by Avery Prudenti ‘22

The app Tik Tok has become one of the most popular social media platforms with around 732 million monthly active users globally. Along with Instagram and Pinterest, Tik Tok has created a way for teenagers and young adults alike to share their creativity, especially when it comes to fashion. Now that fashion has become reliant on social media, style trends have become increasingly fast paced as well. In the past, fashion trends would slowly emerge through marketing campaigns, fashion publications, shows, and celebrity endorsements. Nowadays, styles can make their way across the country, or even around the world, with the click of a button.

Social media has impacted fashion so much because consumers on these apps crave lifestyle and fashion content to inspire them. It is believed that these consumers are now “buying a third more clothes now than they were 4 years ago,” states the Ethical Fashion Forum (EFF). These numbers are expected to continue rising. As people are buying more clothing at rapid paces, stores are mass producing more clothing than ever before as the number of garments produced annually “has doubled since 2000 and exceeded 100 billion for the first time in 2014,” states McKinsey Sustainability, a company that works with brands on ethical, sustainable products. These increases in the mass production of clothes can be linked to an increase in social media’s influence. Steff Yotka from Vogue wrote that the most popular brand of 2018 “was Fashion Nova, which has never held a fashion show.” These brands are able to gain popularity through apps like Tik Tok instead of the traditional ways of the past.

The rapid paced form of fashion has made it increasingly difficult for clothing stores and brands to keep up with them, because their production is not fast enough. This has allowed fast fashion brands like Shein and Forever 21 to thrive because they are the types of stores that can produce these trends before they are quickly replaced. Brands like Shien have been criticized as being unethical for some time now. Shien has been accused multiple times of stealing designs from small businesses and selling them for cheaper prices. One of these situations occurred in 2017, when a model/influencer Felicity Hayward accused Shein of copying her brand. This is not Shein’s only controversy, and the brand has also been under fire for mistakenly selling Nazi swastika neclaces last year. Additionally, there have also been rumors of fast fashion brands not paying their workers minimum wage and participating in child labor.

The fast fashion boom may not seem bad at first with inexpensive clothing delivered to the door within days, but these brands have a serious impact on the environment. Most fast fashion brands use synthetic fabrics, like polyester, because they are cheap materials that can be made into so many different things. These synthetic materials make up around 35 percent of all microplastics found in the ocean. In addition, when these plastics finally break down in the ocean, “It creates a toxic substance with a harmful impact on the marine ecosystems,” states Ngan Le in “The Impact of Fast Fashion on the Environment” by the Princeton Student Climate Initiative. These harmful chemicals include bisphenol A (BPA) and PS oligomer, which can be potentially very harmful towards sea and human life.

These fast fashion industries are unsustainable as they are seriously harmful towards the environment, yet people still use them because they are affordable. Often they are the only ones who can keep up with the fast paced fashion trends that exist through social media outlets like Tik Tok and Pinterest, so people turn to them when they want to buy clothes from the latest trend.