Dressing Minds – The Environmental Crisis of Fashion

Fashion is one of the most polluting industries in the world, and fast fashion multinationals have built their empires in unsustainable ways. But the responsibility is not theirs alone.

It is estimated that the average consumer buys around 53 new garments a year, and each of them is worn only 7 times before being discarded. 50% of today’s fast fashion is thrown away a year after purchase, often ending up in massive natural landfills, like the Atacama Desert in Chile, where mafias burn the waste at night to erase the traces, causing irreversible environmental and toxic damage.

Brands like Shein, Temu, and fast fashion in general encourage us to make impulsive purchases, drawn in by the low prices of their products, without stopping to think why they’re so cheap: labor exploitation, poor-quality fabrics, stolen designs from other brands, etc.

These unsustainable and compulsive consumer habits , where trends change rapidly, driven by fleeting social pressure, aspirational influencer videos on social media telling us we “need” it, and a consumer system based on planned obsolescence , lead us to feel that even with a closet full of clothes, we never know what to wear.
Fashion is culture, it’s identity, it’s expression, it’s politics, it’s rebellion, but it’s also consumerism, pollution, and exploitation…

As African-American designer Dapper Dan says, fashion is not just about dressing bodies, but also about dressing minds. That’s why, before buying a piece of clothing, we should ask ourselves: Will I really wear it many times? Do I need it? Who made it? And under what conditions? Maybe then we’ll realize that we don’t need to keep buying so many things…

Recycling and reusing what already exists is a way to take care of our world, far from this empire of polyester and waste.
At the ERAM Fashion Degree, we train our students to dress their minds, not just their bodies.

Judit Vidella

Teacher and Researcher in the Escola Universitaria de les Arts ERAM- UdG