Buying reusable items in bulk goes directly against what was originally an environmentally cautious purchase. This standard of having every variation of a beloved reusable water bottle has become worse than simply using a plastic water bottle multiple times.
Working at Target, I’ve witnessed the reusable water bottle craze first hand. For Valentine’s Day the company Stanley released a limited edition pink and red water bottle. People became unhinged over this, some even buying up to seven or eight bottles. The majority of people partaking in the new Stanley had already owned several other variants of the exact same water bottle.
The water bottle industry isn’t the only area in which amoral practices have increased in past years. Fast fashion, an unethical business implementation of producing cheap clothing items while not paying employees their dues and in a lot of cases using child labor, has been more acceptable in American society as of recent.
A few major brands guilty of fast fashion practices include Shein, Temu, ZARA, Amazon, and so many more. Cycling through fashion so quickly has led big brands to decrease the quality of their clothing, while increasing the price at the same time. This has had an astronomically terrible impact on climate change.
I feel another reason fast fashion has become socially acceptable is with posting on and consuming social media, each individual person has become their own brand. This also ties in with the rapid changing of trends.
Having to name every little trend and aesthetic is incredibly damaging in the long run, even though it seems harmless. A few of these trends are aesthetics marketed toward teenage girls: vanilla girls, clean girls, coquette girls, old money, mob wife, indie city girl, coastal granddaughter, and eclectic grandpa. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The need to categorize every little outfit or wardrobe leads to a loss of self and instead pushes teenagers to find value in materialistic items, instead of building a sustainable wardrobe they actually like. This ties back into fast fashion; styles going in and out of popularity rapidly causes fashion businesses to cut corners to keep up with changes.
