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How To Talk About Fast Fashion
Jade Taylor is a tireless warrior against overconsumption and fast fashion. Here is her best advice on how to talk about fast fashion – with friends and unknown persons alike.
Getting into reselling radicalized Jade Taylor to see the realities of the fashion industry. She started asking why the thrift stores were always so full and what would happen to all unbought donations. She became committed to keeping as much clothing out of the landfill as possible. Divesting from fast fashion is a lot of things for her: it’s climate justice, it’s a vehicle for global class consciousness, it’s taking a stand for ethical labor practices, Jade says.
Impressed by Jade’s tireless work for a more ethical and sustainable style, we contacted her to learn more.
Why should we not buy fast fashion?
There are so many reasons to avoid fast fashion. For starters, our planet can’t sustain our current levels of consumption. Something has to give, and if we don’t slow down, the habits we enjoy will be ripped away by planetary collapse.
The way that we consume clothing in the modern day is completely unprecedented. We buy, on average, five times more clothing now than we did in 1980. That’s approximately 68 garments a year, and your average garment is worn about 7 times before it’s discarded. Clothing used to be an investment, something often crafted by someone in your community and passed on to your children. People had fewer, higher-quality garments. There were days when an outfit was the most expensive thing people generally owned! Corporations have taught us to see clothing as disposable for their own benefit and these are habits that cost human lives. Just look at the Rana Plaza collapse that happened in 2013.
We shouldn’t buy fast fashion because class consciousness is a global phenomenon. There is no conscionable defense of a system in which we, as consumers in the global north, regularly enjoy goods and services only made possible by the suffering of people in the global south.
How do you define fast fashion?
Fast fashion is a business model that refers to the speed between a garment’s conceptualization and when it hits the shelves (or the online storefront). Fast fashion compresses the production process into a fraction of what it once was with the aim to give customers the trendiest styles as quickly as possible. It’s a common misconception that fast fashion has to be cheap –it doesn’t. Fast fashion can come at any price point. Higher-priced brands that people may or may not realize are fast fashion include Urban Outfitters, ZARA, and H&M.
It is true, however, that fast fashion is generally produced as cheaply as possible. Corners are cut at every step of the process to generate the most profit possible. Fast fashion companies use cheaper materials and skip once-integral steps of garment design, such as fittings and pattern gradings for plus sizes, but the easiest corner to cut is in labor, hence why we have people enslaved in sweatshops sewing SHEIN dresses. Any brand offering new styles daily, weekly, or monthly falls into this category.
How to start a conversation about fast fashion?
Conversations about fast fashion have to be started somewhat intuitively, in my experience. That is to say, you need to tailor your approach. Fashion - and consumption in general, actually - is a rather touchy topic. What we buy has become synonymous with our identity, so if you go about these discussions in the wrong way, people can take it really personally. The thing that works best is finding an angle that a person can relate to. Some folks respond best to approaches that highlight the plight of garment workers or the damage fast fashion does to the planet. Other people already want to stop buying fast fashion but they don’t know where to start. Oftentimes, people have questions that lead into other facets of the conversation. The most important thing I’ve learned, though, is that you need to start these discussions empathetically if you want to make an actual impact on people!
What are the most powerful arguments to convince people to stop buying fast fashion?
A common retort I hear is, “Well, so what? Everything else is bad, too. Our phones are made of cobalt mined with slave labor, Amazon warehouse workers urinate in bottles, and I’m suffering at my job, too! Why should I care?” and it’s like, you’re so close to getting it! So many things are bad. So many people ARE suffering, but the greatest advantage that the powers that be have lies in your apathy. If we don’t care, then nothing will ever change.
That’s why the most powerful thing you can do is to really show people the problem. That is why documentaries like The True Cost (2015) and Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion (2024) are so effective. They dig deep and actually show their viewers footage of the massive textile landfills in places like Ghana and Chile. They feature one-on-one interviews with people that work in the industry and allow the audience to really put a face to the suffering.
I strongly believe that people are inherently good and inherently sympathetic towards others. I also believe that we live in a system that strongly encourages a sense of rugged individualism and material goods over human lives. The most powerful arguments are the ones that deconstruct the ways in which we have been manipulated by corporations into believing there’s nothing we can do but continue to give them our money.
What are the most common counter arguments you see and hear?
