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This article provides background information about the causes and effects of "fast fashion."

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Fast Fashion & Environment - Lower Lexile

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All the important definitions in 1 place!

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27 Ethical and Sustainable Fashion Terms You Need to Know

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We’ve created this super ethical and sustainable fashion glossary so you can navigate the responsible fashion world with ease.

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If you think fast fashion is bad, check out SHEIN

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Three years ago for International Women's Appreciation Month, we highlighted " 47 Badass Women of Color Influencers Unapologetically Changing the Landscape of Sustainable Fashion " for the largest roundup of BIPOC change agents in the ethical fashion space. We are finally back for another historical roundup! This year to kick off September Fashion Month - we are sharing 55 Black fashion designers and craftsman phenoms who deserve to be recognized, honored and supported!

For many years now, BIPOC/ WOC roundups (often narrated by white women) had only a small percentage of Black designers and often times repurposing the same 4 - 5 well known brands. And as much as we love accessories (perhaps even more than clothing garments), Black designers featured in these round-ups often focused on handbag, hat and jewelry brands. (Although we couldn't resist featuring just two accessory brands due to their powerful design innovation). THERE ARE TOO MANY AMAZING BLACK SUSTAINABLE FASHION (GARMENT) DESIGNERS THAT NEED TO BE CELEBRATED! Mainstream sustainable fashion brands and discourse have preserved white views and power through appropriation and intentional motives of Black invisibility. So for the past five years - MelaninASS has bookmarked the work of over 50 Black designers to share NOT during Black History Month or even Earth Month. We were intentional about sharing this feature for September's Fashion Month to honor these richly melanated artists who deserve to be recognized during a time when "trends" are created, lack of diversity is debated and ethical standards are increasingly becoming topics of discussion.

Black designers spanning the globe have been Vanguards in style, innovation and regenerative production as stewards of environmental, social and cultural justice. These designers represent the diasporic spectrum where sustainability is a hybrid of technology and art for fashion-forward solutions. With designs ranging from repurposed "trash" and plant-based fibers to independent and ethical manufacturing, check out these 55 incredible design engineers:

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55 DOPE Black Sustainable Fashion Designers That Are The True Vanguards Of The "Ethical" Movement - melaninASS.com

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Three years ago for International Women's Appreciation Month, we highlighted " 47 Badass Women of Color Influencers Unapologetically Changing the Landscape of Sustainable Fashion " for the largest roundup of BIPOC change agents in the ethical fashion space. We are finally back for another historical

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Read this Teen Vogue article about a California law aimed to uplift the workers who make our clothing.

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This Bill Could Change Fast Fashion for the Better

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Get into California’s Garment Worker Protection Act.

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This Vogue Magazine article describes Nike's new line of sustainable fabrics

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First came the sports jerseys and sneakers crafted from recycled waste plastics. Then came the eco swimwear collections, and pledges to use only renewable energy and reduce its shipping emissions. Now, Nike has gone one further in its sustainability agenda with its "Move to Zero" campaign - a commitment to reduce the American sportswear giant's carbon emissions and waste to zero.

"We see climate change as a threat to the sports we love to play and watch," said Virginia Rustique-Petteni, senior director of global sustainability engagement at Nike, speaking after a round-table discussion last week, during which Nike announced its new initiative to reduce its impact on the planet in tandem with Climate Week. Surrounded by walls stacked with the latest running wares, Rustique-Petteni - along with Noel Kinder (Nike's chief sustainability officer), Golnaz Armin (senior design director in sportswear) and Michelle Warvel (vice president for direct services and experiences) - debated the need for sustainable innovation in sportswear at the live-streamed event. "Making real progress on climate change will require the industry coming together," she said.

Move to Zero is Nike's most ambitious undertaking to date. It's the first time all aspects of Nike globally have been aligned with one clear planet-saving mission. "We're pursuing science-based goals to aggressively reduce our carbon footprint and are innovating to reduce waste," says Rustique-Petteni. Tying it up under this one broad-reaching initiative is "really about making the statement of future commitment and recognising that our brand can act as a catalyst for change," said Kinder.

Part of this commitment involves switching to 100 per cent renewable energy by 2025, through partnerships with factories utilising rooftop solar power units in Vietnam, China and Indonesia. Nike will also overhaul its manufacturing processes, fabric production and reduce the size of its cardboard boxes significantly, which reduces the need for tissue paper and excess wrapping to fill out the box.

By the end of 2021, Nike will completely eradicate single-use plastic bags in all its stores. Third-party carbon offsetting programmes, where Nike will pay for the planting of trees, will also help to reduce overall emissions. "The systems are complex, but we know we can't just wait for solutions - we have to create them," said Rustique-Petteni, of this multifaceted approach. It's now easier than ever to shop more sustainably with Nike; an online badging system enables buyers to identify which products contain more than 50 per cent sustainable fibres. Customer communication is key.

Founded in 1964 in Oregon, Nike has long been ahead of the curve in terms of sustainability. In 1992, it shifted from using petroleum-derived glues to water-based adhesives to stick its rubber soles onto sneakers; 10 years later, it switched to using a more environmentally friendly rubber for all its soles, which contained 96 per cent fewer toxins. It was also the first clothing company to publish a corporate and social responsibility report - way back in 2001. But today, against the tangible effects of climate change, these commitments are more important than ever. "We want to accelerate progress by sharing the work we're doing to design better products for today and tomorrow by changing how we make them, deliver them and take them back for another life," said Rustique-Petteni.

Nike hopes to use its influence to force wider change. With annual revenues totalling $37.4 billion (£29 billion), some 76,000 employees and wares for sale in 170 countries worldwide, if a brand as vast as Nike can achieve its eco targets, then any label can.

Pressure on the fashion industry to respond to its environmental impact continues to grow. It's the second most polluting sector after oil. And Nike knows that sportswear in particular is one area that needs to innovate. Yoga leggings, gym tops and running shoes are all traditionally crafted from sweat-wicking polyester and nylons, which are man-made and use petroleum to create. They also release micro-fibres of plastic when washed, which end up in the ocean. Over the last few years, as the world has honed in on the plastic problem, countless brands from Adidas and Stella McCartney to smaller independent labels such as Prism and Now_Then have unveiled swim collections crafted from recycled ocean plastics. Nike is no exception; the brand has diverted 7.5 billion water bottles from landfill since 2010.

