Opinion: Fast fashion is bleeding into the fabric of thrift culture | Opinion

The traditional 20-year trend cycle, where old styles re-enter the mainstream because of nostalgia and en-vogue youth culture, is shrinking faster than people can keep up with.

It starts on social media with massive shopping hauls, those viral moments where influencers pick up a cartload of clothes all at once. Then there are the micro-trends constantly pushing consumers to chase the next new thing. 

People get influenced to keep up with these trends, and when the fad becomes cheugy, it goes into the donation bin and onto the next. Fast fashion is appearing in thrift stores, making quality clothing harder to find, inflating prices in the resale market and hurting the environment.

Damages of fast fashion

Instead of vintage racks full of old yet durable garments, low-cost and low-quality clothing is being tossed into the nearly 5.7 billion pound donation pile at Goodwill or the millions of pounds at The Salvation Army.

This means long-lasting garments are getting lost between hangers full of fast fashion brands like SHEIN, who utilize child labor, practices that are harmful to the planet and manufacturing shortcuts to create flimsy, micro-trend pieces that are out of season before they leave the sweatshop.

Online fashion sustainability community Common Objective highlights the use of child labor within the fashion industry. One example is their research on “investigations into cottonseed production in India, where almost half a million children are contracted to local producers working for large national and multinational seed companies.”

How this affects accessibility

Where thrift stores used to be a haven for hidden gems at discounted prices, they are now an amalgamation of garbs designed to be worn once. This limits the availability of affordable clothing to consumers both in utility and style.

Further, if you do find a gem, someone has likely found it before you.

When it comes to resale, the effects of the shift to trendy thrifting are clear. The lost treasures once flooding thrift stores are now being flipped for higher prices on Depop or Poshmark, making it harder for people who rely on thrifting to find affordable options. 

The root cause of the inaccessibility? Companies mercilessly mass-produce and advertise to cover up the harm done to Earth. To put it simply, way too many clothes are produced for the planet’s resources to keep up and fashion houses are patching up their messy seams with cute facades.

Why stitches cannot fix a bad pattern

At the heart of thrifting is the desire to keep usable clothing in circulation to help steward the Earth. 

While large donation centers have been able to curb the amount of waste sent to landfills, if companies and consumers alike fail to reform toxic fashion cycles, the destruction of the planet is still unavoidable.

The reality is clear: Fast fashion has turned a once-sustainable practice into a place to discard fast fashion’s fleeting trends, making it difficult for people to find well-made, affordable pieces and failing to protect the environment.

The solution goes beyond searching for a rare find at the thrift store. It is about tackling the core issue: an industry that values profit over the environment, pumping out trends that cannot even break down before being replaced. 

Until there is a shift culturally and systemically, thrift stores will only continue to reflect the same problem they were initially meant to combat.