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Fast Fashion
Alondra Rivera
West Coast University
English 140 Written
Melissa Cueto
9/21/2025
Fast Fashion
Fast fashion has revolutionized clothing shopping by offering trendy styles at affordable prices and fast delivery. Stores may stock new runway-inspired clothes within weeks, satisfying consumers’ constant demand to look stylish. While accessibility looks desirable, the structure that allows it is based on hidden costs. Fast fashion’s cost and ease hide its drawbacks. It harms people and the environment rather than just looking good. Behind fast fashion’s low costs and fast turnover is a system that affects garment workers and the environment. Furthermore, it pushes customers to buy more than they need while undercutting sustainable alternatives. Fast fashion affects worker rights, ecosystems, and the economy worldwide. Fast fashion mistreats workers, hurts the environment, promotes overconsumption, and discourages sustainable alternatives.
First Body Paragraph
One of the biggest difficulties with fast fashion is exploitation of developing country labor. Garment workers work long hours in dangerous circumstances for little wages. Sweatshops, or factories, lack fundamental safety requirements, leaving workers vulnerable to accidents, building collapses, and fires. This sector is dangerous, as shown by the 2013 Rana Plaza accident in Bangladesh, which killed over 1,100 garment workers (Alam, 2025). Despite public attention to such deaths, many factories have comparable conditions. In the rush for fast production, firms often put profit before workers’ rights. Studies reveal that fashion brands’ ethical pledges rarely affect behavior. Worker exploitation continues, with low salaries and no healthcare or union representation (Lebaron, 2021). Workers’ inability to escape poverty while corporations and retailers profit reinforces it. Because supply chains are purposely complicated and opaque, customers are frequently ignorant of this exploitation (DuHadway et al., 2021). This hidden mistreatment raises ethical concerns, showing that quick fashion sacrifices human dignity. Corporate accountability, greater labor law enforcement, and consumer understanding of the human consequences of their clothing choices are needed to address this issue.
References
Alam, S. (2025). Corporate Social Responsibility and Ethical Practices in the Readymade Garment Industry: Unraveling the Impact of the Rana Plaza Catastrophe.
SSRN Electronic Journal.
DuHadway, S., Mena, C., & Ellram, L. M. (2021). Let the buyer beware: how network structure can enable (and prevent) supply chain fraud.
International Journal of Operations & Production Management,
42(2), 125–150.
Lebaron, G. (2021). Wages: An Overlooked Dimension of Business and Human Rights in Global Supply Chains.
Business and Human Rights Journal,
6(1), 1–20.
