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Micro-Trends, Major Impact: What is going on with Fashion?

This article is for anyone who is curious about fashion trends, why they exist, and what they mean for fashion. If we need to change trends, then how do we do it? Everything is fast today: food, transportation, hopefully your internet, and also fashion. Fast fashion is very enticing. How we can get the clothes we are interested in so very quickly, while a trend is still happening? Social media has a huge impact on what we wear and when. Lately, it even affects how quickly we wear clothes. This is a super huge topic with the younger generations, millennials and gen-zers. So, it only makes sense that a gen-zer herself wrote this article!

Emma Sammons is a business development associate at Fix That Shirt. Outside of Fix That Shirt, she is a college student at Florida Southern College. Her studies are focused in Business Administration with a track of International Relations. Additionally, she is starting her second month in one of the most fashionable cities in the world, Paris. Here, she is first-hand studying fashion trends, consumption of clothing and garment sustainability. Her insight comes from having a start-up back in the United States, a love of fashion, and an understanding of media culture. Seeing the lack of sustainability in the fashion industry made her curious to look a bit deeper into our trends. 

 

To quote Emma, “As a college student, I see fashion trends everywhere. Bandeau tops were the look for two or so weeks and then suddenly, they’re “too basic”. Seeing people throw last weeks’ trending item down the trash chute after wearing it no more than twice, I realized there might be an issue.”  

There are many different kinds of trends, from weather patterns to voting. Here, we’re discussing fashion micro-trends, arguably one of the more devastating kinds of trends.  

But what even is a micro-trend?

A micro-trend is a lot what it sounds like. This is a trend that happens over a very short period of time, and it usually doesn’t stick around for longer than a season. This manifests as a bit over 50 trends per year (almost one trend per week!). I’m sure that most of us can agree that many trends could be difficult to keep up with. This is where the problems emerge. Let’s dive a little deeper and answer a few questions, starting with… 

What does a micro-trend look like?

Source: The Emory Wheel
Source: WhoWhatWear
Source: The Daily Trojan

Here are some of the top headlines that pop up when you search for fashion trends. The corset top, flair leggings or T-shirts with oversized images (and all their many look-alikes) were all the rage for a few months and just as quickly abandoned.  Take the example of parachute pants. They were very fashionable in the 80s for breakdancing, but they became the laughingstock of the 2000s. We all laughed at this ridiculous fashion in the music video for “Ice Ice Baby”. In 2022, parachute pants made a sudden reappearance and the streets were filled with people looking like MC Hammer (very famous people too, like Bella Hadid).

Source: IMDb

Over the course of that year, sales of parachute pants increased by 181%. In just under a year, the pants once again disappeared as quickly as they emerged. The trend, now slowed to a halt, leaves a question behind. Where are those parachute pants now?

So, where do our clothes go when we’re done with them?

Well, it’s no secret that fashion companies are producing a lot of clothes. 92 billion pieces of clothing that are produced every year. Of those, about 85% end up in landfills and less than 1% are recycled. Taking into account these numbers, it wouldn’t be crazy to assume the local landfill has quite a few clothes floating around in them. But why are there so many clothes and not enough people to wear them? 

Source: The Guardian

First of all,  these micro-trends create a feeling that can best be explained scientifically: FOMO. Missing out on anything can be attached to quite a big scare, and fast-fashion knows that. So, when a once coveted dress becomes tacky in the span of a month, at least we were wearing it when it was cool!  

This leads us into our second reason. We don’t have the closets that celebrities have when they do Vogue closet tours. The mile long wardrobes that seem to be able to hold every item of clothing ever produced aren’t commonplace in the average household. There isn’t space to hold clothes that we won’t ever wear again. This means old clothes have to go somewhere, but they can’t stay here.

 Lastly, we always get a good deal on them. There isn’t a huge financial burden when you can order 12 shirts for $10. It’s a deal that seems too good to be true when they show up on our doorsteps a week later. They might fall apart quickly, but last just long enough to keep us on trend. 

