How Fast Fashion Is Destroying the Planet

By Tatiana Schlossberg

Sept. 3, 2019FASHIONOPOLISThe Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of ClothesBy Dana Thomas

There is that old saying, usually attributed to Yves Saint Laurent: “Fashion fades, style is eternal.”

Literally speaking, that actually may no longer be true, especially when it comes to fast fashion. Fast-fashion brands may not design their clothing to last (and they don’t), but as artifacts of a particularly consumptive era, they might become an important part of the fossil record.

More than 60 percent of fabric fibers are now synthetics, derived from fossil fuels, so if and when our clothing ends up in a landfill (about 85 percent of textile waste in the United States goes to landfills or is incinerated), it will not decay.

Nor will the synthetic microfibers that end up in the sea, freshwater and elsewhere, including the deepest parts of the oceans and the highest glacier peaks. Future archaeologists may look at landfills taken over by nature and discover evidence of Zara.

And it is Zara and other brands like it that have helped plant flags on the farthest reaches of the planet. In “Fashionopolis,” Dana Thomas, a veteran style writer, convincingly connects our fast-fashion wardrobes to global economic and climate patterns and crises, rooting the current state of the fashion biosphere as a whole — production methods, labor practices and environmental impacts — in the history of the garment industry.

Throughout, Thomas reminds us that the textile industry has always been one of the darkest corners of the world economy. The defining product of the Industrial Revolution, textiles were crucial to the development of our globalized capitalist system, and its abuses today are built on a long history. Slave labor in the American South supplied factories in both England, where they were notorious for child labor and other horrors, and the United States, where factory fires took the lives of recent immigrants at the turn of the 20th century. Thomas reports that there are immigrant workers in Los Angeles today who are victims of wage theft and exploitation, not to mention the Bangladeshi, Chinese, Vietnamese and other laborers who face working conditions that are at best grim and at worst inhumane. Fashion is an industry that has depended on the toil of the powerless and the voiceless, and on keeping them that way.

In one of the most powerful part