Recycling plastics into fibres comes with its own problems, however: garments can't then be recycled further, proving how complex this path to sustainability can be. As part of Move to Zero, Nike will commit more resources to trying to close this loop. "We're exploring a number of new materials and technologies that are lower-impact, longer-lasting and more easily recyclable," said Rustique-Petteni.

The Move to Zero panel would ordinarily have taken place in New York; owing to Covid-19, Nike switched the discussion to a digital format, with Rustique-Petteni, Kinder, Armin and Warvel each sitting socially distanced around a table. Yet the backdrop of the global pandemic only heightened the urgency of this initiative, according to Kinder.

"There's the phrase, 'Never waste a good crisis,'" he said. "Climate change has been so front and centre... during the pandemic, whether it was the really visceral experience that many people around the world had during lockdowns - with clear skies, or skies choked with smoke from forest fires. It's really brought home the tangibility and indirect impact of climate change," he said. "People care about this in a way that they never have before. The quantitative part [for us now] is holding ourselves accountable to measurable progress."

More from British Vogue...

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Nike Is Grasping The Sustainability Nettle With Its "Move To Zero" Campaign

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British Vogue speaks to those leading Nike's sustainability drive to understand how the sportswear giant is working towards greener practices. Its Move to Zero campaign aims to offset carbon emissions and reduce waste to zero.

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This is a page from NIKE's website that explores their climate commitments. Can we trust it? Are they doing enough?

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We're committed to a better tomorrow for all athletes. Move to Zero is our journey toward zero carbon and waste to help protect the future of sport.

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This TED Talk describes how she ended her relationship with the toxic fashion industry

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I Broke Up With Fast Fashion and You Should Too  | Gabriella Smith | TEDxWynwoodWomen

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This Youtube video explores how Gen Z is turning to thrifting to solve the problems created by the fast fashion.

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Costs of fast fashion fuel a rise in thrift shopping

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In the garment industry, stories about workers who barely eke out an existence on "starvation wages" are legion: Factory workers in New Delhi often describe living in makeshift hovels "barely fit for animals." A young woman from Myanmar might wrestle with the decision to feed her children or send them to school. In Bangladesh, sewing-machine operators frequently toil for 100 hours or more a week, only to run out of money before the end of the month.

Workers have demanded higher pay in all those countries, of course, sometimes precipitating violence between protesters and police. Companies in general, however, have preferred to sidestep the issue altogether. In fact, no multinational brand or retailer currently claims to pay its garment workers a wage they can subsist on.

To be fair, defining a "living wage" can be a tricky business, one that requires some complex mathematics. Even within the same country, the minimum income a worker requires to afford basic needs - food, shelter, clothing, medicine - can vary wildly from one locale to another.

Plus, as brands are wont to remind people, most of them don't own the factories that produce their clothes, meaning they neither pay for the garment workers' wages nor determine what those wages are.

So when H&M declared in November 2013 that it would deliver a "fair living wage" to more than 850,000 workers across 750 factories by the end of 2018, the announcement was nothing short of a bombshell.

As the world's second-largest apparel company - after Inditex, which owns Zara - H&M said it felt a sense of "shared responsibility" when it came to persistently low wages, an issue as endemic to the global garment industry as unrelenting hours, unsafe environments, and rampant verbal, physical, and sexual abuse.

H&M makes its famously cheap-chic apparel and footwear at about 1,900 independent suppliers around the world, often in the aforementioned low-cost countries.

"It has always been our vision that all textile workers should be able to live on their wage," it said in a statement then. "We believe that the wage development, driven by for example governments in some countries, is taking too long, so we want to take further action and encourage the whole industry to follow. With size comes responsibility, and we have the ability to contribute to change."

Its detractors were skeptical, particularly when no benchmark figures were forthcoming, but there was no reason to believe that H&M wasn't in earnest. Even the acknowledgement that workers needed better wages, as one campaigner told me in 2013, was "a vital step."

By 2017, however, H&M's language regarding its living-wage strategy took a slight turn. The 2018 goal was to have "improved wage management systems in place" at suppliers representing 50 percent of its product volume.

Workers' rights groups found H&M's "less ambitious course," along with the continued lack of specific benchmarks as it approaches its self-imposed deadline, troubling. In addition, whatever scant updates H&M released only served to bolster the impression of the brand as "notoriously opaque."

"A number of elements in those updates seem to be generalist, not concrete enough, and to a certain extent, immaterial or irrelevant to the question: Well, as a result of this, are workers producing clothes for H&M getting a higher salary, yes or no?" says Ben Vanpeperstraete, lobby and advocacy coordinator at Clean Clothes Campaign, an alliance of labor unions and non-governmental organizations in Amsterdam. "And that's the crux of the question. Everything else is relatively irrelevant fluff."

"As a result of this, are workers producing clothes for H&M getting a higher salary, yes or no? And that's the crux of the question. Everything else is relatively irrelevant fluff."

H&M certainly doesn't view itself that way. "We have always been clear on what our goal is; to set the foundation and mechanisms needed for fair living wages to be paid by suppliers," says Cecilia Tiblad Berntsson, the firm's social sustainability manager. "We have an ongoing dialogue with stakeholders and report annually both to stakeholders and media about the activities and actions within the fair living wage strategy."

2018, she adds, will mark the "first milestone" in an overarching strategy to address the issue. H&M's focus may be redirected to "where the local need is greatest and where there is a possibility to scale up effectively," but the scope of its ambition hasn't changed, Berntsson says.

To be sure, the retailer has placed itself in the crosshairs of a contentious issue. If the intricacies of a living wage weren't enough to grapple with, there is also the notion of the minimum wage - that is, the lowest wage that a country's local or federal government says employers are legally bound pay their workers.

Not only does a country's minimum wage rarely square up with the concept of a living wage, but it can also differ by orders of magnitude.

In Sri Lanka, for instance, the basic pay averages 13,500 rupees ($197) per month, yet workers interviewed by campaigners from Labour Behind the Labe l in 2016 said they would require at least 33,000 rupees ($481) to support their families. The same group queried workers in India who were earning an average of 6,284 rupees ($92) per month. To make ends meet, those same workers said, they would need 13,000 rupees ($190), if not more.

In Sri Lanka, for instance, the basic pay averages 13,500 rupees ($197) per month, yet workers said they would require at least 33,000 rupees ($481) to support their families.

Brands can sometimes use this lack of agreement over calculations as a way to stall efforts at pursuing living wages, according to Dominique Muller, director of policy at Labour Behind the Label, a not-for-profit organization based in the United Kingdom.

Furthermore, it's in the interest of governments to keep the minimum wage low, in part because they don't want brands to abscond to other countries in pursuit of cheaper labor.

