From September 9th to October 3rd, major fashion shows take place twice a year in New York, London, Milan and Paris. On high display, top designer brands will dazzle the world with the latest styles for next spring/summer wardrobes. The wheels of a $2.4 trillion industry are spinning again. But as quickly as dreams are spun on the runways of the world’s fashion capitols, an alternate reality, as dark as the fashion shows are bright, continues to inspire glamor and hype.

As next year’s gorgeous designs make their way down the catwalk, there’s a huge contradiction behind the curtain. Unfortunately, most people don’t know what that means.

A 2020 survey in the UK found that more than half of Gen Z, the most environmentally conscious demographic, reported buying ‘most clothes’ from fast fashion brands. Focused on Instagram and TikTok, price and convenience are key to your shopping habits. Fast-fashion companies overshadowed them, trolling the internet for indicators of the latest trends (many runway-inspired) through “search engine optimization” to produce new styles as quickly as possible. I’m here. His Shein, a fashion brand, surprises thousands of people every day.

People associate fashion with beauty, creativity, self-expression, social desirability, and more. However, the average shopper understands that each purchase accounts for his 4% of total greenhouse gas emissions, and that nearly all of his purchases end up in incinerators or landfills. Smoldering there, unaware of polluting the air. Alternatively, of his 100 billion garments produced each year, only his 1% of that material is recycled into new material.

Most shoppers know their clothes are made of highly toxic dyes and heavy metals that wash into streams, rivers and aquifers, making people and animals sick, harming ecosystems and destroying biodiversity. Alternatively, growing non-organic cotton severely depletes and degrades the soil and consumes more pesticides than any other crop.

The average person knows that the industry cuts down 150 million trees for cellulose fiber, that cattle grazing is responsible for deforestation in the Amazon, and that leather produced in the region I do not know that it is used for shoes and bags of global fashion brands.

As a March 2022 survey reported, they are unaware that their synthetic fabrics are made from petroleum. He doesn’t realize that washing them generates more than his third of the microplastics in the ocean, or that these microplastics end up in his bloodstream. At his University of Vrije in the Netherlands, researchers have found plastic polymers in the bloodstream of the vast majority of them. Half of it was his PET, a polymer found in clothing.

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Shoppers may be completely unaware of why their clothes are so incredibly cheap. That is because costs are taken from factory workers in the clothing industry. They are paid less than the Global South minimum wage. Cost of living. The buyer unwittingly supports an industry that is her second largest cause of modern slavery, including child labor.

Most major industries are regulated. For example, the automotive industry is regulated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, as well as local jurisdictions such as the California Air Resources Board. As another example, the food and agriculture industry is regulated by the US Department of Agriculture. But the fashion industry, he one of the largest manufacturing industries on the planet, is almost completely unregulated.

Because of this, brands had no real incentive to change. But the price of fast fashion is too high. Accountability and systemic change are critical to reducing the irreversible footprint this industry is making on the planet.

Hopefully that’s about to happen.

Earthday.org and its campaign, Fashion for the Planet, are supporting the Fashion Coalition’s legislation in support of the Fashion Sustainability and Social Accountability Act (the Fashion Act), which was introduced into the New York State Legislature in January. Part. For the first time, the fashion industry will be forced to account for emissions, water and plastic use, chemical management, supply chain mapping and social due diligence disclosure. Create a coherent framework and vision for the transition to a sustainable sector of the economy, along with environmental standards.

Given the almost limitless destructive power of this industry, it’s time to send the message that ‘fast fashion’ is ‘out of fashion’.

Directed by Sherry Rogers Earthday.orgA global campaign to redesign the fashion industry and reduce its impact on the planet.