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The term fast fashion has been circulating for a while now but what does it actually mean?

In short, fast fashion is the mass production of cheaply made clothing to cater to changing fashion trends. The idea is to get the newest styles made and into shops fast, encouraging shoppers to buy them fast and then throw them out…fast!

In the 1800s the Industrial Revolution brought swanky sewing machines and technology which began to move clothing production from people’s homes into factories. A bit of a game changer!

But it was in the 1960s that the fast fashion industry really took off with new faster, cheaper, technologies as well as businesses using lower cost labour overseas. Cheaper production led to ultra-low prices for the consumer and the ability to churn these products out at a very fast rate. People wanting to keep up with the latest trends meant that clothes were selling out fast encouraging people to buy quickly…. All leading to the term “fast fashion”.

Behind the scenes the fast fashion industry isn’t always glamorous! Even though the industry creates jobs for lots of people across the world, workers can be mistreated, work long hours in dangerous or unsafe conditions and can be paid as little as 60p an hour or even less for those workers who are being paid by the item they make.

Fast fashion can also have a huge impact on the environment. Firstly, it takes tonnes of energy to produce all these clothes. Most clothing is dyed to create a colour and these toxic dyes are often washed out into nearby rivers polluting the natural water reserves. And lastly, as fast fashion is not made to last, a lot of this clothing ends up being thrown away only after a couple of wears.

In fact, it is estimated that in the UK 10,000 items of clothing go to landfill every 5 minutes - that’s 2000 per minute.

Take a pair of jeans for instance. It can take around 8,000 litres of water to grow enough cotton to make a pair. On top of that, the cotton is then dyed, more often than not, with toxic dyes which can be washed out into the local water supply. The environmental impact of a single pair of jeans is so much bigger than you might think.

You may have heard the popular 3 R’s - ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ - asking us all to reduce what we consume, reuse our resources and recycle where possible. These are all important to helping us tackle the environmental issues around fast fashion.

There are several ways we can slow down fast fashion.

Where previously there was a stigma around re-wearing your clothes and shopping second-hand, they’ve now become “cool” with social media movements normalising “outfit-repeating” which is wearing an item in your wardrobe multiple times.

Upcycling, mending or customising old clothes and, renting clothes have become more popular over the past few years. More of us are embracing this “slow” approach to fashion. Even celebrities are wearing upcycled outfits on the red carpet!

The idea is that we buy fewer new items, mend and make use of what we already own and stop feeding the fast fashion monster, in order to reduce the impact on the planet. By making these changes to our lifestyle, we can reduce the 350,000 tonnes of clothes that end up in landfill every year.