"There's a lot of pushing by brands to make sure that not only the government keeps wages low but also the supplier keeps wages low," Muller says. "And then the suppliers and the industry associations will say to the government, 'Look, you can't increase wages because then we wouldn't get the orders from the big brands.'"

Even within the same region, brands can play factories off each other, says Judy Gearhart, executive director of the International Labor Rights Forum, a human-rights organization based in Washington, DC.

"If one factory owner agrees to produce jeans for $2, then another can't charge $2.50 or they'll lose business," she says. "In a sense, we are all fueling the race to the bottom, but it's the largest, most successful brands that are driving themselves and the competition the hardest."

Occasionally, workers will score a minor victory and minimum wages will creep up. But even an uptick of 77 percent - something that occured in Bangladesh a few years ago - is only a nominal one, Vanpeperstraete says.

Despite the appearance of progress, it's important to keep in mind that Bangladesh's wage increase was "also against an inflation of 12 percent a year, and the last revision was five years before that," he says. "Consumer inflation will just eat it up again, so there are no real gains."

To promote real change, a living-wage benchmark remains an indispensable tool, Gearhart says. "A living wage benchmark quantifies what workers need to live decently, so that they can support a family above the poverty line and still be able to have some discretionary spending and the ability to save," she says.

The power brands wield over their suppliers can be oppressive to the point of tyrannical. And even so-called "codes of conduct," those legalese-adjacent blocks of text that tout a company's dedication to ethical labor practices, are rarely the talisman against supply-chain impropriety that brands make them out to be.

"The proponents of codes of conduct have not gathered or published quantitative reports about their impact on workers' wages, hours, accidents, or ability to form unions."

"The failure of codes of conduct to ensure workers' rights has been robustly documented, with several phenomenal catastrophes - the Ali Enterprises fire in Pakistan, the Tazreen Fashions fire, and Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh - occurring in factories that had been certified and/or inspected and approved for code compliance multiple times by multiple actors," Gearhart says. "Additionally, the proponents of codes of conduct have not gathered or published quantitative reports about their impact on workers' wages, hours, accidents, or ability to form unions."

At best, codes of conduct are a feint, Vanpeperstraete says. At worst, they're a figment of someone's fever dream.

"Lots of codes of conduct talk about a living wage and we have no evidence of factories paying a living wage; lots of codes of conduct talk about right of workers to join or form a union of their own choosing and that rarely happens," he says. "These codes of conduct are more about allaying the concerns of consumers than implementing these rights in the supply chains of brands."

In some cases, codes of conduct might be little more than offhand suggestions.

Just last month, Arcadia Group, the operator of Topshop, Miss Selfridge, and Dorothy Perkins, told its factories that it would pay them 2 percent less on all forthcoming orders because it was performing under par, which it blamed on a shifting retail landscape fueled by online upstarts like Missguided and Boohoo.

"The fact that a brand has the power essentially to say, 'Well, we've got these contracts agreed but we want you to provide it to us with this discount,' is quite significant," Muller says. "But it happens all the time: Brands on the one hand puff up their corporate social responsibility and on the other hand, when it suits them, do the opposite in terms of producing standards."

"Brands on the one hand puff up their corporate social responsibility and on the other hand, when it suits them, do the opposite in terms of producing standards."

But brands have an imperative, Muller says, if not a moral one based on the UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights, then a legal one in terms of modern slavery laws.

Meanwhile, the yawning divide between the haves and the have-nots is only becoming wider.

Billionaire wealth has soared by an annual average of 13 percent since 2010 - six times greater than the wages of regular workers, which have risen by a yearly average of only 2 percent, according to Oxfam International, which published its latest report ahead of the World Economic Forum summit in Davos, Switzerland, last month.

Of the 2,043 dollar billionaires worldwide, nine out of 10 are men, a fact worth mentioning because a vast proportion of garment workers - 80 percent - happen to be women.

"Economic rewards are increasingly concentrated at the top," Oxfam says. "It takes just over four days for a CEO from the top five companies in the garment sector to earn what an ordinary Bangladeshi woman garment worker earns in her whole lifetime."

As is the case with most businesses, it's the smaller, nimbler companies that have the drive and wherewithal to innovate when it comes to better wages for workers.

Some brands, like Fair Indigo and Raven + Lily, might choose to collaborate with worker-owned cooperatives.

"In this way the workers are really setting their price for the garments in the way that is economically sustainable for them," says Robert Behnke, co-founder and president of Fair Indigo.

Others might take advantage of nascent mechanisms such as Fair Trade U.S.A.'s apparel program in North America or the Fairtrade Foundation's Textile Standard in Europe.

Patagonia was one early adopter of the Fair Trade standard, beginning with the launch of 11 Fair Trade-certified women's products in 2014. Currently, the outdoor-apparel brand pays a premium on some 200-plus men's, women's, and children's products. The extra money goes directly to the workers who made the garments, and they form a committee that decides how to spend it.

"In essence, when you purchase a Fair Trade-certified product, it's a guarantee that it was traded in a more ethical way and really that boils down to safer working conditions, improved livelihoods, and protections for the planet," says Maya Spaull, senior director of Apparel and Home Goods at Fair Trade U.S.A. "So that's what's really behind that seal you see on Fair Trade products."

"In essence, when you purchase a Fair Trade-certified product, it's a guarantee that it was traded in a more ethical way."

But even when given the opportunity to promote living wages, brands and retailers can sometimes be willfully obtuse.

When Continental Clothing, a London-based wholesaler of blank garments, launched a pilot line of certified-organic T-shirts and hoodies with a built-in price premium for workers in India, for instance, the concept failed to "take off like crazy," according to Mariusz Stochaj, the company's head of product and sustainability.

The premium, which is similar to the one found in the Fair Trade system, isn't much - about 10 pence (16 cents) for a T-shirt and 54 pence (79 cents) for a hoodie. But the idea is that this amount gets passed along the value chain, "from the factory through to the retailer without being marked up, ensuring that the small additional cost at the point of sale is returned to the workers in its entirety," says Stochaj.

Some of Continental Clothing's customers were welcoming of the idea, Stochaj says; others were wary of attracting unwelcome questions.

"It's the same with organic cotton or any other sustainable practices where people will say, 'Why haven't you done it before?' or 'If it's such a small premium to pay for such a big difference to those people, why don't you just absorb it within your own profit margins?'" Stochaj says.

"People will say, 'Why haven't you done it before?' or 'If it's such a small premium to pay for such a big difference to those people, why don't you just absorb it within your own profit margins?'"

