Over the past twenty years fast fashion has spurred unbridled consumerism, with disastrous consequences for the environment and human rights. In this time period, companies like Sweden’s H&M and Spain’s Zara have gone from middle-size purveyors of inexpensive clothing to juggernauts that operate thousands of stores across the world. In the last ten years they have been joined by new entrants such as UK’s BooHoo, America’s Fashion Nova, and most notably the Chinese giant Shein, which has undergone explosive growth in the past few years. All efforts to stop them have failed. It is now time for governments to step in and regulate fast fashion the way it has regulated Big Tobacco and the automotive industry. By pumping out vast amounts of clothing in countries where labor laws are lightly regulated, fast fashion companies have become some of the worst offenders when it comes to sustainability and ethical labor practices. Shein is a particularly egregious example because its operations are centered in China, which allows it to keep its manufacturing practices completely opaque and away from the eyes of Western regulatory agencies. Meanwhile, on the consumer end, the amount of textile waste generated by the developed world has reached truly staggering amounts. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, in 2018 Americans discarded 17 million tons of textiles, most of which came in the form of trashed garments. Much hand-wringing has been done to lament this sad state of affairs, and much blame has been put on the companies themselves. Fast fashion firms have enabled the shift in consumer mentality that has turned clothes-shopping into an addictive form of entertainment, making disposability the norm. Some of the blame should also fall on fast fashion consumers who treat shopping as a competitive sport, buying and discarding clothes at a historically unprecedented rate. According to a 2019 report by the UN Alliance for Sustainable Fashion, “The average consumer buys 60 percent more pieces of clothing than 15 years ago. Each item is only kept for half as long.”
It calls for (but doesn’t actually define) a durability standard.
And yet, you rejected the undefined standard because of your specific strawman of any hypothetical idea of what a standard might be.
How do you figure it wouldn’t just raise the price for clothes across the board and do nothing for the laborer or the environment?
Hang on, do you not understand what the environmental concern is here? Durability is, like, most of the environmental issue.
The liberal in me wonders whether clothing should be considered a necessity and not taxed at all, or else at the very least public nudity should be legal.
Lol, the liberal in you should go down to your local mall and see if they charge you sales tax on a pair of Levi’s. In NYS, at least, clothing purchases are only subject to sales tax if the total is above a certain amount (it was $120 a while back, it’s more now).
Most of your objections are super trivial to solve, you realize that, right? If you want to get into public policy, and not just baseless calls for anarchy, try to actually study public policy for five minutes.
Here’s an obvious and easy regulation you could envision—not necessarily the right one, not without issues, but resolves most of your objections right away. Create a private right of action, effective four years from now, for clothing that is not reasonably durable. Give whatever guidance you might give in the law creating the right of action, also allow some FTC subgroup to bring actions, let the courts work out the details at common law. Companies other than Shein and the like will probably have nothing to worry about. Parties would need to arrange a class action with mountains of evidence to ever enforce the law, so tiny companies will have especially little to worry about, and certainly never bother with any sort of compliance-checking regime. Shein and friends will change their US offerings to be somewhat less shoddy so they can avoid litigation. Big companies hate getting into this kind of litigation. They’ll find the most cost-effective way to improve their own manufacturing processes. Shit, even my libertarian friends would think that sounds like a pretty good solution.
To me it reads as “the commoners shouldn’t be able to afford so much ticky-tacky with so little money, we need to make it expensive so they can’t buy as much”. Despicable elitism on its face
you mean in your head, right? That’s obviously not what the article said at all, you literally just made that shit up and then pretended you were criticizing the argument “on its face.”
These are just some practical effects. If you actually care about fashion as an art form, you might worry how restricting the industry could stifle innovation and trends in ways that reach your ivory tower.
Again, it’s not at all difficult to write the regulation to have exceptions for cases where the lack of durability makes an artistic statement, or where it’s not feasible to achieve a desired artistic effect with a more durable garment.
If this half-spun idea ever leaves the loom,
Then maybe you’d finally find something about it worth criticizing?