The Terrors of the Fashion Industry: Mindless Marketing

One pair of jeans. You probably have three or four hanging up in your wardrobe or tucked away, neatly folded, in your chest of drawers. But when was the last time you thought about what is used to make them? I bet you've never given a thought to it.

1,800 gallons of water. That's how much it takes to make one ordinary, denim, medium-sized pair of jeans. So that simmers down to this: If you don't buy a single pair of jeans, someone could be supplied with drinking water for 15 years. If everyone in the world owned one less pair of jeans, that could solve so many problems, save so many lives. See my point now?

Welcome to the world of fast fashion. More than fifty percent of Britons are completely unaware that fashion has a negative effect on the environment. According to a study by Oxfam, new clothes bought in the UK produce a larger carbon footprint than driving around the Earth six times. If fashion is one of the biggest causes of climate change, then why does no one know about it? What can I say, people love their clothes even more than they love their cars.

You probably haven't heard of the Citarum river in Indonesia. However, I bet you shop at big brands like Topshop and Nike all the time. Don't see the connection? Don't worry. I had no idea what this was until a teacher at my school showed us a documentary about fast fashion. Huge brands (like Topshop and Nike) hire companies to run factories, most of which are in poor countries like Indonesia. These factories need a place to dump all of the toxins and chemical dyes that they use to colour clothes. In Indonesia's case, one of these dumping grounds is the Citarum. See it now? The problem is, thousands of families living on the riverbank use the Citarum as a source for drinking water and for bathing and cleaning clothes. This means that tiny babies from poverty-struck Indonesia are washing in toxic water, just so that people like you and me can have the stuffed wardrobes so many of us desire.

So please, check the labels before you buy new clothes. Or better, wait until you actually need them.

Thanks for reading,

Anna

This is an article from my blog https://irreversibleby2030.wixsite.com/, where I post as often as possible. On my site, this article is called "Mindless Marketing: what goes into the clothes we wear".