But paying a living wage can have immediate, tangible benefits, something Stochaj discovered in the two years the "Fair Share" project has been brewing. At the factory where the scheme is being piloted, absenteeism has plummeted. And recruiting new workers has never been easier.

"We have basically people on a waiting list waiting for vacancies, which we've never had before," he says.

Perhaps the larger question is whether consumers even care about workers receiving a living wage. And until they do, most brands and retailers won't.

"For most brands this is not a priority by itself," says Adheer Bahulkar, a partner in the retail practice of A.T. Kearney, a global strategy and management consulting firm. "Because while more than two-thirds of consumers say that they want better living conditions for the workers, less than half of the same consumers are actually willing to pay more for their purchases."

And therein lies the rub.

"Even with brands that have the best of intentions and want the triple bottom line of environmental, human, and economic well-being, economic well-being ends up trumping the need for environmental and human wellbeing," he says. "Consumers have basically reset what they expect to pay, and this is putting more pressure on brands to either find ways to lower prices - and hence pay lower wages - or lose market share."

But consumers wouldn't have to pay much more, if anything, for their togs, activists say. After all, a garment worker's wage is only 1 to 3 percent of the total cost of most clothing, according to the Clean Clothes Campaign.

Which is to say, if brands wanted to pay their workers a living wage today, they could. In December, Labour Behind the Label noted that it would cost H&M only 1.9 percent of the $2 billion it made in 2016 to pay all its Cambodian workers the additional $78 per month they would need to achieve a living wage.

To approach the problem from a different angle, H&M would only have to reallocate one year of its annual advertising budget to muster up living wages for its Cambodian workers for six and a half years, the group says.

One problem is that most businesses still operate in silos where the number crunchers and the do-gooders are entirely divorced, Vanpeperstraete says.

"In clothing, the people buying it, the buyers, are considered the people who actually determine the margin of that specific organization - they determine profitability," he says. "That results in an internal hierarchy of a company where the buyers are already more important than the CSR people because the buyers are making the money and the CSR people are spending the money. So who gets the last word?"

But what it all boils down to, he says, is the abundance of political will.

"Companies can be extremely efficient organizations when it comes to achieving specific goals, but only if they're set on doing so."

"Companies can be extremely efficient organizations when it comes to achieving specific goals, but only if they're set on doing so," says Vanpeperstraete. So many brands, he notes, laud their ability to deliver "ripped from the runway" looks at mass-market prices, with little turnaround time. "If they would have the same commitment to paying living wages, then that would probably happen, not necessarily overnight but in a very short time span," he adds.

H&M, with its pledge in place, yet nebulous results, exists in a liminal, in-between space. "H&M has at least had the audacity to say, four years ago, 'In five years time, workers will have a living wage,'" he concedes. "So they're sort of half there on the political will. But I think in implementation we don't necessarily feel yet or have enough evidence to believe that this is carried through in the way that the organization works."

Yet the retailer's atypical modus operandi might also be the key to its success. Unlike most of its high-street brethren, who flit from factory to factory while jostling for room on the production line with dozens of other brands, H&M maintains what it calls "strategic partnerships" with suppliers that provide 100 percent of its products for five years at a time.

In other words, it has leverage, which it can use to create - and sustain - meaningful improvements in a way that few brands can.

"H&M is in a crucial position to do stuff because it has those long-term relationships and those large buying volumes with a lot of factories," Vanpeperstraete says. "If H&M calls a factory owner, they'll listen. People pick up the phone for H&M."

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Why Is It So Hard for Clothing Manufacturers to Pay a Living Wage?

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H&M promised to make sure the people who make the company's clothes can live on their pay, but the benchmarks have shifted.

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this infographic teaches us about the important term greenwashing

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The fashion industry is responsible for 8-10% of global emissions - and British shoppers buy more clothes than any others in Europe.

Now, some UK brands are being investigated over claims about the sustainability of their fashion lines.

What can you do to reduce your wardrobe's impact on the planet?

What is fast fashion?

The term describes the quick turnover of fashion trends and the move towards cheap, mass-produced clothing - with new lines constantly released.

Wardrobes are "overflowing with clothes", argues fast fashion campaigner Elizabeth Cline. Oxfam research suggests the average Briton has 57 unworn items.

What's the environmental impact of fast fashion?

Producing clothes uses a lot of natural resources and creates greenhouse gas emissions which are responsible for climate change.

Overall, the fashion industry is responsible for 8-10% of global emissions, according to the UN - more than the aviation and shipping combined.

And global clothes sales could increase by up to 65% by 2030, the World Bank suggests.

Most of fashion's environmental impact comes from the use of raw materials:

The industry also uses a lot of water.

Who buys fast fashion?

UK shoppers buy more clothes per person than those in any other country in Europe, according to MPs.

Young people top that list. A recent survey by environmental charity Hubbub found that more than two-fifths of 16 to 24-year-olds buy clothes online at least once a week, compared to 13% on average for other age groups.

How can you reduce your fashion footprint?

The UN has launched the #ActNow Fashion Challenge to highlight how industry and individuals can help improve fashion's environmental impact.

It says that reducing the fashion industry's carbon footprint "is key to limiting [global] warming".

Make clothes more sustainably

Several firms have launched "eco" collections which use organic and recycled materials, including H&M Conscious, Adidas x Parley and Zara Join Life.

But critics argue such collections don't solve the biggest problem - overconsumption.

"Until brands tackle this issue first and foremost, 'conscious collections' by fast fashion brands can only ever be considered greenwashing," argues Flora Beverley, co-founder of sustainable brand Leo's Box.

Zara rejected the accusation, telling the BBC that it "does not use advertising to push demand or promote overconsumption". Adidas said that by 2025, "9 out of ten Adidas articles will be sustainable". H&M declined to comment.

Some fashion lines may not be as sustainable as they first appear.

The UK's competition watchdog is investigating Asos, Boohoo and Asda over claims about sustainability of their products and the language used to describe them. The companies said they were committed to providing accurate information.

Many "slow fashion" companies are emerging - offering fewer new pieces a year, all of which have a lower environmental impact.

But not everybody is prepared to pay for them.

A third of young people surveyed by the London Fashion Retail Academy said they wouldn't pay more than £5 extra for sustainable garments.

Charity shops and jumble sales have long offered a reliable way to extend the life of clothes. Sites like eBay and Facebook Marketplace also make it easier to buy and sell pre-loved items.

