In recent years, the rush of fast fashion has attracted criticism for its environmental impact and waste. Consumers can order clothes online at very low prices. These garments are often made of synthetic materials (and often in dubious circumstances in terms of worker rights) but are so inexpensive that people can afford to buy many new outfits.
In 2018, environmental historian Adam Rome considered what led us to this moment of hyper-consumption. In an essay on the history of fashion’s environmental impact, Rome proposes that
[f]ashion is creative destruction. When styles change, no-longer-stylish things become useless, even if they still are in perfectly good condition. To avoid embarrassment, the fashion conscious must keep buying into the latest trends, and that potentially endless replacing of the old with the new is a terrible environmental burden.
Today, of course, buying into the latest trends has become even more achievable: knock-offs of high fashion are cheaper than ever, and the low quality of the material and stitching doesn’t matter if customers only intend to wear them once or twice.
And fashion, as a point of consumption, goes beyond clothing, Rome explains.
“[W]e now know that the rising American appetite for coffee, sugar, bananas, rubber, beef, and timber in the twentieth century led to deforestation across the tropics,” he writes. “The next step is to think more deeply about why consumers bought what they bought. What drove consumption? Fashion is a key part of the answer.”
This appetite for sugar, coffee, and tea, which goes back to at least the 1600s, only increased as these goods became more affordable, through efficiencies of production and transport. Indeed, personal transport was another fashion turn, as the arrival of the automobile allowed people to express their taste—and status—through their cars, the designs of which initially didn’t change regularly. The Model T, for example, remained stylistically the same for years.
The firm to lead the shift was General Motors, introducing annual model changes in 1927, and as Rome notes, quoting then-head of GM’s style department, Harley Earl, by the 1950s this practice had become standard.
“Our big job is to hasten obsolescence,” Earl explained in 1955. “In 1934 the average car ownership span was 5 years; now it is 2 years. When it is 1 year, we will have a perfect score.”
Everything we might buy is shaped by cycling trends, as manufacturers have learned to change the range of options more rapidly, that we might be urged to buy replacements.
There was a time when fashion existed but moved at a comparatively more sedate pace.
“By the start of the American Revolution,” Rome writes, “the design of many kinds of apparel changed annually, and some super-fashionable items went in and out of style every month.”
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Now? That cycle moves at warp speed, and the option to stay with the trends has increased our need for storage. All of us in industrial societies own far more clothing than our ancestors. So, we have more hanging space, more shoe racks, and ever-expanding storage needs.
We also treat clothing as disposable.
“Americans throw away 25 billion pounds of textiles a year,” Rome writes. Such
trashed textiles make up about 5 percent of the municipal waste stream. Fast fashion usually is not made to last. Why should it be? The colors fade, the seams split apart, or the fabric becomes worn after a few washings.
We’re becoming more aware of the effects of this today as the amount of microplastics in our environment is being recognized. Some consumers are recognizing the problem, and some producers have turned sustainability into a marketing angle. Patagonia, the outdoor apparel company, started encouraging consumers to buy less over a decade ago, offering repair services and accepting back old clothing donations. In 2012 it launched the “Common Threads Partnership” via “a full-page New York Times ad that showed one of the company’s best-selling jackets,” writes Rome.
(Notably in 2025, this has been replaced with “worn wear,” a reselling program—and the earlier partnership with ebay to resell items is no longer mentioned on their website)
But a true shift to sustainability and limiting consumption has to be a consumer movement, and that hasn’t happened yet.
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“In the past, rebellions against the tyranny of fashion only attracted a minority,” Rome writes, so “they just became countercultural fashion statements. Although sustainable fashion has revolutionary potential, it might become merely a market niche.”
As someone who knits and sews, I’ve encountered groups pledging to only make their own garments, or to buy nothing new—but they’re small.
As Rome concludes, “We need truly to own what we buy. That means having ‘long-term meaningful relationships’ with our clothes instead of a series of flings.”
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