halloween costumes didn’t cost $200 before fast fashion, they won’t cost $200 if we suddenly start regulating fast fashion. Even if they did, you don’t need to buy a readymade costume, lots of people do DIY costumes and they tend to come out better.
The whole concept is elitist nonsense. Why can’t people buy bullshit clothes? God knows fashion magazine editors have their fair share.
It’s not because the clothes are “bullshit” in the abstract, it’s because of the extreme environmental disaster caused by the norm of buying garbage en masse.
And fast fashion also regularly violates safety standards and labor standards. They break every forced labor law they can. And it’s not an either or situation, there are companies that do none of that and still provide a solid product. And laborers tend to make shoddier products when they are forced to work, or when their piece rate is dramatically blow a livable wage. Shit, garment workers in the US working on piece rates are paid well below minimum wage in practice.
Labor and safety concerns are almost entirely irrelevant to the argument the article is making. It calls for (but doesn’t actually define) a durability standard. What it’s made of, how it’s made, and penalties for noncompliance. And also ban marketing, lol. How do you figure it wouldn’t just raise the price for clothes across the board and do nothing for the laborer or the environment? If fast fashion is all “garbage”, how do you really pin that down? How long does a shirt really need to last, and why should the government decide? The liberal in me wonders whether clothing should be considered a necessity and not taxed at all, or else at the very least public nudity should be legal.
To me it reads as “the commoners shouldn’t be able to afford so much ticky-tacky with so little money, we need to make it expensive so they can’t buy as much”. Despicable elitism on its face, and that’s the gist of an article seemingly written by a busybody who thinks they’re anointed to solve moral issues (as they judge them) by decree. The consumers are too dumb and too many, and they don’t know what’s best for them. Forget making compelling arguments on sustainability and letting voluntary action follow, something simply must be done right now, and it must be written into international trade law.
The effect on cost to enter the market should be obvious. Out of the gate you need to prepare for and demonstrate compliance. More red tape means it’s now someone’s job to interpret navigate and track that rigmarole, or pay a consultant to do it. Fast fashion giants have the legal resources to find and defend loopholes, but even a large producer might decide your market just isn’t worth entering or staying in. This wouldn’t be a first by a long shot, there’s a laundry list of companies that shun California because the state regulates everything under the sun, including sunlight itself.
In production, durability requirements mean changes to materials, tooling, training, contracts. Development cycles get longer, and designs more cautious. Costs of all the above get passed on to the consumer. To watch over it all, more permanent government asses in government seats in heated government buildings wasting taxpayer money on denier and stitch audits.
These are just some practical effects. If you actually care about fashion as an art form, you might worry how restricting the industry could stifle innovation and trends in ways that reach your ivory tower.
If this half-spun idea ever leaves the loom, I’m sure it’ll make a great case study in unintended consequences. I’ve bought like two shirts in the last decade and I hate waste, but I hate busybodies and shitty regulations way more.
It calls for (but doesn’t actually define) a durability standard.
And yet, you rejected the undefined standard because of your specific strawman of any hypothetical idea of what a standard might be.
How do you figure it wouldn’t just raise the price for clothes across the board and do nothing for the laborer or the environment?
Hang on, do you not understand what the environmental concern is here? Durability is, like, most of the environmental issue.
The liberal in me wonders whether clothing should be considered a necessity and not taxed at all, or else at the very least public nudity should be legal.
Lol, the liberal in you should go down to your local mall and see if they charge you sales tax on a pair of Levi’s. In NYS, at least, clothing purchases are only subject to sales tax if the total is above a certain amount (it was $120 a while back, it’s more now).
Most of your objections are super trivial to solve, you realize that, right? If you want to get into public policy, and not just baseless calls for anarchy, try to actually study public policy for five minutes.
Here’s an obvious and easy regulation you could envision—not necessarily the right one, not without issues, but resolves most of your objections right away. Create a private right of action, effective four years from now, for clothing that is not reasonably durable. Give whatever guidance you might give in the law creating the right of action, also allow some FTC subgroup to bring actions, let the courts work out the details at common law. Companies other than Shein and the like will probably have nothing to worry about. Parties would need to arrange a class action with mountains of evidence to ever enforce the law, so tiny companies will have especially little to worry about, and certainly never bother with any sort of compliance-checking regime. Shein and friends will change their US offerings to be somewhat less shoddy so they can avoid litigation. Big companies hate getting into this kind of litigation. They’ll find the most cost-effective way to improve their own manufacturing processes. Shit, even my libertarian friends would think that sounds like a pretty good solution.
To me it reads as “the commoners shouldn’t be able to afford so much ticky-tacky with so little money, we need to make it expensive so they can’t buy as much”. Despicable elitism on its face
you mean in your head, right? That’s obviously not what the article said at all, you literally just made that shit up and then pretended you were criticizing the argument “on its face.”
These are just some practical effects. If you actually care about fashion as an art form, you might worry how restricting the industry could stifle innovation and trends in ways that reach your ivory tower.
Again, it’s not at all difficult to write the regulation to have exceptions for cases where the lack of durability makes an artistic statement, or where it’s not feasible to achieve a desired artistic effect with a more durable garment.
If this half-spun idea ever leaves the loom,
Then maybe you’d finally find something about it worth criticizing?