But this doesn't necessarily mean that shoppers buy fewer items overall.

The waste charity Wrap argues that second-hand purchases are unlikely to replace more than 10% of new sales. It recommends other approaches, such as encouraging people to repair and revamp existing pieces.

Rent the Runway has offered a rental service for clothes since 2009

Hiring clothes is another way to access new pieces.

Market research company Imarc suggests the rental market could increase by 65% to about £1.6bn worldwide by 2025.

Wrap argues that if renting replaced 10% of new purchases every year, it would save 160,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide in the UK alone.

The simplest solution could also be the most most effective.

Buying a maximum of eight new items a year could reduce fashion's emissions by 37% in the world's major cities, according to research by Leeds University and Arup.

But this would obviously have significant financial implications for manufacturers and retailers, a tension which is not unique to the fashion industry.

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Fast fashion: How clothes are linked to climate change

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Fashion is responsible for 10% of global emissions - buying less and renting clothes could help.

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Fashion is one of the most polluting industries in the world. But a small town in Italy called Prato has built its fortune on transforming old scraps into new clothes, particularly knitwear and wool.

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Recycling fashion: The town turning waste into clothes- BBC News

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Fast fashion is stylish and cheap, but it's killing the planet. #NowStreaming

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Fast fashion is stylish and cheap, but it's killing the planet. #NowStreaming https://t.co/dT7OROOyeB

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Fast fashion is stylish and cheap, but it's killing the planet. #NowStreaming pic.twitter.com/dT7OROOyeB
— Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj (@patriotact) November 24, 2019

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Fast fashion is stylish and cheap, but it's killing the planet. #NowStreaming https://t.co/dT7OROOyeB

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Fast fashion is stylish and cheap, but it's killing the planet. #NowStreaming https://t.co/dT7OROOyeB

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Fast fashion is stylish and cheap, but it's killing the planet. #NowStreaming

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This graph explore what shoe brands are selling the most

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Climate activist Greta Thunberg has used an interview with a top style and culture magazine to call out fast fashion companies for "greenwashing".

In an Instagram post to accompany her appearance on the cover of the first issue of Vogue Scandinavia, Thunberg spoke out about the contradiction between mass produced fashion and sustainability.

"Many are making it look as if the fashion industry are starting to take responsibility, by spending fantasy amounts on campaigns where they portray themselves as 'sustainable', 'ethical', 'green', 'climate neutral' and 'fair'," Thunberg wrote. "But let's be clear: This is almost never anything but pure greenwashing. You cannot mass produce fashion or consume 'sustainably' as the world is shaped today. That is one of the many reasons why we will need a system change."

"The fashion industry is a huge contributor to the climate-and-ecological emergency," she continued, "not to mention its impact on the countless workers and communities who are being exploited around the world in order for some to enjoy fast fashion that many treat as disposable(s)."

In her interview for Vogue Scandinavia, she said: "The last time I bought something new was three years ago and it was secondhand. I just borrow things from people I know."

Thunberg added that there was a misconception around the attitude of activists.

"This is some kind of misconception about activists, especially about climate activists that we are just negative and pessimists and we are just complaining, and we are trying to spread fear but that's the exact opposite," she said. "We are doing this because we are hopeful, we are hopeful that we will be able to make the changes necessary."

The cover image of the magazine, which shows the activist in a woodland scene petting a horse, was shot by photographer Alexandrov Klum. Vogue Scandinavia is edited by Rawdah Mohamed, the first hijab wearing woman of colour editor at a western fashion magazine.

The interview was published after the release on Monday of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report which showed a critical global heating threshold of 1.5C may be breached far earlier than previously expected, potentially within a decade.

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Greta Thunberg: ethical fast fashion is 'pure greenwashing'

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Climate activist Greta Thunberg has used an interview with a top style and culture magazine to call out fast fashion companies for "greenwashing". In an Instagram post to accompany her appearance on the cover of the first issue of Vogue Scandinavia, Thunberg spoke out about the contradiction between mass produced fashion and sustainability.

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10 Graphs that Explain Climate & Fashion

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10 Graphs that Explain Climate & Fashion

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Fast fashion is both an economic and sociological phenomenon that has grown to epic proportions. What we cut in costs for garments is borne twice over by the planet, and it is absolutely crucial that we change our regulations and behaviours. We believe in empowering people with knowledge, so here is our list of the 10 most essential fast fashion statistics that will help you understand the detrimental impact of this industry on the environment.
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1 - 2. Clothing production has doubled - Garment usage lifetime has decreased

These two statistics are the embodiment of fast fashion. Clothing sales doubled from 100 to 200 billion units a year, while the average number of times an item was worn decreased by 36% overall.

3. Fast fashion generated more CO2 than aviation and shipping combined

The fashion industry is the second-largest industrial polluter, accounting for about 10% of global pollution, ranking higher than emissions from air travel and maritime transport combined.

4. More than $500 billion are lost every year due to lack of recycling and clothing utilisation

Garments given up early and thrown out instead of recycled combine to produce massive wastage, estimated at around $500 billion every year. A large portion occurs on the consumer's side, but retail stores are just as guilty, often spotted tossing or burning unsold stock.
You might also like: How Can the Fast Fashion Industry Reduce Textile Waste?
5. Fashion habits around the world vary

The previous statistics gave a global snapshot of the situation, but fast fashion is more or less prominent depending on where you live.

6. 20% of global wastewater comes from textile dyeing

The fashion industry consumes a monstrous amount of water, around 93 billion cubic metres, leaving much of it contaminated by toxic chemicals. According to the UN Environment Programme , 20% of global wastewater comes from textile dyeing. Because the bulk of the production is in countries with less regulation, the wastewater often finds its way to rivers and seas where it can wreak havoc.

7. We discard 92 million tons of clothes-related waste each year

This next figure on our list of fast fashion statistics can be difficult to grasp, so let us reframe it.

8. Produces half a million tons of microplastics

You've surely heard of the plague of microplastics, now seemingly ubiquitous on Earth. They are found everywhere, from the top of Mount Everest, to within the very air we breathe. The oceans are riddled with them, routinely ingested by fish, which are then eaten in turn as the plastic works its way up the food chain.

Garments are a huge source of microplastics because so many are now made of nylon or polyester, both durable and cheap. Each wash and dry cycle, especially the latter, sheds microfilaments that move through our sewage systems and end up in waterways. We estimate that half a million tons of these contaminants reach the ocean each year.
You might also like: Are Microplastics Harmful And How Can We Avoid Them?
9. Returns of items bought online exceed the amount of all purchased goods

As more and more online retailers, big and small, offer the option to send back goods easily and often for free, return rates, especially of fashion items, have skyrocketed, exceeding 30% of all purchased goods.

