Today´s trends are tomorrows trash.

When it comes to clothes these days, maybe we should ask What´s your waste size, not your waist size?

We all have those clothes just sitting in our closets, the top that you spent less than a Starbucks coffee on just because it looked cool on the hanger but you actually never wore. Or the shirt that you wore that one time before it was not fashionable anymore.

Fashion cycles are moving faster than ever and shortening the seasons, this season´s clothing is likely outdated within in a year. This trend, called fast fashion are encouraging the disposable of clothing, the quality of the fast fashion garments is questionable due to the mass-production for the clothes to become more affordable, and attract customers to purchase more. Fast fashion has changed the way we dress, how we think about clothes and how we treat them.

More styles available equals more purchases, leading to an increased waste. We buy more clothes than ever before - wear them a few times, if at all. The turnaround for fashion trends has been speeding up the trends, and the shortened the life cycles of the clothes by 50 percent. The rate we use to throw away clothes have increased drastically, in less than 20 years the volume of clothing tossed away each year in America has increased by 100 percent, from 7 million to 14 million. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, if we started to recycling of the clothes we now now toss away cit would affect the environment equally as taking of 7.3 million cars and their carbon dioxide emissions off the roads.

Second to oil, the fashion industry is the most polluting industry in the world, which stresses the responsibility of fashion retailers to become more sustainable in their production of clothing. The importance for fashion retailers to always be on point with the latest trends is the number one element for their success and with the markets increased concerns about the environment, sustainable collections is seen to be an increasing trend. More and more retailers launch collections produced on organic and reused materials.

Sources:

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/international/briefings/toxics/2016/Fact-Sheet-Timeout-for-fast-fashion.pdf

https://www.businessoffashion.com/community/voices/discussions/can-fashion-industry-become-sustainable

http://www.newsweek.com/2016/09/09/old-clothes-fashion-waste-crisis-494824.html

http://loisirs.lemessager.fr/magazine/environnement/astuces-vertes/article/bien-trier-son-verre-1.html

Image:

http://www.npr.org/2016/04/08/473513620/what-happens-when-fashion-becomes-fast-disposable-and-cheap