Being offered a shiny apple of fast fashion leads to a rotten garden of human rights violations.įashion Nova partners with Instagram influencers and encourages other users to tag and promote the. And for the middle class of America, living the Kardashian lifestyle is an ideal that once seemed so far out of reach, the average consumer’s torment of Tantalus. They’ve jumped on influencer marketing that creates an aspirational aesthetic that is actually attainable. Influencer marketing and the false sense of moralityįashion Nova has tapped into a goldmine. And it can only continue to be that messed up as long as we choose to ignore it. It’s an easy lie to believe that buying American-made over Chinese-made earns us enough Good Place points, but the system is more complicated than that. The American factories they use owe over $3.8 million in wages to workers, with those same workers making an average of $2.77 an hour.Īll this is bad, yes, but we can’t pretend it’s anything new. The recent New York Times article on Fashion Nova takes that scandal a step further by acknowledging that the fast fashion brand may be indeed using American-based labor, but that labor is unethical as heck. While American Apparel had long been known for their “Made in the USA” claims, that previously long-held perception was no more, as they now used factories primarily in the Caribbean and Central America, and the public noticed. Gildan Activewear (known better to the public for purchasing American Apparel) was one of the first fast fashion brands to come under the microscope after that purchase. Whether documented or not, do we care about these people? Does the average consumer - the target demographic of the fast fashion industry - care that their trendy new boots were paid for with pennies, putting a literal dollar value on a worker's life? Or does that $25 price point make it worth it? The issue of undocumented immigrants will always be a political one, but at the end of the day it's a matter of questioning the value of a human life. According to California Bureau of Labor Statistics, of the over 46,000 individuals who make up Los Angeles’s second-largest industry (the so-called “cut-and-sew” labor force) a whopping 71% are immigrants. The majority of this sweatshop workforce is, unsurprisingly, comprised of undocumented immigrants who are left with few other choices for work. The lofty goal of making what amounts to $5 an hour is in reality a pipe dream for them. It’s not in China, but in America that workers put in grueling 12 hour days, making garments that will be sold for anywhere from $5 to $75 for around three cents apiece paid out. Los Angeles is a biting dichotomy: activists and influencers shout about human rights, meanwhile sweatshops are a dirty little secret. Los Angeles is the ground floor of fast fashion’s dirty “secret”īut fast fashion’s dark side is happening in our own backyard, and you have to wonder whether or not anyone even cares.
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