News / Fast fashion: the price we pay for our designs on low costs

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The Loadstar is running a series of reports on the ecommerce sector, which has been driving growth in air cargo. But are there clouds on the horizon? 

While the chic have always had an appetite for staying ahead of the proles, today’s young people are faced not with spring, summer, autumn and winter ‘lookbooks’, as previously generations have been, but by fortnightly fashion ‘hauls’ measured in cubic metres. 

No more mods and rockers. With incredible skill, social media websites have honed their ability to cater for the tastes of individual users. A profusion of decentralised micro-trends has left Vogue and Vanity Fair, and the overarching idea of ‘style’ the magazines once helped to steer, in the dust.  

In the new paradigm, everything – hoop earrings, dungarees, every conceivable brow shape at once – is fashionable somewhere. With Shein’s designers frantically devising over 700 new products every day, the generous-minded might say that we live in an age of unprecedented creativity.  

But France, the home of haute couture, disagrees. By 2030, the French government will slap a €10 ($10.92) tax on every Shein and Temu garment sold – doubling the $10.70 cost of the average price of a Shein product.  

Perceived as a transparent attempt to put them out of business, Shein and Temu rely on volume and incredibly low margins per item sold, as well as labour costs as low as 4 cents per garment for workers.

Despite the abundance of TikTok influencer ‘hauls’ of $1,000 or more, the average spend is closer to $75 – so much for ‘shopping like a billionaire’. (Actual billionaires’ spending habits are quite different: Mark Zuckerberg buys $400 Brunello Cucinelli tees; ex-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey famously indulges in $1,000 Rick Owens sneakers) 

Garments are not expected to be worn more than three or four times, and are certainly not built to survive that number of washes, threads sometimes unravelling and textiles warping after just one. Until recently, discussion of Shein, Zara and Temu’s environmental impact centred around the abundance of material waste clogging landfills and rivers, and filling the ocean with ever greater amounts of microplastics.  

Jet-fuelled chic 

But recently, that has changed. Fast fashion has sped up to such a degree that ground transport is now literally too slow to keep up. 

Unfortunately, Amazon had set a precedent with its push for next-day delivery –which served to reduce efficiency and increase emissions, Anne Goodchild, civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of Washington, told Vox in 2019.  

“Delivery services, to some extent, have the potential to be an improvement,” she said. “[They consolidate] a lot of deliveries, hopefully, into one vehicle like a UPS truck. They have strong incentives, profit incentives, to do that in an efficient and cost-effective way. [But] as we move toward faster delivery, it gets harder to consolidate. When we’re not paying some sort of personal cost for the trip, I think it’s easy to overlook how much travel we’re adding.” 

In general, the faster people or goods get from one place to another, the more pollution is emitted. Rail is the outlier: it could, if implemented with overhead power lines, reliably double the speed of trucks while carrying hundreds of teu, emitting no carbon in the process.  

Also sprach Zara 

But even high-speed rail is not fast enough for Shein, Temu and Zara shoppers to get hold of their latest ‘capsules’. Imagine, then, how eye-rollingly passé the clothes will have become in the four weeks it would take a ship to arrive at Rotterdam from Shanghai.  

Instead, according to advocacy group Public Eye, Inditex, Zara’s parent company now books around 1,600 cargo flights into Spain’s Zaragoza a year, each carrying around 100 tonnes of clothing, with far more onward flights toward Qatar, the UAE, the US and elsewhere.  

Using ICAO emissions numbers as a basis, The Loadstar recently calculated that moving cargo from sea to sea-air via Dubai gave a 4,872.6% CO2 emissions increase over a conventional Suez Canal sea transit. Transporting a typical long-sleeved shirt by aircraft, instead of by ship, generates 14 times the carbon emissions, according to Hamburg-based environmental consultancy Systain. 

Because time to market is crucial, fast fashion retailers must constantly stay on the move, unable to wait for the same supplier to conclude one order before another needs to be allocated. This affords little possibility for optimisation or rationalisation. With so many moving parts – cotton harvesting, fibre and dye production, cutting and stitching, to name a handful – this ever-shifting supply chain dashes any hope of transparency.  

In 2020, an investigation by Labour Behind The Label found that garment factories in Leicester, producing clothing for Boohoo, were employing vulnerable migrant workers from Somalia, India and Bangladesh at £2 to £3 per hour – a fraction of the UK minimum wage. 

Whether or not companies have the will to address these problems, they seem unable to act on the near-certain knowledge that child labour, slavery and prison labour form part of their sourcing and subcontracting structures.  

A recent study by Sheffield Hallam University found some 53 manufacturers supplying 103 major fashion brands were purchasing cotton picked by Uyghur slaves in China’s Xinjiang region. Temu says it “strictly prohibits” this and Shein says it has “zero tolerance” for forced labour.

But branching supply chains and labyrinthine systems of subcontracting mean that many companies, willingly participant or not, are still being caught out.  

A false economy 

Despite its apparent cheapness, the rise of fast fashion and single-wear outfits has done nothing to reduce consumer spending on clothes, which is steadily increasing in many economies. But e-commerce platforms like Amazon and Alibaba have become masters of disguising costly externalities behind an intuitive shopping experience and a perception of low prices. 

If everyone on Earth had one good pair of boots, stakeholders in our industry would have less to do, goes the theory. It is tempting, therefore, to see fast fashion as a good thing. It appears like a magic trick: ever-increasing volumes of stuff needing to be moved; lucrative work for those in the business of moving it; and created as if from thin air.  

But only if we do not pay too much attention to the payment being exacted in return.