Leopards in the Microtrend Jungle: The Farce that is Fast Fashion

Menial small talk no longer revolves simply around the weather or the content of someone’s Sunday afternoon. Light chit-chat now seems to cover much broader topics of child labour and environmental exploitation, amongst other things. The shift seems dramatic, improbable, confusing, perchance. but if you stop and listen…you’ll no doubt hear it too. 

“It was only £4 from Shien, and I had free delivery so I had to,” she declares, as she holds up a leopard print belt that three weeks ago she would have called ‘disgusting.’ He agrees with her, telling her that just yesterday he bought a leopard print vest from ASOS because his favourite celebrity had the same one. No, really, he saw it on Instagram. He jokes, “I’m so mad, I literally had an identical top just like this a few years ago, but I threw it out because I thought it was ugly!” They laugh together, in temporary contentment. They feel, just momentarily, as though, in a world with constantly changing fashion trends and lifestyles that always seem just out of grasp, they fit it. They feel accepted. 

A month later, she throws out the belt she bought from Shien; it was broken anyway. He can’t find his leopard print vest. He presumes it’s lost somewhere under the mountains of clothes he accumulates in hopes that one day, someone will tell him that he has the best style. But is it really the best style? Or is it just ‘the style’ that keeps us slaves to consumerism? Is it just exploitation under new names like ‘Coquette, or ‘Y2K.’‘

There is certainly truth in the statement that “it takes seeing it to believe it,” and given that packages of clothes aren’t also filled with the haunting screams of economic and environmental exploitation, that statement runs true. It’s easy to ignore suffering when it’s not flown like an upside-down flag in your line of vision. But, the truth is, according to the global slavery index 50 million people were living in situations of modern slavery on any given day in 2021, according to the latest Global Estimates of Modern Slavery. Of these people, approximately 27.6 million were in forced labour. The term ‘forced labour’ refers to when individuals are ‘compelled against their will to provide work or service.’ Of course, this term does not simply rely on external forces holding individuals against their will, but also the broken economic system whereby often the only option is to work in ‘sweatshop’ environments (a factory or workshop, especially in the clothing industry, where manual workers are employed at very low wages for long hours and under poor conditions) because there is no other means of incurring income. Often, there is no escape from the cycle of poverty, and those who fall victim, live their whole lives at the mercy of the growing material need of 1st world countries such as the UK and the USA. 

In 2022, Netflix released a documentary called ‘Untold,’ whose aim it was to expose the fashion industry for its hypocrisy and exploitation. Whilst this overt criticism, plastered on the UKs largest streaming service, is arguably an ideal situation, the public response still remains in question. What seems to have occurred is that, due to the documentary focusing specifically on the global corporation ‘SHIEN,’ many have ‘boycotted’ only that establishment in a ‘Cancel Culture’ style and chosen to be blind to the very true notion that all ‘Fast Fashion’ brands are rooted in the same soil of exploitation. They have just not received the same coverage. The human rights exploited by these sweatshops is a list of crimes longer than the word count of Dostoyevsky’s ‘War and Peace.’ Perhaps it’s the typical selfish human nature to presume that because something doesn’t affect you specifically, you are allowed to not pay attention to it. However, that thought is naive on a myriad of levels. You may not be directly impacted by the human rights violations, but to deny that you are victims of the environmental crisis caused by industries such as the fashion industry would be insanity. 

The environmental damage produced by the exponential demand for new clothes at the mercy of the ‘micro trend’ trend is concerning. Factories pump fumes and leave piles of waste so high they might dethrone Everest or Kilimanjaro as the world’s highest mountains. Surely then, this physical manifestation of our ‘Use and Discard’ mindset would kickstart our desire to inspire change and shift to more sustainable buying habits. But, unfortunately, these waste mountains are hidden away in the land of the exploited, leaving the exploiters masked and none-the-wiser. Is the solution then, to dump large mountains of waste in the middle of UK highstreets, or fill H&M with discarded garments from unwanted trends? 

She goes to the bin and lifts out the tattered Leopard print belt. He’s cleaning his room and kicks the Leopard print vest he lost and forgot about. They think that maybe they shouldn’t have bought them in the first place. They feel guilty. 

A day later she ordered another clothes parcel because she thought that everyone else was dressed better than her at uni. He buys three shirts from H&M. They don’t care enough to stop because no one does.

The truth is, it’s easier to be in denial than to confront the fact that you are a perpetrator of another person’s oppression. It’s easier to dress up like a leopard; to camouflage into the jungle that we call our ‘progressive’ society. 

Edited by Holly Anderson and Daisy Packwood, Fashion Editors