Your favorite stores may negatively affect your community
January 18, 2017
Fast fashion is a term used to describe certain stores such as Forever 21, Topshop, H&M, and Pac Sun that hop on trends immediately for profit. These stores market off creating and distributing clothes from the runway for a cheaper price. Some of your favorite stores are affecting your community and this is why.
Fast Fashion has immensely grown since the 1990s, and itai??i??s now at itai??i??s peak, especially around this holiday season. More than any other item, clothes are the most most popular gifts parents buy for their kids.
ai???I think people would buy more clothes when school starts and around the Christmas time,ai??? said Ms. Linda Yurkanin, SHS Entertainment Marketing teacher.
The lack of awareness is what makes fast fashion so rapid. Trends usually appear faster around the fall and summer time. Due to new trends reaching the market in three weeks rather than six months, second hand stores are known to produce their clothes at a fast rate which makes the quality of the material cheap. Ai??ai???Trends go in and out, what goes in will go out in the next year,ai??? said Yurkanin.
Unwanted clothes that havenai??i??t been sold at fast fashion stores in a certain number of months, they are often tossed into huge piles for landfills. ai???We go through so much more clothing than we did before,ai??? said senior Chelsea Nwanne, who works in the gift shop at Camelback Lodge.
Approximately 84% of unsold clothes in the United States alone either go to landfills or an incinerator in which theyai??i??re burned. Incinerators release a large amount of pollutants into the air which often causes health deterioration and environmental degradation.
Besides the environmental impact Fast FashionAi??has on the world, it also has effects the selling of clothing.
Thrift stores are now overlooking certain clothes because of they feel that shoppers will not buy them. Clothes bought from fast fashion stores will not be purchased or accepted due to the poor quality of fabric.
Some stores have introduced the use of re-purposing and recycling old materials for new clothing. Using re-purposed clothing is on trend at the moment, and helps out with the amount of clothing getting thrown out.
Some ways for you to reduce use of Ai??fastAi??fashion, is to simply shop at your local thrift shops or from other stores that have re-used old clothing. Thrift stores are great because they provide clothing that the likelihood of anyone else having is rare, but they also have an history behind it giving outfits more character.
![A Promax Super Jumbo boombox (2014.270.2.1a) used as a prop by the character Radio Raheem in the Spike Lee directed picture, Do the Right Thing. The boombox includes a dual audio casette tape deck, an equilizer section, radio dial, coloured light display, and a pair each of 8 subwoofers, midranges, and tweeters. There are sections of red, yellow, and green electical tape with black ink text on the sides and top of the player. There are also rectangular black, green, and yellow Public Enemy stickers adhered to both the PR and PL side of the player. On the lower back of the boombox is handwritten text in gold ink reading [BROOKLYN, NY / 3/17/90 / To Gene / RADIO RAHEEM LIVES / LOVE, Spike Lee / FIGHT THE POWER]. There is a metal handle attached to the top of the player, around which two braided bracelets (black-and-white 2014.270.2.1b, coloured 2014.270.2.1c) and multi-coloured printed cloth (2014.270.2.1d) have been tied. The rewind button on the PR tape deck has fallen off but is stored with the boombox (2014.270.2.1e). The boombox had an audio cassette in the PR deck that has been removed (2014.270.2.2), titled JAZZ CLUB / Vocal. The cassette is off-white with black text and is printed with track titles, manufacturing information, and serial number. Date: 1980s. Record ID: nmaahc_2014.270.2.](https://shsnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/IMG-2612-1-475x309.jpg)
Makayla Maynard • Mar 8, 2017 at 1:23 PM
Great article! I never thought about what happened to the extra clothing in stores that aren’t sold. Its crazy to think that there is about 84% of unsold clothes in the United States that either go to landfills or an incinerator to be burned. And that because of this, it spreads pollutants into the air. I think that all those cloths needn’t be burned, but donated to people and children in need of clothing. I always have admired thrift store clothing. And maybe I will even start to shop there for the sake of caring about the enviorment we live in and for the different cool styles I can rock.