Fast Fashion Pros and Cons
What is Fast Fashion?
Fast Fashion is inexpensive clothing that is produced to mass-market retailers in response to the latest trends. Retailers like Primark, H&M, ASOS and Boohoo.com churn out millions of tonnes of clothing each year to keep up with the ‘need to be new’.
This has been growing rapidly over the last 10-20 years with globalization being at the forefront and a drive from the Millennial and Gen-Z generations obsessed with having the newest trends before they’ve even hit the store.
Fast Fashion allows us to accommodate the world's passion for fashion at an affordable price but does come at a price.
The Pros to Fast Fashion?
With living in such a fast-paced world, Fast Fashion allows for more affordable clothing. The latest trends are sold to the masses, people get what they want and not have to wait around for anything as there are now so many retailers and brands to choose from, either in-store and online, with eCommerce becoming the biggest industry on the planet as the human race moves deeper into the digital era.
With clothing becoming so cheap people can get a new outfit each weekend to go out in, sometimes even cheaper than a round of drink at your local pub! This has moved people into the habit of buying something and only wearing it once, a throwaway cutler. It’s great for someone who doesn’t have the largest income (students/the youth) as they can still enjoy the thrill of spending and getting the new things when they want, and not have to spend an arm and a leg on it, allowing them to save in other areas of life.
The Cons of the Industry
With the colossal demand for these clothes and the rate at which people want them, the increased waste from this throwaway culture, we as a species have created, means that 100 billion garments each year go to landfill in countries a lot worse off than the people buying the clothes.
Places like the Far East and Southern Asia, where huge sweats shops that have been known to exploit workers, make these clothes are on barely a liveable wage in awful conditions to get the product quickly the consumer on a mass scale. More than 1,100 people died in the garment factory collapse in Bangladesh in 2014 forcing western retail to be more transparent about their supply chain.
In early 2018 designer brand Burberry admitted to burning over £30 million worth of stock instead of selling it off cheaply to protect the band's identity. This caused controversy in the fashion industry and it really made people stop and think as to what we can do to make this more environmentally friendly and stop this throwaway culture.
What we do here at Baggy Boys Co.
If you haven’t noticed yet we’re an online retro retailer specialising in the sale of 80’s and 90’s sportswear attire. Basically, we’re second-hand clothes shop on the internet.
We source clothing from all over the world that’s been in circulation for decades from huge warehouses with millions of tonnes of clothing it in, we find what we want, spruce it up and sell it to people who either have a passion for the era’s or want something you can’t get today, a form of garment recycling.
With the Fast Fashion Industry a major contribution to pollution and worker exploitation, we are proud to be part of the stand against these corporations! Even if we are a needle in the haystack to the issue, we’re doing our bit to help fight this global crisis and getting people some groovy retro items to rock at their next gig.