10. You can easily help cut consumer emissions by more than half

It has been shown that by:

skipping one in six washing loads,

washing half loads at below 30 degrees,

and substituting every sixth dryer usage with open-air drying,

We would reduce consumer emissions by more than half.
You might also like: Fast Fashion and Its Environmental Impact
That may seem like a complicated set of instructions, but the message is that small cuts or changes of behaviour here and there make a big difference. You can be part of that.

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The 10 Essential Fast Fashion Statistics | Earth.Org

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Fast fashion is both an economical and sociological phenomenon that has grown to epic proportions. We believe in empowering the people with knowledge, so here is our list of the 9 biggest fast fashion statistics.

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A former Teen Vogue columnist used their fashion expertise to write a book about the dark side of fashion. Read the first chapter here.

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Before clothing gets purchased and stashed away in our wardrobes, it had a life. A life at the hands of the person farming the cotton, the woman sewing it together, the one who packs it into a shipment, and again with the person who delivers it to our doors. If it goes into a store, it has a life with the retail worker who had to pull it out of a box and take out all of the wrinkles with a hot steamer before placing it on a hanger in a way that will catch our eye. Then it comes to live with us, where we give it energy, wearing it to parties and to work, or on dates and to dinners. We make memories with a garment that are punctuated with a small wine stain or the pull of a thread that got caught in a chair. But after it's gone out of style or worn so often that we no longer like it, we remove it from our purview, and its life goes on without us.

It would be great if our previously loved clothing landed in the closet of another person who can wear it like new and breathe life back into the fabric, but that's not always what happens. Even with the immense growth of peer-to-peer resale apps like Poshmark, Etsy, and Depop, most of the clothing people discard ends up in recycling bins like the one next door to my apartment. Chances are, those discarded clothes go into a bundle with a bunch of other clothing to be sold around the world in the multibillion-dollar international resale market.

It just as well might find its way to Sel Kofiga, a Ghanaian artist who has an intimate relationship with the way clothing is disposed. When he was young, his parents wouldn't let him shop at Ghana's thriving secondhand market because it was, as he put it, "the white man's used stuff."

And they were right. Each week 15 million items of clothing are brought into the port in Ghana to be placed in the country's thriving secondhand markets. Many of the used items that line the streets of the famous Kantamanto market in Accra, the second-largest market in the country, are from Europe and the United States, which consumes over 36 billion units of clothing each year. Eighty-five percent of those units are discarded, which is quadruple the number from just five years ago.

The pieces I hear being tossed into the green bin night after night are the same ones Kofiga sees in huge, messy piles near his home. "We don't need this much," he said as he spoke about the work he does: photographing the market and using the fabrics he finds to create art pieces that bring awareness to just how much clothing exists in the world. "Trends," he told me. "They are the problem because we have more clothing than we can even wear."

Copyright © 2022 by Alyssa Hardy. This excerpt originally appeared in Worn Out: How Our Clothes Cover Up Fashion's Sins, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission.

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"Worn Out" Investigates the Evils of Fast Fashion and How You Can Help

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Before clothing gets purchased and stashed away in our wardrobes, it had a life. A life at the hands of the person farming the cotton, the woman sewing it together, the one who packs it into a shipment, and again with the person who delivers it to our doors.

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Read this article from The Atlantic to learn about corporations who are fighting against eco-friendly laws.

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The trade group that represents Apple, Walmart, Nike, and dozens of other companies is trying to kneecap the U.S.'s final chance to meet its 2025 climate goals.

Four years ago, when President Donald Trump announced that he would take the United States out of the Paris Agreement, the world's largest companies leapt into action.

Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, personally beseeched Trump to remain in the pact. Bob Iger, Disney's chief executive, resigned from a White House advisory council in protest. Goldman Sachs's CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, sent his first-ever tweet just to denounce the exit. Within days, hundreds of U.S. companies had signed their own Paris Agreement pledge, promising to cut their climate pollution more than 26 percent by 2025, as compared with 2005 levels.

Today, many of those same companies-including Apple, Amazon, Walmart, Nike, Target, and dozens of others-are funding efforts to kill the Democratic reconciliation bill, which contains significant climate provisions that would allow the U.S. to meet its Paris Agreement goals.

This campaign is a quieter one. The companies are financing it through their membership fees in pro-business trade groups such as the Business Roundtable, a coalition of CEOs that lobbies for corporate-friendly policy.

That campaign seems to violate those same companies' climate commitments. The bill would eliminate nearly 1 billion tons of carbon in the next decade, according to an analysis from the Rhodium Group, an energy-research firm. Its climate provisions "would be the largest single portion of a comprehensive plan for the U.S. to meet its nationally determined contribution" under the Paris Agreement, Trevor Houser, a partner at Rhodium, told me.

Because of the long timelines involved in actually building zero-carbon infrastructure-it can take several years to permit, construct, and connect a solar or wind plant to the power grid-the bill almost certainly represents the country's final chance to meet those 2025 goals, Jesse Jenkins, a mechanical-engineering professor at Princeton, told me. "We're already talking about 2022 spending, which leaves just three years 'til 2025. If this bill doesn't pass now, the window to move the needle has closed," he said.

"It's either this [bill] or no federal policy, and that means that we would miss the 2025 Paris goals, and the 2030 ones too, probably," he said.

The Business Roundtable is one of the leaders in the fight against the bill. It has dispatched C-suite executives to meet with lawmakers, and it has orchestrated an expansive opposition campaign that includes TV and radio commercials, in-person lobbying, and more than $150,000 in Facebook ads displayed to users in purple states. In one such ad, the group warned that the reconciliation bill would be "bad for Montana workers and the economy."

If a worried Montanan went to see who ran that ad, a list of the Business Roundtable's well-credentialed members was only a few clicks away. It includes Tim Cook, the Apple CEO; Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google's parent company; Doug McMillon, Walmart's president and CEO; and the leaders of Target, Nike, 3M, and more.

The Business Roundtable says that it opposes the bill because it would raise taxes on companies and some high-income spending. "Congress has unnecessarily tied climate action with $1 trillion in tax increases on job creators, which we strongly oppose, and trillions in non-climate-related spending," Joshua Bolten, its president and CEO, told me. "There is no policy reason to link strong action to address climate change with unrelated, harmful tax policy and substantial spending, which would not only worsen Americans' already dangerous debt burden but also undercut the competitiveness of the U.S. economy, businesses, and workers."

