Arguably no consumer goods industry benefits from our throwaway culture more than fast fashion. That’s why buying carefully, and only what we need, can be a powerful act of environmentalism. Because polyester is basically plastic, it takes years to break down. Different synthetic fibres like polyester are often blended to make fabric, making them hard to separate. So what are H&M and Zara going to do? They’re going to just keep recycling stuff. They kind of tweak things all the time anyway. They have something in red? They make it in blue. And you know, what in the end do we mostly wear? T-shirts and jeans. At any given moment of the day, half the planet is wearing jeans. The first table you see when you walk into [Uniqlo or Zara] is jeans. That’s their bread and butter—it’s like when you walk into a luxury store and you see handbags. So they’ll just keep making jeans.

Finally, we can develop a deeper connection with our clothing, to slowly but surely change the way fashion works for us – either as individuals or together.It never occurred to them because it hadn’t happened in a generation, and they’re getting clobbered with the way they set up the supply chain. Countries like Cambodia, Vietnam, and Bangladesh, were so dedicated to making all these clothes to fill that [demand for] volume. It’s a gigantic house of cards, and it’s so delicately balanced. One thing goes and it’s just all collapsing. And it’s collapsing violently. Fast Fashion’s Plastic Problem, a new report from the royal society for arts, manufactures and commerce (RSA), looks at some of the biggest online brands in ‘fast’ fashion: Asos, Boohoo, Missguided and PrettyLittleThing, analysing 10,000 recently-listed items, balanced across different product categories. It’s a cliche to say that we can’t shop our way out of a climate catastrophe but it’s absolutely true,” said Pham, the professor at Pratt. “The popular emphasis on individuals knowing where their clothes are made and who made their clothes–as ways of buying ‘better’–obscures the reality that the problems with the global fashion industry aren’t individual bad brands that just need to be called out. The problems are structural and systemic,” she said.

President Richard Nixon wore long pants and wingtips to the beach, and was soundly ridiculed for it.

Other Worlds

Much of the pain and deflation detailed here by Woolf lies in the gulf between the private pleasure of a garment and its public reception. How many of us have looked at ourselves in the mirror at home and felt delighted by a new outfit, only to have that joy punctured when we realise we are underdressed, overdressed, or somehow out of step with everyone else at an event? The feelings that result from these apparent 'fashion disasters' are awful and intimate: at once speaking to some of the deepest fears we hold about ourselves, and a symptom of the changing messages around what (and who) is considered fashionable and beautiful. Last year, with the forthcoming Strategy for sustainable textiles in mind, a large group of NGOs, including Plastic Soup Foundation, sent a joint report with recommendations to the European Commission. To put an end to the contested export of low-value discarded clothing which recipient countries can do nothing with, it primarily argued for: This might look something like: H&M pretending to be able to recycle clothing using its “Green Machine”. But they know it’ll never happen at scale, because it’s so much cheaper to landfill or burn it. Or fast fashion brands Shein, Zara and Pretty Little Thing’s new resale platforms. A new @cleanclothes report shows why we’re urging garment brands to sign a binding agreement to make up for workers’ wage losses during the pandemic. Workers are owed 11bn USD and counting! #PayYourWorkers https://t.co/O8EiGKYpIn

Recycling textiles can be difficult and expensive. Take a look at any clothing label – fibres are often so mixed up, they’ll never be separated and reused in any useful way. And again, with such large volumes, made with massive amounts of cheap materials, wastage in factories is also high.

The antidote is more conscious fashion production – and consumption

When it’s left to break down in landfills, it pollutes the air, soil, and water with plastic microfibres and hazardous chemicals. When it comes to the environmental impacts of the industry, fast fashion is often blamed. But high-end brands originate trends and generate demand for new styles, which are then mass produced by fast fashion companies for a fraction of the cost. And they’re often made in similar factories with similar conditions–and even similar materials. Giving new meaning to the phrase ‘fashion victim’, a 35-year-old Australian woman had to be cut out of a pair of skinny jeans after developing a condition called compartment syndrome. It’s not the first time someone has succumbed to a dangerous style trend: “They’ve always been around, since the Stone Ages,” says Summer Strevens, the author of Fashionably Fatal. “It’s when fashion is taken to an extreme; I call it vanity insanity.” Here are five of the deadliest fads in history. the mandatory return of containers that turn out to be filled with low-value textiles by exporters, coupled with fines; and,

Textile production generally requires chemicals which need to be diluted through washing, and eventually disposed of – making water pollution another huge issue. Look out for standards like “Oeko-Tex” that provide reassurance that health- and environment-harming compounds haven’t been used in the production of certified fabrics. 9. Growing cotton uses 18% of pesticide 25% of total insecticide worldwide We might just miss a whole season, and if we do, that’s okay. We have enough clothing out there that we don’t need to make any more clothes for decades and we’ll still have plenty to wear. They don’t even want to reveal how many clothes they actually produce each year. 100 billion pieces a year is an estimate from a decade ago, before the explosion in ultra-cheap, disposable fashion from companies like Boohoo and Shein. Did you know that? Not many people do. And that’s likely why it just keeps getting worse: it’s thought that if nothing changes, by 2050 fashion will take up a quarter of the world’s carbon budget. The oil industry has likely expected a hit on its profits coming, as much-needed climate action lowers the use of fossil fuels.So the use of synthetic fabrics is a huge part of fashion’s role in climate change. Clothing is a source of microplastics The import of discarded clothing in South America is concentrated in the Chilean harbour of Iquique in the economic free zone of Alto Hospicio. Every year 59,000 tonnes of clothing are brought here from around the world. What follows is a comparable ecological disaster. Clothing that cannot be used anymore – up to 40,000 tonnes a year – ends up in the adjacent Atacama Desert. What is notable is that many of the clothing in these dumps still have price tags. These are clothing that were not sold and were even never worn. Large fashion brands are responsible for this, but they act as though nothing happens. WILL THE EU PUT AN END TO THIS?