While we all want to have the flashiest, most wonderfully appealing outfit in the room, the infamous practice commonly referred to as “fast fashion” has only further confirmed that notion that shortcuts to excellence are fraught with hazards. To put things in a less poetic perspective, the fast fashion mentality is one of the least responsible and least ethical movements to hit the industry.

Because of the push for getting the latest couture from the catwalk and onto store racks, the average amount of clothing purchased in the United States has quintupled from the levels of the decadent 1980s. This increase in consumption has caused a ripple effect that only bolsters the textile industries of developed nations; increasing production leads to increased production costs and increased production costs come with the drawback of requiring more raw materials. While some products can benefit from this sort of excessive production, the majority of high fashion is extremely seasonal in nature; an outfit may be stunning for no more than a few months before the new lines debut, leading to that same outfit being tossed into the closet until such time as it becomes fashionably retro, donated to a charity or is simply abandoned. The whole mess makes the idea of ethical fashion practices all the more appealing.

Beyond the horrid notion of leaving perfectly serviceable, if stylistically fleeting, clothes abandoned and unused, this expedited assembly-line has a very real and noticeable effect on the environment via increased levels of pollution and additional poundage of “textile waste.” Bearing the previously mentioned statistic about American clothing consumption in mind, the average American home generates 70 pounds of wasted clothing a year; five to six percent of the entirety of garbage comes from clothing. While donation or recycling of clothes is done by some, these responsible solutions only account for roughly 15 percent of those 70 pounds; most still winds up in a landfill or dump.

While natural materials degrade over time, a large portion of the fashion industry has cut corners in production through the use of synthetic and inorganic components and will continue to accrue in the landfills of the world. Sadly, growing landfills of unfashionable clothes are not the sole reason people need to favor ethical fashion over fast fashion. Refining raw materials into fabrics and the shipping processes used to bring them to factories across the planet are two ways airborne pollutants manifest. Campaigning for more ethical approaches to clothing production highlights the risks of toxins, pesticides and acids that slip into water supplies local to a factory or refinery; all are hazards that lead to damage marine life populations and violate the water that people use for bathing and cooking.