We have briefly discussed the ‘why’ behind the excessive amount of clothes that are used and discarded at a speedy rate. Now, it’s time to look at the reason behind the success of this extremely unsustainable fast-fashion model. While we’re focused on making sure we have just the right outfit for our cousins’ dogs’ western-themed birthday party, innocently making a purchase doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. The problem becomes when everyone else has the same idea. One thing leads to another, and suddenly we have new mountains made of clothes in Africa, Asia and South America. We never really hear about that part, so let’s discuss that. 

Source: Pexel

Case in Point XNUMX: Chile: About XNUMX weeks ago, a satellite camera captured a picture of the Atacama Desert of Chile from space. Yes, clothing waste is visible from space. The pile is growing at an average of 39 tons per year.To put that in perspective, a baby humpback whale weighs about 1 ton. Imagine dumping 39 baby humpback whales in any one place. That would be quite a chaotic scene. So, the companies are throwing out clothes we’ll never see on the shelves.

Case in point 2008: Asia: In Asia, rivers over the years have turned red with pollution from dyes. Googling “red rivers in Asia” will give you articles on rivers turning bright red going all the way back to XNUMX. These rivers become uninhabitable and dangerous, not to mention alarming. This would be just as scary as the sky turning brown from factory emissions (which is also happening there).

If you don’t recall throwing your clothes in the bin, then how do they end up in the dumps?

 We aren’t normally throwing our clothes straight in the bin, hurling them into the ocean or burning them. A lot of us donate clothes with the goal of getting them to charities and second-hand shops. When we donate, clothes end up sorted further. Whatever doesn’t work gets shipped off to places like Ghana, where there is a huge market for leftover clothes.

Case in point 3:

Once your old denim shorts make it to Ghana, 40% because they are unsalvageable. Now, we have a lot of extra clothes on our hands that can’t go anywhere else. They can’t ship them back to the place they came from and say “hey, we don’t want these, take them back now please.” The entire reason these clothes ended up here in the first place was because they were undesirables. So, they’re burned, thrown in ditches, or put in dumps. The waste gets into the water supplies and destroys the ecosystem. Did you know that some companies (some of them are brands that aren’t considered fast fashion) have burnt their extra unsold stock to make room for new clothes? There’s a whole lot of wrong going on in fashion.  

A lot of bad things are happening after and as the clothes are being made, but what about before that, what’s happening with that?

Now, our question is: how did these clothes get here so incredibly fast?

Initially, the speed of getting a new halter top only a few days after seeing your favorite influencers wear one is appealing. Fashion is fast, and it’s only speeding up. Fast fashion is making 2020x as many clothes as they were in XNUMX Currently, companies are making enough clothes to give every single human on the planet 14 items every single year Even more shockingly, we currently have enough clothes on the planet to keep the next XNUMX generations clothed.Your great-great-great-great grandchildren already have clothes. Let’s hope they really like vintage wear! But how are companies managing to produce and distribute so fast? 

Step 1:

Once a trend hits the runway, fast fashion companies quickly copy and mass produce clothes using cheap materials. They often exploit labor through factories in far off countries that are underpaying the workers. They utilize the sweat shops where people, on average, are making less than 50 cents an hour and work between4 to 16 hours per day.This contributes to lower the production cost. When we combine the cross continent shipment cost of the goods, the sum ends up being lower than producing locally with quality material and fair pay. The turnaround from copying, sourcing, production, distribution and final sales is a matter of weeks, sometimes even days. 

Case in point XNUMX: ASOS: a company that has shortened their manufacturing process from the average 3-4 weeks of the fast fashion brands to 1-2 weeks. This leading us into a company proud of that speed…

Case in Point XNUMX: Zara: the company committed itself to the goal of creating a fashion cycle from conception to shelves in 15 days! They used to be the giant of the fast fashion industry until they were recently overtaken by…

Case in point 3: Shein: the most profitable fast fashion brand today. Perhaps it is the 75 hour work weeks, the speedy machines or the cheap materials, but they are very, very fast. Even faster than the other two brands before, the appeal to consumers is much louder than anything else about the brand.

