With consumers having to dodge greenwashing, temptingly low price points, the facade of ‘recycled’ fabrics, and the FOMO on the in-vogue trends, keeping up with sustainability is a tough bone to crack.
Raise your hand if you took a sustainable-clothes only resolution but drooled as you passed by a fast fashion brand’s insane sale offers. Affordability and accessibility are the basic USP of fast fashion brands to lure in folks to buy stuff they do not need. Moreover, as they recklessly churn out collections after collections, imbibing reel-famous sartorial inspiration, it becomes even harder to not give in to this web of temptation. The revenue wheels of such sustainability-allergic brands churn with our volatile desire to ride the trend wave.
Via: Sustainable Fashion Forum
Aside from this constant tug-of-war, most sustainable brands also cannot match the extravagant marketing budgets of fast fashion brands that shove ads in the face of customers every two seconds, giving them the time of the day. Consumers literally have to surf through the market like Mario, dodging obstacles of greenwashing, marketing gimmicks of ‘recycled’ fabrics, and more to stick to sustainability. Moreover, especially, in India, you need to have pockets as deep as the Pacific Ocean if you want to invest in sustainable pieces that have a longer shelf life. Because with the advent of cheaper-than-thou online reatilers like Shein, Farfetch, etc that are designed only to make the livelihood of small, sustainable businesses difficult, people often think twice before investing in timeless pieces.
Via: Sustainable Fashion Forum
But, by choosing low price points over a sustainable wardrobe, what is being looked over is the ‘collateral damage’ bestowed onto both the planet as well as the hands that make the clothes. Cases in point: the burgeoning landfill you pass by every day on your way to work, the garment workers who weren’t paid during the pandemic, the loss that the Rana Plaza incident brought around, and many more that are overlooked. While sustaining sustainability is as hard as greenwashing fashion brands to take accountability, but it’s a decision we as a generation have to make again and again to give credibility to our ‘wokeness’.