The Ugly Truth of Fast Fashion

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   By Rose Graykowski, Karolina Colon & Alexa Skrivanek 

  

  Why Fast Fashion?

 In the 1990s the fashion world was changed forever by a company named Zara whose mission was to only take 15 days for a garment to go from the design stage to being sold in stores. This idea became the thriving fast fashion industry. The term “Fast Fashion” was first coined by the New York Times but is still very relevant today (Rauturier, 2020). In fact, Zara’s model has been used over and over again by other clothing companies to the point that the modern fashion cycle is only about six weeks long which means that people are constantly buying cheap clothing that will inevitably be discarded.

    The fast fashion industry is infamous for its use of sweatshops in other countries to keep profits high and prices low. The downside to this, aside from the inhumane treatment of factory workers, is the impact on the planet. This detrimental impact on the planet is what we wanted to look at more closely. For our project, we chose to look at fast fashion and its wider impacts on the environment. Generally, when fast fashion is talked about the focus is on the violations of human rights that are going on within the offshore sweatshops as opposed to the environmental impacts.

The fashion industry is responsible for a great deal of environmental damages ranging from the production of 20 percent of global wastewater and 10 percent of global carbon emissions to cutting down trees in our rainforests (UN Environment Programme, 2018). Our group wanted to bring light to a not so well known downside of the fast fashion industry.


When we started doing research for our project we started to realize that the concept of fast fashion, ie “cheap, trendy clothing that samples ideas from the catwalk or celebrity culture and turns them into garments in high street stores at breakneck speed to meet consumer demand” (Rauturier, 2020) was well known but the name wasn’t. From here we decided to take an educational approach to the topic and wanted to specifically target college students and teenagers. 

Project

    We created three different infographics to educate our audience about the dangers of the fast fashion industry. Each member of our group constructed an infographic with a specific purpose in mind. The first infographic portrays many environmental costs of fast fashion, while the second infographic provides a few fast facts about the fast fashion industry. Our third infographic provides the audience with information about how to make everyday changes in regards to shopping for clothes.


    We designed our infographics to be visually appealing and to catch the audience's attention. Visual media is engaging and can help people understand the magnitude of an environmental issue. We used data visualizations to demonstrate numerical data about the fast fashion industry (Pezzullo & Cox, 2018, p.84). Instagram was our platform of choice for presenting our infographics. Many of our Instagram followers are college-aged individuals who unknowingly support fast fashion brands. Social media is a powerful tool because it can be used to convey important messages to a broader audience compared to word-of-mouth communication. The biggest consumers of fast fashion are young people such as high school and college-aged students, so Instagram was an especially useful platform for displaying this information. Instagram allowed the audience to engage with our infographics, through the use of interactives. Not only could we see the number of views and likes, but many people also took the time to answer our polls and ask their own questions via direct message (Pezzullo & Cox, 2018, p.111). 

Goals

    The goals we set for the project consisted of educating young people about the brands they’re buying from and how it’s detrimental to the environment. Achieving this goal will engage our audience to not only know about it but also care about this issue. After posting our infographics to our personal social media accounts, we’ve accumulated the number of likes, views, and poll answers. Two of us decided to post questions on a poll through Instagram stories. They pertained to the core question if people think fast fashion is important to them and if it has environmental consequences. The number of views combined for two infographics was 517. In contrast, the number of likes on a regular Instagram post between two infographics was 88. The polls showed more people agreeing that fast fashion is an important environmental issue and that it is also harming the environment. What was discovered with the polls is that most of the people who said yes are girls while the ones who said no were mainly guys. That might be because the term “fashion” is usually associated with femininity and for most guys who don’t consider that part of their lifestyle would not necessarily care too much about this issue. The numbers say one thing, but there is still more engagement necessary for an issue so close to us. The simplicity and abstractive value that infographics contain will allow more people to be moved to understand the data with compelling connections and/or quantification illustrated within this visual interpretation of our issue (Pezzullo & Cox, 2018, p. 84).

Organization

    In tandem with the infographics, we organized our project by creating a message box. This helped us categorize the problem and give an explanation as to why it matters. Our message box includes the issue, problem, why it matters, solution, and benefit to limiting fast fashion consumption. Message boxes are a great communication tool because they can help bridge the attitude-behavior gap by providing a solution to the problem. Although many people may express interest in helping the environment, they won’t always follow-through if it’s more costly and inconvenient (Pezzullo & Cox, 2018, p.221). This is why we decided to incorporate simple solutions and guidelines for our viewers to follow.


Follow our socials: 

@karol1771

@graykowskirose

@tumbleddowntherabbithole


Click here to see infographics


Sources:

Pezzullo, P. and Cox, R. (2018). Environmental communication and the public sphere, 5th  Edition. Sage Publications.

Rauturier, S. (2020, June 23). What is Fast Fashion? Retrieved September 07, 2020, from https://goodonyou.eco/what-is-fast-fashion/

UN Environment. (2018, November 12). Putting the brakes on fast fashion. Retrieved September 22, 2020, from https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/story/putting-brakes-fast-fashion 












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