A Legal Solution to a Fast Fashion Problem

Abstract

Clothing is one of life’s necessities. Fashion—the prevailing style of clothing of a particular time—offers an important medium through which people from all walks of life can express themselves through personal style.1 While the garments we put on our back may be an indispensable part of daily life, many take for granted where they come from and how they entered their wardrobe. The fashion industry, for all its merits, takes a major toll on resource use and has broad environmental impacts. From cultivation of fibers that will later become textiles, to dyeing processes, to consumption, the clothes we wear impact our environment at every step. The emergence of the “fast fashion” industry—the rapid production of inexpensive clothing to mimic the ever-changing trends of high-fashion labels—has exacerbated these effects. Popular retailers like H&M and Zara have a wide global reach. Although these retailers made explicit commitments to responsible use and production with in-store textile recycling and rewards programs, the actual value of these efforts is less clear. In contrast, other retailers like The Reformation and Everlane founded their brands on the tenets of sustainable fashion. This note acknowledges the difficulty of defining “sustainable fashion” and recognizes that its overuse in general discourse has perhaps rendered the term meaningless; marketing and advertising campaigns have flung the term around with abandon and it has become more of a marketing ploy instead of an important standard. However, in an attempt to give this phrase meaning in the context of this discussion, “sustainable fashion” is defined as a system of clothing production and consumption that assesses and attempts to meaningfully reduce the impact of each stage of a garments life, from the production of the fibers to its disposal. Sustainable fashion seeks to minimize and reduce consumption of resources at all stages and can be done through forgoing use, recycling, and repurposing so as not to compromise the availability of such resources for future generations, However, with these commitments to alternative materials, limited production, and longerlasting clothing comes higher costs and inaccessibility to consumers. While others have suggested that simply allowing the industry to regulate itself by promoting self-imposed labelling and encouraging consumers to change their shopping habits will correct the negative environmental impacts from the fashion industry, this paper proposes that more is needed. This note suggests that using existing legal frameworks for the imposition of international trade policies to disincentivize consumption of fast fashion and to incentive limited consumption of responsiblymade clothing is the quickest and easiest method to solve the multi-faceted problems of the fast ffashion industry.