Fast Fashion: The Companies👚

Before I start on the post, I want to mention that I missed last week's post (after over 2 years of never missing one!) because I was doing a city break where I decided to skip a week because we were out and about on our holiday.   My posts may be fortnightly, depending on how busy I am.

Also, I'd like to say Happy Easter! Feel free to read my Happy Easter post (that was over a year ago!), where I talk about how to tell whether your easter egg packaging is recyclable or not and give a few statistics. 

Anyway, back to the actual post. This is basically a part two to the Stop Fast Fashion post which gave an overview to the situation - in this post I'll talk about companies that you may be familiar with which are contributing (or trying to prevent) fast fashion. The Guardian recently released an article about Shein and what they're doing, and this is what my post will be based off of. 

Shein has very recently come to the forefront of the market, but already have controversial practices, even when you take away the environmental aspects. For example, they are accused of ripping off smaller brands, the times where they put a swastika necklace on their website, or  selling a Muslim prayer mat as a decorative rug (before quickly removing them and apologising) or their suppliers terrible, sweatshop working conditions. 

Anyway, demand for their products means they produce 10,000 new products a day, which is astonishing. The process of "testing and repeating" is a method that Shein use which is basically where they produce a small batch and send it out - if it does well they basically mass-produce it, and if it does badly, they forget about it... Shein send products out to 250 countries which produces such bad product miles, without thinking about returns. Because it costs more to put a returned item back into circulation than to just throw it away, returns mostly end up in landfill.  It is one of the worse examples of fast fashion.  

However there are lots of companies who are trying to help. For example, H&M now have H&M Conscious, where they use more environmentally-friendly materials to make their clothes, and stores where you can recycle unwanted garments.   And if you bring a bag of used clothes to an H&M store they will give you a thank you voucher that gives you money off your next purchase, which is great.  Read more about that here. 

The difficulty with specifically eco-friendly fashion is that it's incredibly expensive. So, if it is something you'd be unable to afford, I'd recommend just shopping greener: in charity shops, websites where you can swap/buy clothes or making sure you don't get rid of something in a bad way.

Thank you for reading this week's post. I hope you had a good Easter, and a good upcoming week!

Violet

         xxx