Here are the five most common that I encounter:
1. “If we stop buying fast fashion, then those garment workers will be out of jobs!” is one that seems noble on its face, but is deeply insidious as it is never paired with actual advocacy. It only comes from folks uninterested in improving garment workers’ conditions. People are dying for fast fashion. Not to mention, this argument imagines a fictitious happy worker who desperately needs their fast fashion factory job, which completely ignores the reality of how many workers are forced to be there – such as Robin, who had his passport stolen from him.
2. “There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism.” Sure, but shouldn’t that motivate you to consume as little as possible, instead of to consume as much of the least ethical option as possible?
3. “Sustainable brands don’t cater to plus sizes!” Not only do size-inclusive sustainable fashion brands exist, they also desperately need support. The Curvy Fashionista publishes lists of indie brands that cater to plus sizes regularly, and plenty of size-inclusive brands actually have sizes beyond that of even what fast fashion retailers offer. Some of my favorites are Loud Bodies, a brand that creates dreamy, romantic garments in sizes up to a 10XL and does custom sizing for free, and Gloomth, a brand that specializes in “victorian gothic” style dresses up to a 5XL.
Not to mention, a lot of fast fashion brands are phoning in their pattern grading for plus sizes anyway. It’s much harder to reach out to, say, a company like Fashion Nova to let them know that their skirts look totally different on a person who wears plus sizes versus a person who wears straight sizes than it is to reach an indie brand. Indie brands are much more likely to take custom sizing requests and to listen to your feedback. When you engage with a sustainable fashion brand, you’re usually participating in an actual community. Sustainably-made garments are much more likely to actually fit you.
4. “But I can’t tell which brands are ethical and which ones aren’t!” This is by design, and it does suck! Greenwashing is a beast, but there are lots of ways to figure out which companies are being genuine and which ones are liars. For starters, the service Good on You is a great way to check out the ethics and sustainability of various brands. There are also lots of certifications that companies can obtain to show you that they’re at least trying. I’m actually working on a series right now designed to teach people how to spot greenwashing.
5. “The blame shouldn’t be on me, the consumer! The blame should be on corporations instead!” Well, here’s the thing. Corporations developed propaganda convincing you to absolve yourself of “individual sin” for contribution to climate change whilst also propagandizing you into mindless, constant consumerism via “retail therapy” and hauls so that you’d, ultimately, do nothing about any of it. They trained you into apathy by convincing you that there was nothing you could do about it, so you might as well do whatever you want.
Thus, consumers continued to buy their products whilst shouting, "you can't blame individuals, blame corporations!" and, predictably, nothing happened to these corporations because their bottom line wasn't affected! Corporations don't do *anything* that doesn't make them money. Our money is the most powerful tool that we have, and as a collective, we can exert serious power over corporations by withholding our hard-earned income. Corporations do not want us to realize our collective power. You should be sick and tired of seeing your money leave your community, the working class, and further line a billionaire's pockets.
(Here's an interview with journalist J.B. MacKinnon discussing the impact of such consumerism on the environment.)
Do you ever get tired of talking about these things only, with people whom you do not know?
Admittedly, yes. I go through periods of motivation to have these conversations and periods of withdrawal and exhaustion. I have the same conversation over and over with different people every single day. It’s nice when people approach it with genuine curiosity and a desire to learn, but unfortunately, a lot of people don’t do that. I’ve been called slurs for suggesting that people shop less. People make a lot of assumptions about me, too – namely that I’m able-bodied and wealthy, when the reality is that my position on fast fashion and consumerism is informed by my own personal struggles with being a disabled poor person. This is why I shake my head at the idea of someone being so poor that they have “no choice” but to buy fast fashion. I wasn’t doing SHEIN hauls when I was homeless. I wasn’t buying any new clothes at all!
What keeps me going are the people that reach out to me on occasion just to tell me that my content helped reshape their relationship with their clothes. I don’t say that to toot my own horn, really – my friends say I have some of the worst imposter syndrome they’ve ever seen. It’s just that it’s really easy when you get so much negativity for your work to feel like you’re not making a difference, so the supportive messages that I get really do mean a lot to me. I read each and every one of them. They remind me that education is really important. Knowledge is power, and people can’t do better if they don’t know better. If my content reaches 1,000 angry people and one person who resonates with it, then creating it was worth it.
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