Is Fast Fashion Too Damaging to Justify Convenience?

By Brandy Lesline

There is something almost hypnotic about the experience of buying cheap clothes. You click, you scroll, a package arrives in two days, and for about twenty dollars you have something new to wear. It feels harmless. It feels like a deal. And for millions of people around the world, it has become as routine as buying groceries. But underneath the appeal of fast fashion , its speed, its low price, and its relentless novelty , sits a cost that never shows up on the receipt. And when you start to look at that real cost clearly, it becomes very hard to keep calling it a bargain.

The fashion industry is one of the largest polluters on the planet, and fast fashion sits at the most destructive end of it. The production of cheap clothing is extraordinarily water-intensive , it takes roughly 2,700 litres of water to produce a single cotton t-shirt, enough drinking water to sustain one person for nearly three years. Textile dyeing contaminates rivers and groundwater across manufacturing regions in Asia and Africa. Synthetic fabrics shed microplastics with every wash, quietly accumulating in oceans and eventually in the food chain. These are not fringe statistics dug up by activists. They are well-documented realities that the industry has spent considerable energy hoping the public would not connect to the garment sitting in their online cart.

Then there is the human cost, which is perhaps even harder to sit with. Fast fashion's low prices are not a miracle of efficiency. They are the result of wages kept deliberately low, working conditions kept deliberately poor, and labor protections kept deliberately weak in countries where workers have little power to push back. The 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh , which killed over 1,100 garment workers , was not an isolated tragedy. It was a warning that the industry largely absorbed, mourned briefly, and then moved on from. A shirt that costs eight dollars did not get that cheap by accident.

I want to acknowledge something, though, because this conversation tends to go sideways when it does not. Not everyone buying fast fashion is doing so carelessly. For many families, a fifteen-dollar dress is not a frivolous choice , it is the only affordable one. Telling a single mother on a tight budget that she has a moral obligation to spend four times as much on ethically made clothing is not a principled stance. It is a privileged one. Any honest critique of fast fashion has to hold two things at once: the industry's practices are genuinely harmful, and the burden of fixing that should not fall most heavily on the people with the least financial flexibility.

The responsibility belongs, in the first place, with the companies designing the system. Fast fashion brands have mastered the art of manufacturing desire , releasing dozens of micro-collections a year, using social media to make last season's purchase feel embarrassingly outdated, and pricing items so low that throwing them away feels easier than caring for them. This is not consumer weakness. It is an engineered outcome. Regulation that requires greater transparency around supply chains, mandatory environmental reporting, and genuine accountability for labor conditions abroad would do more to shift the industry than any amount of individual guilt.

Still, choices matter, even imperfect ones. Buying less, keeping clothes longer, choosing secondhand where it is accessible and affordable , these habits do not fix the industry, but they do quietly push against the logic that drives it. The most dangerous idea fast fashion has ever sold us is not a dress or a pair of jeans. It is the belief that newness is the same thing as value, and that something cheap enough to discard was worth having in the first place.

So is fast fashion too damaging to justify the convenience? Yes , when that convenience is being subsidized by poisoned rivers, collapsed buildings, and a throwaway culture we have normalised without ever truly choosing. Convenience has its place. But not when the people and places paying for it are the ones who never got to enjoy it.