The True Cost of Fast Fashion

How often have we stood in front of a shirt for a few dollars without asking: how can a garment that travelled all the way from a factory in the Far East to a mall cost so little? The answer is simple and uncomfortable: when a shirt costs that little, someone else pays the price.

When I worked as a fashion journalist for "24 Hours", the weekend supplement of Yedioth Ahronoth, I was at a press presentation where a PR representative showed me a dress and said: "It's only 99.90 shekels, so even if you don't love it, it's no big deal." That started to grate on me. I realised I was in the wrong place.

We are losing value and quality in favour of quantity. Today a garment costs as much as lunch. Technology, globalisation and industrialisation have eroded the value of clothes, and that cancels our sense of responsibility, replacing it with "I don't care what happens to it, it only cost me a few dollars." The social and environmental cost is completely missing from our considerations.

Fast fashion chains work at a pace of dozens of collections a year. That dizzying turnover makes us feel we have to buy today, because tomorrow it will be gone.

The fashion world got a painful wake-up call in 2013, when a building housing garment factories in Bangladesh collapsed and more than a thousand people were killed. It is easy to write headlines calling the people who make our clothes victims — but the picture is more complex. Many economists say this is how poor countries develop, and the workers themselves often say the money lets their children go to school. It is not black and white, but we must make sure these people work legally: minimum wage, regulated hours and social benefits.

The environment pays too. Almost nobody thinks about the fact that an item ordered online was shipped from China, and that this has an environmental cost. We don't talk about the resources needed to make the garment, and we barely ask which materials and chemicals sit on our skin all day. It is a product we use so much and know so little about.

First, buy by need and don't be a tool in the hands of marketers. I'm not saying never buy on sale — if I need something, a sale is a great opportunity. But if I don't really need anything right now, I won't go. Today's promotions are so sophisticated that buying the one item you actually need feels like a bad deal. Buy-one-get-one is not always cheaper — the extra item is usually one you didn't need.

I call it a "bread and butter wardrobe": 70 percent of the wardrobe is our everyday clothing, and the remaining 30 percent is the sequin jacket, the stilettos and the rest. Most of what is in our wardrobe is waiting for us to lose weight or for one very specific occasion — so we need to connect to our real needs, not keep a million clothes that don't serve us.

And finally, demand transparency. After the disaster in Bangladesh a movement called on shoppers to photograph their clothing labels and ask brands #WhoMadeMyClothes. It started on the margins and gained momentum; today there is more demand to know. Real change will come from regulation, a shift in mindset and consumer pressure — all working together.

This asks us to step back from emotion a little, because our shopping is emotional. I don't want to cancel that — I love fashion too. But you can love fashion and still ask, before every purchase, who pays the true cost of the garment.