With the new year here, the biggest question you hear is, what are the new fashion trends of the year? Or are we bringing something back into style? Are certain colors and patterns out, and so last year? What brands are gonna have all the trendy and cute clothes? Is camo still cute? Are bows tacky now? Are loafers coming into style? Is lace or mesh gonna be the fabric of the year? While there are so many questions on fashion trends and what’s sheek and what stinks in 2026, people are losing sight of an even bigger topic and problem in the fashion world. Overconsumption. While we all love a good micro trend, think about the thousands of clothes that get thrown out and end up in landfills. Fast fashion and consumerism have been issues for years and only plan to get worse. So here are some facts on fast fashion and overconsumption of clothes to not only educate you on it, but to motivate you to help bring the rate of textile waste in landfills down. So we can all make a positive change in the ecosystem and in the fashion industry.
First and foremost, let’s talk about micro trends, also known as algorithm dressing. What is a micro trend? They are short lived fashion trends, usually originating from social media, specifically TikTok. With a trend, there is usually an aesthetic that trendy clothing items go with. For example, clean girl, brat summer, cottage core, trad wife, soccer mom core. A micro trend typically lasts around 3-5 months and then fades pretty fast after that. Once something becomes trendy, every brand tries to include those styles in its selection of items, and next thing you know, those trends are inescapable for the next couple of months. These are brands from Hollister to Walmart to Shein. I feel as though micro trends are pushed in every teen’s face. For example, this last year, every shopping window had either bows or camo incorporated with their clothing options. This almost leads the trend to die out sooner, because it makes the trend less unique and cool. As teens and young adults, we want to stand out with our style, making us our own person compared to others. Overall, micro trends are a big part of pop culture, and they positively and negatively impact our society. It’s fun to discover ourselves and learn about self expression through clothing and trying new things out. With that, though algorithm dressing causes over-consumerism throughout the whole world, which plays a huge role in our ecosystem, leading to 92 million tons of textile waste ending up in landfills per year. Making 85 percent of clothing meet this fate. Research says that these rates are only plan to go up if we don’t make a change.
With all these brands running very successful companies and stores, let’s take a deeper look into the background of how they maintain selling millions of dollars’ worth of items in a short time span.
You probably have heard the term fast fashion, and heard that it’s horrible when it comes to overconsumption. Which is true, but did you know you’re most likely shopping from a fast fashion brand? People typically think of brands like Shein and Temu when talking about fast fashion, mainly because of the super cheap prices on their website and the cheaply made and not long lasting items. But brands like Hollister, Gap, and Urban Outfitters are fast fashion brands too.
While these brands are super cute and comfy to wear, it’s important to remember what the outcome is gonna be in the future. I’m not saying not to buy from these brands, I’m saying we can find other ways around the system to still wear cute, trendy clothes without hurting our ecosystem.
Something a lot of people overlook about fast fashion is how we sustain the amount of clothing being produced to keep up with the loads of fashion trends and overconsumption. In this employed industry, there are around 300 to 430 million factory workers worldwide, yet less than 2% earn a living wage. Also, these workers work around 10 to 16 hours a day, six days a week. Also, 80% of apparel is made by young women between the ages of 18 and 24. There are also a lot of underpaid and over worked children workers; approximately 100 to 160 million children are working in the textile making industry.
With all of this fast fashion and overconsumption talk, let’s take a moment to look at the aftermath of all of that. The amount of waste and chemicals that end up in our landfills and oceans that is due to fashion. Some clothing brands use synthetic materials, like polyester and nylon. These materials are even worse for our earth because these chemicals in the clothing are rotting and destroying nature. Also, did you know that textile dyeing is the world’s second-largest polluter of water? Nearly 10 percent of microplastics end up in the ocean each year from textiles. Not only are we polluting our oceans, but we also use a lot of water to make our clothing. It takes 20,000 liters of water to produce 1 kilogram of cotton. Also, to make these clothing items, we are putting tons of chemicals and nasty stuff in the air from the millions of factors trying to keep up with the demand for fashion. These rates only plan to get worse, and eventually, we won’t have clean oceans at all, or we will not have the room in landfills to dump clothing into. We need to make a change as a society and find ways to reduce or at least stop these rates from rising, and we can.
Here are ways to make a change and put your green thumb up. So we can make a change in our environment and protect our Earth.
The perks of thrifting! Thrifting your clothes and donating them to a thrift store can be very beneficial to slow down the textile waste rates in landfills. While it would never deduct the rates, it would totally pause these rates if we all participated in thrifting. Donating your clothes would prevent clothing from being thrown away. Your clothing would also be resold at a way more affordable price, which, given our economic rates, would be more suitable for people to buy clothing. By donating, we would also have to make sure that we are buying from thrift stores, because if the stores are overpacked with clothing, eventually they would have to start dumping those clothes into landfills. In conclusion, thrifting is actually quite fun, you can find really cool and trendy clothes, or even clothes that could be considered vintage. With that, also if we decide to purchase from thrift stores, over fast fashion companies, this would lower the demand for new clothing to be made, leading us to using less resources and putting less chemicals into the air to make clothes.
Other ways to help this problem are buying better quality clothes, like clothes made of cotton and linen that break down naturally, rather than synthetic materials that don’t. Focus on buying quality over quantity. Ensuring that we are buying clothing that will last longer. Another thing is to upcycle your clothing that you don’t care for or is damaged. Add some dye or match work to it, to keep it unique or trendy. You may not know this, but there are recycling bins for clothes specifically. These are often found near schools, community centers, and retailers like Goodwill. The clothing will either be sent to a thrift store or recycled properly.
Overall, the fashion industry is damaging our planet and causing some crazy consumerism in our country. Only you can be the change. So be the change, so we can still appreciate fashion without making it into a landfill fashion disaster.
https://www.greenpeace.org/aotearoa/story/the-dark-side-of-fast-fashion/
https://greenamerica.org/unraveling-fashion-industry/what-really-happens-unwanted-clothes
https://earth.org/statistics-about-fast-fashion-waste/