It's true that Democrats are pursuing their entire domestic agenda in a single bill, as a procedural move to avoid some of the strictures of the Senate filibuster, which Senate moderates such as Joe Manchin of West Virginia have said that they will not alter. Because that move can only be used several times at most during a session, the party's program has been crammed into one piece of legislation.

But while the substance of the Business Roundtable's concern seems to dwell on the reconciliation bill's new tax measures, the group is not distinguishing between its climate programs and its tax measures in its advertisements. Its intent is to kill the partisan reconciliation bill while preserving the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which does not contain the same robust climate policies.

The reconciliation bill's tax provisions-which would finance some of the climate spending-are also opposed by ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute, a fossil-fuel trade group. Those oil giants have run hundreds of thousands in Facebook ads opposing the reconciliation bill's tax hikes, according to Axios.

The Business Roundtable's opposition is surprising because, in 2019, the group issued an influential statement rejecting the idea that corporations are accountable solely to their shareholders. Companies should also "protect the environment" and respect their workers, suppliers, and communities, the statement said.

Some members of the Business Roundtable have distinguished the climate programs in the bill from its tax policy. Lisa Jackson, a vice president at Apple and a former EPA administrator, has said that Apple supports a clean-electricity standard, a mechanism in the bill that would require utilities to generate more of their electricity from zero-carbon sources every year. After receiving an inquiry related to this story, Amazon announced that it supported "investments in the infrastructure and [reconciliation] bills to lower emissions in key sectors like energy and transportation." (Earlier this year, it also endorsed raising the corporate tax rate.)

Netflix, LinkedIn, and 3M, three other members of the Business Roundtable, have also explicitly endorsed a clean-electricity standard.

But none of those companies has left the Business Roundtable, meaning their membership dues are still funding an effort to kneecap the bill. "We can engage with organizations-even when we might have differing perspectives on certain issues-to raise awareness and understanding on issues of importance and drive collective action," Sean Lynch, a spokesperson for 3M, told me.

Apple declined to comment on the record for this story. Target and Nike did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Other members of the Business Roundtable said that the group does not speak for them. ​​"Walmart continues to support the Paris Agreement and advocate for strong and cohesive U.S. climate policy, but has not taken a position on any specific bill," a spokesperson told me in an email.

Jenkins, the Princeton professor, said that these comments didn't go far enough when those companies remained in the Business Roundtable, which is "actively working to sink the whole thing."

"It's one thing to say, 'We have legitimate, serious concerns about the corporate-tax increase, but we support the climate provisions'-but that's not how [the Business Roundtable] has approached the reconciliation bill at all," he said.

"A bunch of firms have been publicly supportive of this bill or some federal climate policy. They're stepping out and trying to lead. But I don't think you can do that while supporting trade groups that are actively trying to tank the policy."

Jenkins contrasted the Business Roundtable with the Edison Electric Institute, the trade group that represents investor-owned utilities. Like the Business Roundtable, its membership is divided on the bill: Some, such as Exelon, the country's largest utility, have enthusiastically endorsed it; others, such as the Ohio-based American Electric Power, are more skeptical or openly opposed. As such, the institute had stayed "lukewarmly neutral" on the bill, Jenkins said.

It's not 2001 or even 2009 anymore. With rare exceptions, the largest companies in America no longer bankroll explicit climate denial as they once did, either directly or indirectly. Dozens of powerful firms have committed to reducing their climate pollution in the next decade and achieving net-zero by 2050 or earlier. Many executives have also pledged support for some sort of ideal, though curiously unspecified, federal climate policy.

But that hypothetical support isn't enough to reduce emissions, and with climate change so far advanced, delay and procrastination amount, in practice, to a kind of denial. As much as executives might want to wait for a perfect climate bill, packed only with inexpensive provisions and stripped of all inconveniences, 40 years of federal inaction on climate change should make it clear that no such bill is coming. Climate change is a difficult problem and it will require powerful people-the ones who care, at least-to compromise. If this reconciliation bill fails, then the history of climate action in the U.S. suggests that lawmakers will not try again until 2032. By that time, the world's average temperature will have likely already cruised past 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Executives may not like some aspect of the reconciliation bill, and they should say so: That's life in a democracy. But if this bill fails in its entirety-which is the outcome that the Business Roundtable hopes to achieve-then that would be a damning indictment of U.S.-style liberal capitalism. It will be clear to people at home and abroad that American society circa 2021 cannot sufficiently organize itself to actually fight climate change, and the CEOs' platitudes about the Paris Agreement will be revealed as just that. The hotter, angrier, and poorer world that will result will not take them seriously, and neither should we.

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largest single portion of a comprehensive plan

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Big Business Is Bankrolling an Effort to Kill the Democratic Climate Bill

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The trade group that represents Apple, Walmart, Nike, and dozens of other companies is trying to kneecap the U.S.'s final chance to meet its 2025 climate goals. Four years ago, when President Donald Trump announced that he would take the United States out of the Paris Agreement, the world's largest companies leapt into action.

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Some social media influencers make entire careers around helping users find the best "fashion dupes." Read this article about the hidden cost of buyer affordability.

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​​On Tuesday morning, in an LGBTQ-affirming Episcopal church in Greenwich Village, like most New York venues during this week, there was a fashion show. The brand Mirror Palais made its New York Fashion Week debut, in large part thanks to the steadfast determination of its founder Marcelo Gaia. But on a different stage - TikTok - Gaia's work isn't just popular: it's the latest target of dupe culture.

Dupes, short for duplicates, is the gen-z term for knockoffs clothes - and they're taking over the online fashion world. While the very nature of fashion has often involved reinventing popular themes or motifs, social media's impact on fast-fashion brands has completely changed how younger generations think about clothing consumption. In previous decades, these brands would often target large fashion houses like Chanel, Prada, and Coach, using designer runway shows and critical responses to eventually inspire the clothes in low-cost stores and budget collections. (Remember when Miranda Priestly helpfully broke that down?) Even when fast fashion began to pick up steam at the start of the 2000s, it took brands like Zara several weeks for affordable iterations of runway looks to be available for a mainstream, ready-to-wear market. Now, fast fashion brands have stockpiles of possible trends ready to go before models have even left the runway.

