As fashion trends gain more and more popularity, and inflation continues to rise, people are continuously pressured to buy new clothes, and tend to look towards clothing at a lower price. Unfortunately, this has led to some problems.
Clothing businesses like SHEIN and Temu push out millions of products at a time, and when half of the items are not bought, they get thrown into landfills and become pure pollution. Along with this, the cause for quick trends coming and going leads to overconsumption.
While more people have turned to thrifting and/or donating, it won’t help everything. While it slightly helps with the environment, what is no donated is thrown out, leading to the same pollution as before. People who are thrifting regularly are helping, but they are also taking away from others whose only resort is to thrift due to lack of income. With donations from places like SHEIN and Temu the durability is lessened, and less people are purchasing them. This is lowering how many people thrift, and leading to more pollution.
While watching fashion videos, buying new clothes, and trying to find “your aesthetic” are all very fun, there comes a time when it needs to end. Fast fashion is fun, but in the long run it’s all just useless trends. We’re building our generation but we’re also ruining the earth for future generations. To better the earth, and to declutter your home there needs to be an end to fast fashion.
It’s hard enough to afford good new clothes to fit these trends already, and I know how appealing shopping is, but what you have and what you like is good enough. You don’t need to go get a whole closet of new clothes off SHEIN. Even if you’re donating all of your old clothes as you get new ones, it’s too much at once. And most of the time you’re donating to Goodwill, which makes more profit off their clothes than actually helping.
Turning to thrifting new clothes is a good alternative, but reselling has become a huge problem contributing to fast fashion. Going to the thrift and buying clothes just to resell at a higher price is taking away from people who can’t afford clothes from anywhere else, and is restarting the cycle of buy buy buy.
Y2K, clean girl, coconut girl, grunge, opium, and more are all trends that have come and gone and come back again. Buying clothes, getting rid of them, buying the same ones back; it’s a constant loop.
In the end, places like SHEIN and Temu are making huge profit off bad clothes, and contributing a huge addition to the landfill. Like all things, these places will come to an end. In the meantime, we must try to quicken the process.