Shopping at the Forever Store

A feature article by Jessica Anthony and Vanshika Sharma

Back-to-school season means a lot of things: finishing last-minute summer readings, organizing the mess of a backpack you forgot to clean out at the end of last year, getting alarms set and ready for your first class, and, of course, shopping! It’s one of the best times of the year to go shopping, aside from maybe Black Friday, and the sales seem to be unbeatable. We’re all guilty of it–buying way too much stuff on sale because you need to stay on trend, and spending your entire allowance at Forever 21 and that trendy online store your favorite Instagram star is promoting.

The problem is, the discounts we all gleefully take advantage of comes at a real cost: the money not paid on clothing is compensated for in other ways. A high volume of low-price clothing can only be produced if manufacturers cut corners, either through poor quality fabrics and construction or simply taking advantage of the supply chain. The fashion industry is horrific, both in terms of environmental impact and labor ethics. It is the second most polluting industry in the world– beating out agriculture, mining, dumpsites, and even coal production.  It is second only to the oil industry.

Fabrics like nylon and polyester are incredibly damaging to the environment because of their greenhouse gas intensive production process, emitting gases such as nitrous oxide, which is 310 times more potent than carbon dioxide. On top of that, a fast turnover cycle in trends means that clothes are being thrown away faster than ever before (refer to graph). Clothing is also almost never recycled, meaning that most perfectly good textiles are going straight from the closet to the dump without sparing any perfectly good fabric to be reused in new garments.

The environmental impact is only part of the corners being cut in the clothing manufacturing process, and that’s because unlike most industries, automation is incredibly difficult when it comes to sewing garments. Behind every $5 shirt and $30 pair of jeans, there’s a person in a factory somewhere who made it by hand–and chances are, he or she isn’t getting paid very much, if at all.

Most big fashion corporations outsource their labor to overseas factories, where there are fewer regulations in place to ensure workers rights, which is why on most of our clothing labels, we see our clothes are made in Taiwan, Bangladesh, India, or China where factory workers are often taken advantage of. These retailers then tend not to disclose which factories they use, so that their name cannot be traced back to the poor conditions the women who sew their clothing often work in.

A recent horrific example is that of the Zara workers in Turkey, who started leaving notes in clothing as a cry for help to try to get people to realize how the people making their clothing were really being treated. The tags read, “I made this item you are going to buy, but I didn’t get paid for it.” This is, unfortunately, a rather common occurrence. While the actual tags in clothing are a newer consequence of this, what they are conveying is an unfortunate reality of the fast fashion production cycle. Forced slave labor and child labor are a common tool used in the production cycle because it helps bring production costs down, so that we can see our great, low prices for back-to-school sales in the local mall.

Being conscious of what stores are sustainable or not is a difficult switch for a lot of people. The cheap prices of clothes at stores like Forever 21 and H&M are unbeatable and convenient. T-shirts that cost $8 and deals like 5 for $20 are extremely hard to avoid. Who wouldn’t want more clothes for a cheaper price? The tendency to choose this type of shopping is rational. Unfortunately, this habit only makes it harder to make that switch to sustainable clothing. We get so accustomed to shopping at low prices at Forever 21 that shopping at more expensive stores like American Apparel just doesn’t seem reasonable. However, not making this switch only does a disservice to ourselves and the rest of society, environmentally and ethically.

Although sustainable shopping may seem extremely expensive at first, in the long run, it is actually a lot cheaper. The clothes manufactured by Forever 21 and other “fast-fashion” chain stores are very poor quality (another reason why they’re so cheap). Not only are their prices cheap, but their clothing is cheaply made as well. The 20 t-shirts you may have collected after one trip to mall in November of 2017 are really only going to last a year, at the most, in terms of quality and trendiness. In an article written for Business Insider, the author states that she found herself visiting Forever 21 frequently because the clothes she would buy from there barely lasted a couple of washes. Though it seems like you may be saving more money by spending less at each visit to a fast-fashion store, the costs of these frequent visits add up to be a lot more than money spent at an expensive, but sustainable and less frequently visited store like American Apparel.

At this point in the article, you may be wondering, “But what are some sustainable and ethical clothing stores?”

There are actually a lot of sustainable stores that some people are either too wary to visit because of the high prices or because they’ve never even heard of them. Well-known stores like American Apparel, Reformation, Patagonia, Levi’s, and Pacsun are on the pricey side, but make up for that in their good quality and long lasting clothing, ethical production, and efforts to reduce their environmental footprints. Nordstrom is possibly the only department stores where almost all clothes are made in the U.S. Other, not-so-well-known ethical brands include Outdoor Voices, Everlane, the local chain Marine Layer, and several online shops. Websites such as goodonyou.eco (also an app) and sustainably-chic.com are two helpful resources when looking for ethical shops and checking if your favorite brand is sustainable or not.

Instead of buying brand new clothes, thrift shopping is also a cheap and easy way of helping the environment and prevents good quality clothing from being thrown away. Sustainable shopping is a great way to help decrease child labor and sweatshops, and to reduce detrimental impacts on the environment, but another way of supporting sustainable fashion is not by shopping and increasing the amount of clothes in your closet, but by recycling clothes you already have. A practice called upcycling takes unwanted items and creatively turns them into items that are wearable and trendy. Not only does this help the environment, but it also caters to your own preferences and personality. By upcycling, you can create or modify clothes to fit your personality and body type while also customizing it to fit a particular trend. In addition, borrowing clothes and even hand-me-downs are fun and economic ways of recycling clothes. Trends seem to recycle. Instead of buying brand new clothes that imitate styles from the 70s, dig through your parents and grandparents closets (and thrift stores!) to find vintage clothes, which saves money and the environment.

The next time you go shopping, make a conscious effort to ask yourself if the item you are about to buy is worth your money. Will it last more than 20 washes? Am I planning on wearing it as much as much as it costs and more (e.g., if this blouse costs $30, you should wear it at least 30 times)? Think real hard about all the times when you will be able to wear this really expensive piece of clothing. Were these clothes made in a sweatshop? Do I really need this? Becoming a more informed consumer will not only help you in the long run, but it will also help the environment and the millions of children, women, and men who make the shirt you are wearing, and getting paid less than 5% of what it costs.

[www.businessinsider.com. www.metro.co.uk, www.greenchoices.org, www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org]