how does slow fashion work exactly?
what is slow fashion?
Slow Fashion is a term used to describe the fashion movement that directly opposes Fast Fashion and its short manufacturing cycles that destroy our planet and exploit its workers. Fast Fashion quickly turns trends into clothes its customers can devour with no regard for its impacts on our planet and society, today, Fast Fashion is responsible for 10% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and for 20% of wastewater production that pollute our rivers and seas.
Slow Fashion promotes sustainable clothes, small brands, and an ethical business model that cares for the environment, the people, and the customers. It opposes the buy-n-throw Fast Fashion culture, overproduction, and unnecessary consumerism that generates tons of textile waste every year. We will talk a little bit in more detail about this subject because there is a lot more to be talked.
Slow Fashion combines other movements like Sustainable Fashion, which especially focuses on the ecological sustainability of its clothes, using organic and ecological materials and production processes, and Ethical Fashion, which focuses on the welfare of the textile workers who are exploited in the Fast Fashion industry. At the end of the day, they all want to achieve the same thing, a sustainable fashion industry but have different means of achieving that goal. If you want to know more about these differences be sure to check this article on What Is The Difference Between Slow Fashion And Sustainable Fashion.
why is slow fashion important?
As you may already know, Fast Fashion is a terrible business practice that is destroying our planet, generating 10% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and 20% of the global wastewater, polluting rivers, seas, and even soils with their garments made from harmful materials. We recommend you to check Fast Fashion 101 | How It’s Destroying Our Planet if you want to learn more about it.
Slow Fashion is very important because it aims to achieve a sustainable fashion industry, an industry that is accelerating the destruction and pollution of our planet in today’s world. But there are other reasons for its importance, here is why Slow Fashion is so important:
- It promotes Sustainable Fashion, which is a movement that promotes garments made with respect for the environment, it especially focuses on the ecological aspect of fashion.
- It promotes small businesses, which comes with competitiveness and innovation that will modernize the fashion industry. By supporting small businesses you’re not only supporting the environment, but also the workers and the small business owners themselves.
- It opposes consumerism, which makes customers buy unnecessary garments they may not even wear, throwing them and polluting the soil, even more, when they end up in the landfill. Fast Fashion is the embodiment of over-consumerism.
- Fights against overproduction, which causes environmental and social problems during the production and the disposal of the garments that did not get purchased, greatly polluting our rivers and soils with its toxic cheap materials.
- Protects the workers, who in the Fast Fashion industry have terrible working conditions and inhuman wages. Ethical Fashion especially focuses on this problem, promoting garments made with ethical work and fair trade.
- Promotes high-quality garments, made with organic and biodegradable materials that will last longer and will have a low impact on the environment, protecting the planet and consumers’ wallets long-term.
These are one of the most important aspects of this fashion movement, but surely there are a lot more to point out. If you want to know more about this subject, check out Slow vs Fast Fashion.
how does slow fashion work exactly?
This fashion movement focuses on all aspects of the production process and supply chain, by doing so it aims to protect all the workers and small businesses involved, but also the environment and the garments themselves.
The word „slow” fashion comes from the fact that it opposes Fast Fashion by creating garments with slow manufacturing cycles. Why does this matter? you may ask, well, there is a point where clothes cannot be created so quickly and cheaply without harming the environment and the workers.
With slow manufacturing cycles, you can guarantee that the garments produced can be sustainable. These slow manufacturing cycles mean that the garments produced are not really produced according to new trends that may last a few weeks, they mean that the clothes can be made from sustainable higher quality materials and that the workers are not exploited in order to produce enormous amounts of items in one sitting.
A great example of a slow fashion production model is on-demand fashion, which means that the garments are produced when the customer orders them online. This is a true game-changer, as not only storage costs (and environmental costs) are reduced, but also overproduction is avoided, eliminating the possibility of the garments being thrown away before they are even sold to the consumer, which is sadly something that happens very often with Fast Fashion.
Overall, Slow Fashion is a more generic fashion movement that focuses on all aspects of fashion, while Sustainable Fashion and Ethical Fashion are more specific movements that focus either on the environmental or social aspects of fashion. Either way, these three movements go hand in hand, and their ultimate goal is to end Fast Fashion and combat all the terrible consequences it has on our world.
how to support slow fashion?
Now you know how Slow Fashion really works, we are going to give you a few tips and tricks so you can begin to put this information into practice. Here are some tips to do Slow or Sustainable Fashion:
- Choose small businesses, this way you will promote small entrepreneurs, innovation, and competitiveness.
- Look at the materials used in the garment, choose cotton, preferably organic or recycled ring-spun cotton and avoid synthetic materials like polyester which are not biodegradable and leave small microplastics polluting our waters.
- Look into the brand you want to purchase from, learn if they use ethical business practices or if they respect the environment.
- The 3 W’s Rule, When you see an item of clothing for the first time in an undisclosed amount of time and you ask yourself What? When? From Who? then you know you have too many clothes that you don’t need.
- The 30 Day Rule, whenever you decide to buy some clothing product ask yourself „Will I wear it a minimum of 30 times?” if the answer is true yes, then go on. You will be surprised to know how many times you say no.
- Donate Clothes, Fast Fashion garments still pollute our soils when they end up in the landfill, letting harmful toxic materials leak into the soil and potentially into the water, instead of throwing your clothes, you should donate or recycle them.
- Use your critical thinking, determine if the brand you are looking at is really sustainable by taking into consideration the price of its clothes, if they talk about sustainability or not, if they have been involved in any scandals and if they have apologized…
Anyway, there are many ways you can do slow fashion, and any action you take is an action away from Fast Fashion. If you want to know more on how to become more sustainable regarding fashion read How To Do Slow Fashion.
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That’s it for today, don’t worry, we have a lot of different articles like this that you can check out either from the links below or from our blog page. We hope this information was helpful, and if you have anything to add, you can contact us on our Contact Us page.
We are thrilled to teach people all around the world 🙂 Also, did you really know what Fast Fashion really is and its terrible consequences for the environment, the planet, the workers, society, and the economy? Do you know exactly what the Slow Fashion or Sustainable Fashion movement is? You should really take a look at these articles about this forgotten and unknown but very urgent and important subject, click here to read „Can Fashion Ever Be Sustainable?”, Sustainable Fashion, Ethical Fashion, Slow Fashion or Fast Fashion 101 | How It’s Destroying Our Planet because knowledge is one of the most powerful strengths you can have, while ignorance is your worst weakness.
We also have a big surprise for you! Because we want to give you the right to know us better, we have prepared a carefully dedicated About Us page where we will tell you who we are, what our mission is, what we do, a closer look at our team, and many more things! Do not miss this opportunity and click here to check it out. Also, we invite you to take a look at our Pinterest, where we will pin everyday sustainable fashion-related content, clothing designs, and other things that you will surely love!