Source: Pexel

Step 2:

The trendiest new item goes in our baskets, making us an unknowing participant in the cycle. Say you make a shopping trip once a month. If you were to do that, you only get in on half of the fashion trends! At a rate of 15 days per trend cycle we end up at around a whopping 24 collections each year and over 450 million garments.  

To make these trends known, companies employ big name celebrities and influencers. Kourtney Kardashian, for instance, just became the sustainability director for a well known fast fashion company. Ironically, this company is responsible for a lot of waste and has a lot of human costs. Talk about Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Naomi Campbell just announced her collaboration with another infamous brand. This company  has the same parent company as the one that Kourtney is involved with. Yikes!

Another influencer just took her viewers along as she toured a factory of one of the largest fast fashion brands in the world. She showed her followers a “behind the scenes look” that received incredible amounts of backlash due to the inaccuracies of the working conditions shown.

These sorts of tactics are super popular in promoting fast fashion as a normal part of clothing consumption, so, let’s look a little deeper.

What does that do to the environment, besides wasting a perfectly good item?

Imagine we have a truck full of those no longer fashionable clothes. Every second,a truckful of textiles is dumped or incinerated, creating incredible amounts of waste, carbon emissions and water pollution.  

In fact, fast fashion has the highest impact on resource depletion, over 20% To put it in perspective, think of a plain white cotton t-shirt. Now, imagine 2 liters of water ( equivalent to drinking water for 900 days ). That’s how much water it costs to create that garment.  

Additionally, the fast fashion industry creates nearly 92 million tons of textile waste.To give that some perspective, that’s about 184 million cruise ships worth of waste. That’s a lot of boats. The fashion industry creates 10% of annual global carbon emissions. They also take advantage of countries with weak labor laws and low wages to get their work done so quickly.

The fast fashion industry is destroying our planet, which begs the question…

Is there a way to fix this and still stay fashionable?

The iconic Vivianne Westwood once said: Buy less, choose well, make it last”. Our problem is not the need to be fashionable, nor is that an impossible thing to do with our current predicament. Instead, the problem is the message that the fast fashion companies are sending us. This doesn’t even include the massive global pollution and poor human treatment that they aren’t telling us about. They have given us a dupe or a cheap “alternative” of what style and fashion are. The true backbone of fashion is individuality or personality instead of an adherence to the fashion trend of the week.  Finding what you look good in, choosing pieces that you’ll wear for a long time, and creating a style of your own are the essentials of what fashion is about.  

We can make our clothes last almost XNUMX times longer if we take care of them correctly. When we shop intentionally and find items we love, you can keep that item in your closet circulation for a very long time. How do we do that?

Shop Second Hand: Find vintage items at a thrift store See what people are selling on verified second-hand websites such as Vestiaire Collective, Vinted et Monogram. You’ll save money and you’re able to pick from thousands of brands. You might just find a keeper in the bins or from the comfort of your own home for half the price. 

Source: Pexel

Shop Slow: In the event you don’t find anything there, get yourself a nice cup of tea or coffee and do a bit of perusing on slow fashion websites. Look for clothes you love on sites that are committed to combatting fast fashion. You’ll come across clothes for a lot of different budgets, from luxury to everyday affordable. Finding ethically made and sustainably sourced clothes is just another way to help the cause. Shops like Patagonia et People Tree are great examples of this! If you find a shirt you love on the more expensive side, the quality of it will keep it alive for two to three times longer than the average fast fashion garment. This turns your clothes from a commodity to an investment in your style!

Care, Repair, Recycle: To make your clothes last longer, check the laundry instructions for them and hang them up properly. When they are in need of a bit of love, repair them! If you need help with that, check out tailors or services like Fix That Shirt When your clothes are on their last legs, see what else can be done with them. Maybe you can turn an old shirt into a washcloth or a pair of jeans into a tote. Get creative!

 By doing these simple things, we can put a dent in the carbon emissions, textile waste and water pollution that fast fashion creates. We can stay fashionable and sustainable without a second thought! We didn’t create the problem, but we can be part of the solution. Making the move from trendy to timeless is the best thing we can do for ourselves, our wardrobes and our planet. 

Fashionably Yours,   

Emma

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