Because people active in the online fashion community often follow multiple creators, influencers get more engagement when they are constantly working to dress in new and popular styles. This contributes to an ever-accelerating trend cycle, where clothes that were necessary four weeks ago could become cheugy today. Fast fashion brands like Shein, H&M, and Asos, who already redefined fashion in the e-commerce space, are now able to churn out dupes while clothes are still popular - marking a direct link between influencer-based marketing and the acceleration of mass clothing production.

One of the most well-known fast fashion companies, the Chinese brand Shein, has exploded in popularity due to its presence on TikTok and Instagram. Post featuring #sheinhauls - where creators buy massive pallets of clothes and try them on for the followers - rake in thousands of views and comments per video. Only 10 years since its $5 million valuation, Shein is now the third most powerful startup in the world and is worth close to $100 billion, according to Bloomberg. In 2021 alone, Shein received $16 billion in sales, seemingly in spite of constant criticism for the company's negative impact on the environment and allegations of worker exploitation.

Seasonal trends on TikTok and Instagram, like cottagecore or indie sleaze, are often defined by heavily identifiable articles of clothing: think the Lirika Matoshi Strawberry dress, the House of Sunny green Hockney midi, or this season's Birkenstock Bostons. When a particular brand or item goes viral, rather than a style, the most popular dupes are those that recreate a product as closely as possible for a fraction of the price. It's no longer inspiration, it's a carbon copy. And influencers have an incentive to post and promote popular dupes: through Amazon's influencer program, creators get a small percentage of sales when people purchase items with their links.

As a designer whose brand was made popular by its young and internet-forward aesthetic, Gaia is no stranger to virality. In 2021, his Mirror Palais Fairy dress was a TikTok staple for months, spawning dozens of cheap iterations. "I have lost count of the amount of knockoffs there were of that dress," Gaia tells Rolling Stone. With popular supporters, like Bella Hadid and Dua Lipa, Gaia's brand was made to go viral. The Maria in Leite midi dress was next.

Made of 100-percent wool and decorated with flower-shaped cutouts, Gaia says he designed the Maria after finding deadstock fabric at a vintage supplier that reminded him of both classic Brazilian cinema and timeless pieces his mother and grandmother kept in their home. Gaia calls the final product an "authentic expression" of his heritage and craft. "Sometimes when you're a designer you're like 'Well, this is for the customer,'" Gaia tells Rolling Stone. "And then sometimes you're like 'This is just for me.'"

With its innate wearability, designer look, and meaningful connection to real life, the dress immediately became a summer 2020 must-have but gave many sticker shock with its $625 price tag; the dupes quickly followed. One influencer bragged that she had found a $17 dupe of the dress on Amazon in a video that got 1.2 million views and 20,000 saves, as top comments read "Amazon storefronts are the real plague of our generation," and "we're not meant to have everything babes." Even with backlash, the unboxing of the dress received almost 90 thousand views and hundreds of comments with people saying they were inspired to order their own dupes.

Gaia said that he considers the younger generation especially sensitive and kind, which makes the widespread support of knockoffs, especially the way it exploits underpaid workers at the bottom of fast fashion companies, surprising to him.

"I'm a little bit desensitized at this point," Gaia tells Rolling Stone when asked about the popularity of dupes. "I'm still upset of course, but more so, it makes me upset when I see young people promoting the dupes. We as a society have become so accustomed to easy and fast consumption... and the dupes just promote a really like kind of toxic culture for that."

Designer Wray Serna, who runs Wray, a sustainable and size-inclusive clothing brand in New York, says that she's already had at least one of her designs stolen by an online retailer in 2019. But the theft, and others like it, only push her to keep working.

"To be totally honest, it definitely does affect me at times," Serna tells Rolling Stone. "I'm frustrated by it. But I always think I can design more things. And in a way, it's almost like you know you've made it big when people are knocking off your designs. I just think, 'I'll make another,' and I move on."

Serna adds that size inclusivity brings another level to the fast fashion debate, as large websites are often the only places for plus-sized people to find clothes that fit. When approached by customers about her price points, Serna says she never judges if a person says they can only find their size at places like Shein but is encouraged when people choose to return.

"We get a lot of praise for extending our sizes, which to be honest with you, I don't really feel like we justly deserve," Serna says. "I think that every brand should carry every size. It's not revolutionary to do so."

Many of the arguments around fast fashion dupes also center on the battle of accessibility vs. accountability. Some supporters of dupe culture claim it is classist to assume people can afford designer clothes or always shop ethically, while dupe haters focus on sustainability concerns in the fashion community. The same argument cropped up again during fashion week after several influencers wore fast-fashion outfits to shows. Major brands and fast fashion marketplaces, like Revolve and Amazon, even held New York Fashion Week- themed events.

While sustainable or small designer brands like Gaia and Serna's are more expensive than the average clothing options, the accessibility argument does little to take into account how much influencing has changed and accelerated the harm of fast fashion, according to author and sustainable fashion expert Aja Barber.

Barber notes that small designers in the fashion world are often priced out of competition when their designs are stolen and popular trends often come at the expense of underpaid or poorly treated garment workers. The ever-increasing trend cycle also means that the fashion industry, which already overproduces, lays the excess abundance of unpopular clothes directly on the global south. According to Barber, conflating critiques of fast fashion copies with classism simply ignores the root of the issue: overconsumption.

"The fashion industry is pumping out enough clothing to clothe the human population 12 times over and the truth of the matter is, you have to be sort of privileged to buy into the system where having trendy clothing is treated like a necessity," Barber says. "There's a lot of bad faith players in this conversation. Poor people did not create this mess... and I think it's time for people to be really honest with themselves about how they're contributing to this problem."

As dupe culture has become largely ingrained with how gen-z and social media fashion mavens buy clothes, Gaia says he supports a version of dupes that take inspiration from designs without stealing directly. He especially loves fans who send him inspired outfits they sewed together or managed to thrift, calling it "a better and healthier way to participate in fashion." For those who think purchasing power is the only way to achieve fashion notoriety, Gaia also encourages dupe supporters to think about where their garments come from and the real human costs of always staying on trend.

"I absolutely wholeheartedly agree everyone should be able to enjoy fashion and express themselves how they want to," Gaia tells Rolling Stone. "But I don't think exploiting people who are even less fortunate than you is the solution either. And as someone who grew up with no disposable income, I filled up a closet, and I always looked cool."

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How 'Dupe' Culture Took Over Online Fashion

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​​On Tuesday morning, in an LGBTQ-affirming Episcopal church in Greenwich Village, like most New York venues during this week, there was a fashion show. The brand Mirror Palais made its New York Fashion Week debut, in large part thanks to the steadfast determination of its founder Marcelo Gaia.