BY: Arden Goodfellow
TikTok is no stranger to fashion trends and try on hauls. Over the past year, I’ve seen my For You Page blow up with videos titled “Fall Closet Must Haves from Zara” or “Aritzia Winter 2021 Hauls” and more. Although these clothing pieces are often desirable, these trendy videos are promoting fashion brands that are terrible for the environment. Social media is now, more than ever, playing a role in consumerism, specifically fast fashion. Influencers are taking the stage on TikTok to share brands and clothing pieces they love, inspiring their followers to buy these pieces, whether they really need them or not.
WHAT IS FAST FASHION?
Fast fashion and shopping sustainably are quickly becoming hot topics in the fashion world. The fashion industry is already one of the largest contributors to the world's waste, but fast fashion takes this to the next level. Trendy looks come straight off the runway and into factories where dupes are created for a fraction of the cost while the workers are underpaid. The reason that fast fashion is so popular is because of the extremely low prices for trendy clothing pieces. It’s sometimes hard to ignore low prices, even when we are aware of the consequences of supporting these brands.
MICROTRENDS
Micro trends are one symptom of the rapidly accelerating trend cycle. These Micro trends are singular items of clothing that go in and out of style quickly, short-lived due to the acceleration of the trend cycle (Rudalevige 2021). TikTok is the perfect vehicle for trend cycle acceleration because the short-form content allows for rapid and indiscriminate consumption. “Brands use the trend-setting status of influencers to their advantage and because brands send out PR packages in one big push, the items often become microtrends, appearing everywhere all at once and then disappearing once content creators have a few solid pics” (Rudalevige 2021). Many TikTok ‘for you pages’ are saturated with hauls featuring several hundred dollars worth of clothing from fast fashion giants such as Shein, Zara, Princess Polly, and Amazon. The popularity of these videos is indicative of a larger problem of normalized overconsumption.
IMPACT OF FAST FASHION ON THE ENVIRONMENT
The fast fashion industry significantly contributes to global environmental issues, producing 10% of all humanity's carbon emissions, is the second-largest consumer of the world's water supply, and pollutes the oceans with microplastics. There is no evidence that Zara minimizes textile waste when manufacturing its products. Although Zara has set an absolute target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions generated from its own operations and supply chain, there is no evidence it is on track to meet its target. It is important to remember that brands like Zara are, at its core, fast fashion companies trying to maximize their profit. For example, Zara, on average, releases 500 new designs per week, 20,000 per year. For most retailers, it takes around 40 weeks to get items out to market, but for Zara, it can take as few as one. Wastefulness is an ineradicable feature of any business model predicated on responding to trends that quickly. “Fast fashion — which is to say cheap, disposable clothing, made indiscriminately, imprudently, and often without consideration for environmental and labour conditions by companies like Zara, H&M, Forever 21, Nasty Gal, and Fashion Nova — is a disease, and both the planet and its people are paying the price” (Thomas, 2019).
CITATIONS
Rudalevige, E. (2021, June 14). How TikTok makes fast fashion faster. Lithium
Magazine. Retrieved September 19, 2021, from
Thomas, D. (2020). FASHIONOPOLIS: The price of fast fashion - and the future of
clothes. New York City, NY: Penguin Press.
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