A T-shirt for five dollars. A dress for the price of a sandwich. Fifty years ago this would have sounded impossible; today it is ordinary. The system that makes it possible is called fast fashion — and its real price does not appear on the tag.
Traditional clothing brands once released two collections a year, but fast-fashion brands deliver new designs to their stores in a matter of weeks, and some online brands add hundreds of new items every day. The business model depends on speed and volume: spot a trend, produce it cheaply, sell it fast, and move on. The system works because we keep buying — the average shopper today purchases far more clothing than shoppers did twenty years ago, and keeps each piece roughly half as long.
The environmental bill is enormous. Making a single cotton T-shirt can require around 2,700 liters of water, roughly what one person drinks in two and a half years, and dyeing fabric is a major polluter of rivers in producing countries. Most fast fashion is made from polyester, a form of plastic spun from oil, which sheds tiny fibers into the water with every wash. And when the clothes are thrown away, often after a handful of wears, most end up burned or buried, while mountains of discarded clothing pile up in deserts and on beaches in countries that never asked for them.
There is a human bill as well: the industry employs tens of millions of garment workers, most of them young women, and wages in some producing countries are among the lowest in the world. The price of a five-dollar shirt is paid somewhere — just not at the register.
What can one shopper actually do? The advice from researchers is surprisingly unheroic. Buy less, and buy better, because the greenest garment is the one already hanging in your closet. Before buying, ask the thirty-wear question: will I really wear this thirty times? Buy secondhand when you can, repair small damage instead of replacing the item, and wash clothes less often and at lower temperatures.
None of this will fix the industry overnight — that will take regulation and sustained pressure on brands — but markets listen to money. Every purchase is a small vote for the kind of closet, and the kind of world, you want.