Fast Fashion: Environmental and social impact

For years, my favorite store has been Forever 21. Low prices and cute trendy clothing appealed to me. As a young adult, I could only afford clothes at bargain prices and didn’t give much thought into making an investment in terms of what I put on my body. I soon fell in love with H&M. A store who’s clothing was also cheap and trendy. They carried more professional clothing which worked as I was in college and needing clothes for interviews. Fast forward and I now have a closet of clothes made entirely out of synthetic fibers.
Retailers such as Forever 21 and H&M are known in the industry as fast fashion because of their ability to turnover new items very quickly. The clothes are cheaply made thus they are able to charge next to nothing. So as consumers, we feel like we are able to buy a lot but in actuality the price of cheap fashion is quite high.
Fifty percent of all clothing is now made from polyester. It’s the number one material found in our closets. Polyester is a synthetic fabric made from plastic. The most common form being PET, which is made from crude oil. This is the same plastic that is used in soda bottles. It’s then melted and spun into the fabric that we all know as polyester.1