The Clothing Graveyard: Fast Fashion as a Symbol of Exploitation
- Vardui Chtrkyan
- Sep 22
- 3 min read
Updated: Sep 26
By: Angelica Geokhyan
An estimated 30% of all retail garments are never sold to the public: they are to be disposed of as they are no longer profitable (“Clothing and Textiles,” 2024). This number, along with the other endless ways the textile industry produces waste, adds up to 92 million tonnes of textile waste that ends up in landfills globally (“Clothing and Textiles,” 2024). However, not all waste goes to landfills. The fashion industry pollutes water and the atmosphere, being responsible for 20% of global wastewater and 3% of global carbon emissions (Igni, 2024). But was it always like this? To understand the undeniable role of the fashion industry in the production of global pollution, it’s crucial to assess the elephant in the room: fast fashion.
The modern-day term, fast fashion, refers to cheaply mass-produced apparel that capitalizes on short-lived popular culture trends. Although fast fashion is an issue of the 20th century, its origins in mass production far exceed the 20th century, creating nuance in the way it manifests in the current day versus the past. Historically, the mass production of goods that is typically associated with fast fashion first dug its claws into society during the Industrial Revolution, where technological advancements allowed for cheaper production costs. In order to maximize profit, people of lower social status, such as immigrants, women, and children, were hired as laborers in textile sweatshops, working long hours and low wages in dangerous, crowded conditions.
More recently, though, the 1950s-70s laid the groundwork for fast fashion to thrive. The counterculture movement of the 60s-70s in the US, with its rejection of establishment, war, and materialism, utilized fashion as means of protest, creating trends along with it (Ames, 2024). As a result, cheap clothing was “necessary” to keep up with fashion trends, and it was cheaper for producers to make clothing with synthetic fibers rather than natural materials. However, there lies a key distinction between clothing production in the 60s and 70s: production was insourced in the 60s and outsourced by the 70s (Ames, 2024). Outsourcing production meant that companies could hire workers from countries where labor and materials were cheaper and regulations were less strict, often using the same sweatshop model of production that was visible in the Industrial Revolution. By the 90s, the North American Free Trade Agreement, an “alliance” between Canada, Mexico, and the US to stimulate free trade between each nation, exacerbated the unethicality of fast fashion by allowing for the exploitation of Mexican workers and increasing income inequality between the US and Mexico (Amadeo, 2024). By the 21st century, globalization and social media have made fashion trends shorter-lived, thus harder to keep up with production-wise.
Currently, companies like Zara, H&M, Uniqlo, Forever 21, Hot Topic, Nike, Shien, Amazon, and so on, include outsourcing as a core function of their business model, no matter its ethical implications. As a result, laborers from China, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Thailand, etc, are exploited due to a lack of oversight and cheap labor costs, raising human rights concerns for the use of child labor, denied maternity leave, dangerous working hours and conditions, and so on. Not only is the exploitation itself a cause for concern, but so is the fact that developing nations face the brunt of the hazardous environmental deterioration. So much so that the driest desert in the world, the Atacama Desert, located in Chile, has mountains upon mountains of unsold fast fashion garments. Nearly 39,000 tonnes of clothing get dumped in the desert annually, consequently earning it the nickname of “The Clothing Graveyard” (Kracht, 2024).
What exactly can be done to mitigate the impact of fast fashion is widely debated upon in terms of politics, but this type of business model should not be normalized in a society that values human rights, especially not in nations where individual consumers choose which companies to buy from and support. One of the most important things to consider as an individual consumer is whether or not a certain trend aligns with one’s beliefs: fashion is a form of self-expression just as much as it is an indicator of one's values.
Works Cited
1. Amadeo, K. (2024, June 12). NAFTA pros and cons. The Balance. https://www.thebalancemoney.com/nafta-pros-and-cons-3970481
2. Ames, C. (2024, August 27). The History &Amp; Rise of Fast Fashion: From the 18th Century to Today. Cory Ames. https://coryames.com/history-of-fast-fashion/#:~:text=In%20the%201950s%20and%2060s,were%20cheaper%20and%20less%20regulated.
3. Clothing and textiles. (2024, January 11). RE:Source. https://resource.stopwaste.org/fact-sheet/clothing-and-textiles#:~:text=Environmental%20Impacts%20of%20Clothing,pieces%20of%20clothing%20per%20year
4. Igini, M. (2024b, May 30). 10 concerning fast fashion waste Statistics. Earth.Org. https://earth.org/statistics-about-fast-fashion-waste/
5. Kracht, E. (2024, April 22). How Chile’s Atacama Desert Became a Garment Graveyard - Glimpse from the Globe. Glimpse From the Globe. https://www.glimpsefromtheglobe.com/regions/latin-america/how-chiles-atacama-desert-became-a-garment-graveyard/
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