“The fashion industry produces over 100 billion garments every year and sends 92 million tonnes of them to landfill. “
“Every time you wash a single synthetic garment (like a polyester gym shirt or an acrylic sweater), it sheds up to 7,00,000 microplastic fibers.”
It begins with a scroll.
You notice this new dress — fashionable & a perfect outfit for your Saturday night Instagram. Add to cart. Checkout. Pose. Post. Forget. And just like that, one more outfit finds its place in the heap of “one-and-done”.
Fast fashion offers instant glamour, but behind that facilitation of glamour lies a heavy burden.
Wastage: The Trend That Never Finishes
Each second, a truckload of textile rubbish is incinerated or dumped somewhere in the world. Microplastics from man-made clothing seep into oceans.
Colors bleed into rivers. The fashion cycle turns faster than the seasons, and so does the mountain of abandoned fabric. What’s “last season” for us is a lifetime of harm to the planet.
Culture, Lost in the Clearance Sale
Remember the beauty of handwoven cotton sarees, ikkat prints, or kurtas? They’re being gradually replaced by mass-produced copies that contain none of their spirit.
When we pursue trends, we forget traditions. Centuries of Indian artisanship – block printing, natural dyeing, embroidery are being lost, overwhelmed by an ocean of homogeny.
What once spoke volumes of heritage now goes onto a neat “Buy 2, Get 1” shelf.
From Expression to Expectation
Fast fashion doesn’t drain landfills, it drains confidence. The imperative to continue consuming, to be “on trend,” perpetuates insecurity. It is ironic that fashion was never intended to make people feel small.
Fashion started as a form of self-expression, a way of honouring uniqueness and culture.
Yet as we have attempted to keep up, we have sacrificed creativity for convenience; we have sacrificed confidence for comparison. The pleasure of dressing up has turned into anxiety over staying relevant.
Perhaps that’s where we ought to stop and think — we ought to rediscover the joy of wearing something that feels like us instead of something that feels like everyone else.
It’s Time to Slow the Stitch Down
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