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< | The unseen cost on fast fashion’s price tag | >
> | The unseen cost on Fast Fashion’s price tag | | | | |
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< | -- By SkyeLee - 22 Oct 2021 | >
> | -- By SkyeLee - 09 Jan 2022 | | | | |
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< | The positive definition of ‘fast fashion’ is the production of low-cost clothing by mass-market retailers, rapidly responsive in transforming catwalk trends to high-street products to meet consumer demand. The global production of clothing has doubled in the last two decades. Its mammoth progress is attributable to the industrialisation and globalisation of the economy, enabling companies to separate processes of production and sale and diverge them into very different economies. One might also conjure up an equally valid, corollary definition that fast fashion is a highly profitable and greatly exploitative business model capitalising on society’s insatiable appetite for consumption. | >
> | The generation and rapid growth of the fast fashion industry occurred only within the past few decades, more than doubling the global production of clothing within this period. It has thrived on capitalism’s model and the internet has played a crucial role in aiding its growth, fed and refined its algorithms with consumer data points, and transmitted new forms of neural impulses on a global scale. | | | | |
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< | Politics of Disposability | >
> | Fashion’s connection to individuals’ neural networks | | | | |
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> | Fashion is and always has been intimately linked to the sensory impulse structures in the individual body. It is coloured by consumer choices, conceived as a form of self-expression influenced by one’s taste and preferences and shaped by one’s aesthetic and lifestyle. While it is a common and accessible form of everyday self-expression, fashion’s psychology has never been purely about the individual. The value of clothing to us extends to becoming reflective not only of the physical environment around us but our social ecology such as religion, class, gender relations etc. Fashion can be representative of all this, and closely tied to our psychological states such as mood as evinced by ‘dopamine dressing’. | | | | |
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< | The political economy of the fast fashion industry might be premised on disposability. It generates societal inertia from the perception that any potential benefits of intervention are outweighed by the profits generated by the status quo. This essay argues that disposability lies in both the existing perpetuation of environmental and humanitarian crises, and consumers’ lack of due regard for their data privacy. | >
> | How Fast Fashion takes advantage of the Net’s new nervous system | | | | |
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> | While the relationship between fashion and the self has long existed, the Net has placed the power to influence, control and eventually exploit it into the hands of conglomerates, notably through fast fashion’s rise. The key factor that the Net brings is interconnectivity. Through the Internet, the biological nervous system of each user and each human consciousness is connected into an external superorganism, metaphorically forming an exoskeletal new ‘nervous system’. Fashion companies can now generate and control new neural impulses transmitted through the masses. For instance, Facebook’s partnership with the fast fashion brand Zaful revealed that they kept their ad campaign running sustainably by maximising the purchase value for each customer interaction on the platform. Facebook’s true customers are not the active users on the site, but rather the advertisers utilising its network, capitalising on the interconnected superorganism to consolidate user identification with a product or aesthetic through shadow profiling, and target adsaccordingly. Companies exploit consumer desire within the wiring of our individual nervous system, and through the new nervous system of the Net, capitalise on ‘Instagram Envy’ to motivate consumption and boost profits. Hence, fast fashion companies focus more resources on cost-effective micro-influencer sponsorships, allowing them to become nodes of connection for the promotion of the fast fashion industry’s signals of control. | | | | |
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< | Unseen Costs | >
> | Facilitated by users’ callous indifference to privacy and succumbing to convenience exchanged for analytics, fashion companies have the power to instantaneously create, direct, and drive trends of desire and consumption. With the power to control what people want, and therefore how much people consume, the fashion industry holds economic power because they can create the demand and control the supply. The result is a market that is designed to maximise demand - with constantly changing trends and a focus on the next ‘new’ thing. | | | | |
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> | Physiological effects of Worker Inequalities | | | | |
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< | The design of disposability is weaved into the fabric of the fast fashion economy, and the five-dollar price tag, equivalent to a morning coffee, belies an unseen and far greater cost. Environmentally, the fashion industry is the second-highest user of water worldwide and accounts for 20% of total water waste. The textile production process produces more emissions than shipping and international plane travel together. The human cost is inextricably linked to this and reflects colonial power structures of inequity. In addition to exploitative working conditions, compensation schemes and inhumane treatment, what fabrics cannot be quickly recycled or resold is exported to developing nations. Ghana was burdened by this textile waste, and bereft of a system of recycling fibres, essentially became a dumping ground. Waste textiles overflow into the ocean when it rains, polluting beaches, threatening marine life. Landfills catch fire, generating toxic smoke. Clothing waste clogs major open drains during periodic torrential flooding, which public health officials predict to spread malaria and cholera. Fast fashion’s premise that new collections will often be based around trends means of course, that the fruits of the environmental and human labour/ suffering do not last. Devoured by the insatiable appetite for consumption, more human and environmental resources are expended to perpetuate this devastating and dirty business. | >
