Sale season is coming. Here’s what you should know about fast fashion

The longer I write about sustainable fashion, the harder it is to walk through shopping centres. I can’t help but see the racks of jeans, T-shirts and jumpers as future landfill: crumpled, dirty and tangled in piles of garbage.

There is an uncomfortable truth Australia needs to face: we are a dumping ground for the cheapest fashion in the world. The average Australian buys 56 items of clothing a year, at an average cost of $6.50 per garment.

Sales can easily convince us to buy things we wouldn’t have previously even considered purchasing.Credit: iStock

If you take a second to consider what else you can buy for $6.50, it’s not very much. It wouldn’t get you a loaf of sourdough, a pint of beer, a two-hour park or a casual swim at your local pool. In fact, it’s almost the same price as a flat white.

The reasons for this are perverse. It makes no sense for a T-shirt to cost the same as a coffee, but here we are – late-stage capitalism and the economies of scale have collided with a cost-of-living crisis and a climate one.

A few months ago, I was on a roundtable of experts convened to define fast fashion for the second-hand platform Vestiaire Collective, which will ban it from the site on November 24, shadowing calls from the European Union to crack down on fast fashion. The panel discussed several uncomfortable truths I wish everyone would keep in mind when shopping for new clothes, especially during the upcoming sales season.

It’s likely you’ll throw away a new garment within a year

Several studies have found that we dispose of more than half the clothes we buy less than a year after purchase. This is in part because clothes are so cheap we can replace them when we feel like it and because of inescapable digital marketing tactics that encourage these impulses. But it also reflects the poor quality of many clothes now. They are difficult to repair, and often doing so costs more than simply buying something new.

Clothes are basically impossible to recycle

Right now, as the technology and infrastructure stand globally, more than 99 per cent of old clothes are not being recycled into new clothes. In Australia, 227,000 tonnes of textiles are sent to landfill every year and another 190,000 tonnes of textiles are donated to charity, about a quarter of this is sold in the local second-hand market and just over half is exported for sale in other countries. Only a tiny fraction gets down-cycled into plastic pellets, rags, insulation or board.

It’s very likely whoever made your clothes is living in poverty

An ethical fashion report released at the end of 2022 by Baptist World Aid found that just 12 of the 120 Australian companies reviewed are paying some or all of their factories a living wage. Sadly, this makes sense when you account for the cost of fabric, shipping and other expenses, $6.50 does not leave very much (read anything) to go to the person (usually a woman of colour) who sat behind a sewing machine and expertly stitched that garment together.

The mark-up on most garments is so high, you’re rarely getting what you pay for

Most large fashion businesses, including luxury houses, make as much product as they can, for the cheapest amount possible, leaving them with more product than they can sell. To ensure they still turn a profit, and account for all the products that will be discounted or not sold, they have begun to apply even bigger margins.

Some reports suggest the retail mark-up is almost double what it used to be, meaning from cost price to retail, a garment could have been marked up 1000 per cent. This means, in addition to the environment, there are two groups of people paying for the enormous profits brands continue to report: the consumer who is getting ripped off and more egregiously, the garment worker whose labour is being devalued.

Most clothes are made of plastic

Two-thirds of our clothes are made using plastics, like polyester and nylon, which take hundreds of years to break down. These materials shed microplastics into our soil, air and waterways. It’s so bad, scientists estimate we consume a credit card’s worth of microplastics every week. Plus, since they’re made of oil, these materials hold on to stains and smells. They’re prevalent because they’re cheap, not because they make good clothes.

Designers put elastane into garments, like jeans, to help clothes stretch to fit a range of different sizes.Credit: iStock

Natural fibres blended with polyester or nylon will pill

The reason polyester-cotton blends or wool-nylon blends pill is because of a fundamental difference between synthetic and natural fibres. Nylon and polyester threads are made of one, long fibre that is smooth and continuous. Cotton and wool fibres are much shorter, so their yarns are made by twisting the fibres together. When you wear synthetic and natural fibre blends, the friction between the two different fibre lengths causes the short staples of the cotton or wool to separate from the long synthetic thread and form little balls.

Elastane will start to sag

Designers put elastane into garments because it has four-way stretch, so it makes poorly constructed clothes fit a wide range of people. This usually means we buy a stretchy garment in a size down. How often has a shop assistant recommended you go for the smaller size in jeans “because they’ll stretch”? When we do this, we’re putting the elastane under constant tension, which causes it to lose its elasticity (incidentally so does heat from the washing machine or dryer). When the elastane stops springing back into shape, you’re left with a saggy garment that doesn’t fit you any more.

Buying the latest trends won’t make you happy

We’re all susceptible to the idea that when we walk into a party wearing a new dress, we might be more desirable or popular, but that’s rarely the case. Generally, the rush of endorphins that comes with a new purchase disappears pretty fast. The surest way to feel good in your clothes (and incidentally the quickest way to a sustainable wardrobe) is to figure out your own style.

Lucianne Tonti is a sustainable fashion journalist and the author of Sundressed: Natural Fibres and the Future of Fashion (Black Inc).

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