Overwhelming Waste, Modular Bodies, and the Limits of Ethical Consumption

BY KATE BRUNOTTS

Before I get on my soapbox, it’s only appropriate that I throw the first stone. I can personally attest to shopping at Uniqlo, H&M, and Forever 21 over the course of my life. I tend to draw a hard line at direct-to-consumer brands like Shein and Fashion NOVA, but under the right set of circumstances, I could definitely envision myself falling prey to their plucky marketing campaigns and unending churn of cheap clothes.

This is a huge problem and it has a name: fast fashion—a business model of replicating recent catwalk trends and high-fashion designs, mass producing them at a low cost, and bringing them to retail quickly while demand is at its highest. Fast fashion waste contributes to 10 percent of global carbon emissions1 and is incredibly wasteful in both production and consumption. We’re drowning ourselves in landfills of clothing, with 85 percent of all textiles ending up in dumps each year.

Surplus clothing is shipped off in troves to countries like Ghana, Chile, and Kenya,2 where unsold clothes slowly pile up in the likes of deserts and riverbeds. While local resellers do their best to repurpose clothing, the production of cheap clothing is only increasing, overwhelming entire communities3 with tactile clothing waste.

Most would agree that there’s little virtue in fast fashion, and yet most of us have participated in its consumption. If we’re going to have any chance at a sustainable future as it pertains to style and textiles, we must first uncover why so many of us are willing to take on this cognitive dissonance at all while the consequences of our consumption are, quite literally, piling up.

The Suffocation of Overconsumption

We live in a time when it’s perhaps easier to imagine a future of overwhelming environmental disaster than to picture world populations joining forces to address such crises head-on. And yet, we’re consuming more than ever before while using individual units of clothing for less time over the course of the garment’s lifespan.

In 2024, Americans bought an average of 53 new items of clothing per year, which is four times more than the average amount purchased in 2000. Even when purchased, clothing isn’t necessarily worn to its full capacity—it’s estimated that 65 percent of clothing is thrown away within a year of its purchase. It’s worth noting that consumption is by no means equal across demographics.4

Women are the largest consumers of fast fashion, with ages 18 to 24 serving as the highest consumers within the group. In a study conducted in Florida,5 counties with higher incomes generate more textile waste (defined as any undesirable or discarded piece of clothing or fabric) on average than counties with lower incomes, though participating in textile recycling practices is relatively evenly distributed across the two categories.

The production side of fast fashion is just as harrowing: In 2022, the U.S. Department of Labor found that 80 percent of L.A.-based garment-working contractors regularly violated minimum wage and overtime requirements. One retailer was found to pay as little as $1.58 per hour.6 While unnamed, the busted L.A. contractors provided garments to well-respected brands such as Nieman Marcus, Nordstrom, Amazon, and Lulu’s.

The biggest players in the fast-fashion industry by market share7 include Shein (50%), Zara (13%), H&M (16%), Fashion Nova (11%), and Forever 21 (6%). Other common retailers include such brands as Primark, Topshop, ASOS, Mango, Uniqlo, Boohoo, PrettyLittleThing, Urban Outfitters, and Old Navy.