> | As the fast fashion industry orients itself toward the market created by this new neural network, the physiological effects reverberate globally. To adapt to the need for rapid production and turnover of clothes with high product differentiation, the fast fashion industry capitalises on existing transnational and national inequity. The increased competition raised by the new Net has also engendered a ‘race to the bottom’ in a bid for companies to find the cheapest labour and materials for most expedient production. The net allows production to be efficiently outsourced to countries where fair working laws can be overlooked. The production process can be diverged from the sale process and expedited from wealthier nations to poorer ones, broadly from the Global North to South. Bangladesh continues to be a popular producer, where despite a period of increased attention for workers’ rights, entrenched and robust worker protections are still absent. Under the false promises of decent compensation, low-skilled, long-hour labour jobs are taken up by inhabitants of impoverished rural areas of these developing countries, frequently women and children. The global network furthermore allows companies to take full advantage of marginalized and therefore, cheap, workers within communities in the Global South. Xinjiang, where the Uyghur are made forced labourers under China’s ‘re-education’ programme, is one of the most popular places for big brands to produce cotton garments. The new neural network incentivises and empowers fast fashion brands to exploit and vicariously entrench global inequalities. | | | | |
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> | Another physiological effect of Environmental Destruction | | | | |
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< | False Comfort | >
> | The environmental crises generated in their wake is further evidence of this. The fast fashion industry’s rapid renewal production cycle makes it the second-highest user of water worldwide, accounting for 20% of total water waste. The textile production process produces more emissions than shipping and international plane travel combined. The pattern of environmental harm furthermore reflects colonial power structures of inequity, as fabrics that cannot be quickly recycled or resold are exported to developing nations. Ghana was burdened by this textile waste, and bereft of a system of recycling fibres, essentially becoming a dumping ground. | | | | |
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< | Although thrift shopping has been touted as the ‘go green’ alternative, environmentalists have expressed concern over the inadvertent marginalisation caused by sustainability trends, referencing the ableist character of plastic straw bans which disproportionately impacted disabled individuals. For instance, the YouTube? trend of intentionally choosing oversized clothes to cut them up and tailor them has been criticised to take away a crucial resource for individuals who need them. Resellers also flock to thrift stores to take in-demand items and profit by marking up the price, pressuring thrift stores to price-match at inaccessible prices for individuals who need them. To put things in perspective, the shelves of Goodwill remain generously well-stocked due to continued patronage of the high street stores which end up as charitable donations. Thrifting lures shoppers with a false sense of security. It does not fill the ethical hole and is at best a band-aid solution, not resolution. | >
> | Ineffective consumer responses | | | | |
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< | Market Forces | >
> | Much like how the brain issues responses to neural signals and physiological effects, the humanitarian and environmental crises have prompted some response from consumers who, feeling complicit, have sought to mitigate the environmental footprint through ‘sustainability’ trends, such as thrifting. However, the actual effectiveness can be doubted. For instance, the online trend of cutting new garments from oversized clothes has evolved into a wasteful practice of intentionally buying oversized. Furthermore, thrifting has become a corrupted practice as resellers have flocked to thrift stores to take in-demand items and profit by marking up the price, pressuring thrift stores to price-match at inaccessible prices for individuals who need them. Ultimately, these practices have only created a false sense of morality, no more than band-aid solutions to the ethical hole of fast fashion. | | | | |
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< | The key driving force then appears to be human capitalistic habits. The industry’s awareness of this is evident. Inditex’s (the multinational clothing company that owns many household names such as Zara, Pull&Bear, Bershka etc.) marketing model specifically strays from magazine advertising and print campaigns, favouring budgeting for celebrity and influencer endorsements as well as prime locations with high street visibility.
Facebook’s partnership with the fast fashion brand Zaful revealed that they kept their ad campaign running sustainably by maximising the purchase value for each customer interaction on the platform. Facebook’s true customers are not the active users on the site, but rather the advertisers utilising its network, capitalising on the interconnected superorganism to target ads at these users. The physiology of this nervous system is wired in favour of the companies able to modify it through shadow profiling. This is only possible when the fundamental political economy in which the network operates is the disposability of personal data, supported by callous indifference to privacy and succumbing to convenience exchanged for analytics.
The interconnectedness of the web also allows for user identification with a product or aesthetic to be consolidated. A psychology study conducted in 2020 ratified the ‘Instagram envy’ hypothesis, identifying that fashion posts arouse envious feelings that motivate consumption. This explains the vested interest in continuing influencer sponsorships, and celebrities become nodes of connection for fast fashion patronage.
Will the restraining hand of government tap on the fast fashion industry’s shoulder? Within the past few years, Western governments have signalled a turn of the tide from caveat emptor to more market regulation using labour and labelling laws. In the US, the federal government has passed domestic labour laws such as the Clean Water Act, to counteract pollution caused by textile factories dumping untreated toxic wastewaters directly into waterways. In Europe, the GDPR’s rules on consumer protection against invasions of privacy caused by data breaches may impact the way companies can leverage consumers’ social media analytics, forcing a re-evaluation of business strategy and reconstruction of brand identity.
There's good material here, though it would be better if the sources were linked into the text. You are writing for the web: make it easy for your reader to find what you're relying on with a click.
What improves the draft most, from my point of view, is getting the material out of the way of your analysis. In the new nervous system there are new forms of neural impulses. Fashion, which is already very closely tied to the sensory impulse structures in the individual body, now reorients itself in globally significant ways affecting worker safety in Bangladesh, the racial oppression in Xinjiang, the microplastic plague in the deep sea, and dozens of other physiological phenomena in the "real" world. Your ideas have their primary value lifted above the details your first draft conveyed.
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