The clothes we barely wear and the industry that wants us to keep buying

Before recording a podcast named ‘BizBro’ which I host, I have developed an unexpected problem…what to wear.

About 35 episodes of the BizBro podcast have been released, and as the number has grown, so has this peculiar pressure. I find myself trying to remember which shirt appeared in which episode. Somewhere in the back of my mind is the instruction: Don't wear the same thing on camera twice.

It is a trivial anxiety. It is also an extraordinarily profitable one.

The modern fashion industry has spent decades weakening the idea that clothes are durable possessions. Instead, they have increasingly become disposable expressions of identity, attached not merely to seasons but to occasions, photographs, social media posts and fleeting trends.

The phenomenon is hardly confined to podcast hosts. Surveys have suggested that substantial numbers of consumers consider clothes old after wearing them only a handful of times. Some young consumers have reported avoiding being photographed twice in the same outfit, a particularly revealing measure of how social media has altered the economics of the wardrobe.

Clothes once had seasons. Now fashion companies increasingly have calendars.

Traditionally, the industry revolved around a small number of collections, particularly summer and winter. Fast-fashion retailers helped dismantle that model, accelerating production cycles until new styles could appear every few weeks — sometimes every few days. 

The industry effectively created dozens of "micro-seasons," ensuring that what looked current last month could feel dated this month. Bangladesh has its own version of this expanding calendar.

The ‘clothing’ seasons

Pahela Baishakh has become an increasingly elaborate fashion occasion. February 21, March 26 and December 16 have distinct clothing aesthetics. The July Revolution is already generating its own visual language and designs.

There is nothing inherently wrong with dressing for celebrations. The commercial logic, however, is difficult to miss: more occasions mean more reasons to sell clothes. Buy for Baishakh. Buy for Eid. Buy for Victory Day. Buy because summer has arrived. Buy because winter has arrived. Buy because the photograph will go on Facebook.

Eventually, need becomes almost irrelevant.

This is one of fast fashion's greatest achievements. It did not simply become more efficient at satisfying demand. It became extraordinarily effective at manufacturing demand.

The result is an apparel industry producing clothes on a scale that would have been difficult to imagine a few generations ago. Estimates commonly put global garment production at roughly 100 billion items or more annually, though precise figures vary considerably. What is beyond dispute is that production has increased dramatically while the period for which many garments are kept has shortened.

For Bangladesh, this creates an uncomfortable contradiction.

The country is one of the world's great beneficiaries of the global apparel trade. Garments transformed its export economy, created millions of jobs and brought large numbers of women into formal employment.

But Bangladesh is also absorbing some of the environmental costs of satisfying the world's appetite for cheap clothing.

Drive through garment-producing belts around Dhaka and the consequences are visible. Industrial pollution has placed enormous pressure on rivers, canals and other water bodies. Textile production is also water-intensive. One widely cited estimate puts the water footprint of a cotton T-shirt at roughly 2,700 liters. A pair of jeans can require thousands of liters more.

The precise footprint varies enormously according to the cotton, factory, dyeing process and methodology used. But the broader problem does not. Cheap clothes are not actually cheap. Part of their price has simply been moved somewhere else.

The hidden costs

A T-shirt may cost a consumer 300 taka. Its price tag does not show the water consumed to produce its fibers, the chemicals used to dye it, the energy required to manufacture and transport it, or the pollution left behind.

Bangladesh knows this accounting trick particularly well. Then there is plastic.

Polyester, nylon and acrylic have become fundamental to inexpensive fashion, and all are synthetic materials derived from fossil fuels. Washing them releases microscopic fibers. Those fibers enter wastewater systems and eventually rivers and oceans.

The shirt may look like cloth. At the molecular level, part of the modern wardrobe is plastic. And production is only half the problem. The other half begins when consumers decide that perfectly usable clothes are no longer worth wearing.

The global trade in secondhand clothing is frequently presented as an exercise in reuse and charity. Sometimes it is. But it can also function as a waste-disposal system in which richer societies export enormous quantities of unwanted garments to poorer countries.

The parallel with shipbreaking is hard to ignore. Wealthier economies enjoy much of a product's useful life; poorer countries are left to extract whatever value remains and deal with the waste.

Many discarded garments cannot be economically recycled. Synthetic fibers can persist for generations after they reach landfills. Others are burned, shifting the environmental cost from soil to air.

Bangladesh can therefore find itself at both ends of the fast-fashion chain: producing inexpensive clothing under immense environmental pressure and receiving unwanted clothing after consumers elsewhere have finished with it.

This raises another question that is rarely discussed when Bangladesh celebrates its garment-export numbers. Why is so much clothing manufactured here in the first place?

Cheap labor is an obvious answer, but it is not the only one. Garment production also pushes many environmental costs away from consumers in wealthy markets. Dyeing, washing and finishing take place beside Bangladeshi communities rather than European or American ones. The pollution is geographically separated from the wardrobe it helped create.

The benefits of the industry are real, and dismissing them would be simplistic. Garments helped industrialize Bangladesh and provided employment on a scale few other sectors could have achieved.

But the celebratory narrative can obscure who captures the greatest value.

Low-hanging fruits 

Bangladesh performs much of the manufacturing while higher-value activities — branding, design, marketing and retail — frequently remain elsewhere. Factories must import machinery and, in many cases, raw materials. Meanwhile, financial irregularities including trade misinvoicing have long been identified as avenues through which capital can leave developing economies.

Bangladesh gets jobs, wages and export earnings. It also gets polluted rivers. The global brands get something considerably easier to market.

There is no single policy capable of dismantling this system. Governments can enforce environmental standards. Manufacturers can improve wastewater treatment. Brands can be forced to disclose supply chains and assume greater responsibility for waste. Recycling technologies can improve.

But consumers possess one weapon requiring neither legislation nor technology. They can stop buying so much. Consider that 300 taka T-shirt again. The question should not merely be whether 300 taka is affordable. It should be whether another T-shirt is necessary.

That distinction — between affordability and necessity — is precisely what fast fashion has worked so successfully to erase. A second change may be even easier: repeat your clothes.

Wear the same shirt to another party. Put the same dress on Instagram again. Attend three weddings in the same panjabi. Record several podcast episodes wearing the same T-shirt.

There should be nothing embarrassing about this. Indeed, perhaps the embarrassing thing is an economic culture that persuaded us otherwise.

I have begun considering a uniform of sorts for my own podcast appearances: two or three identical T-shirts, perhaps in the same color, worn repeatedly. Mark Zuckerberg may have popularized the image of the technology executive who dresses almost identically every day, but the principle is older and simpler than Silicon Valley.

Clothes are supposed to be worn. There is another old idea worth recovering: repair them.

"A stitch in time saves nine" survives as a metaphor long after many people have forgotten its literal meaning. Repair a small tear now because it will become a larger tear later.

Earlier generations in Bangladesh understood this economy instinctively. A father's shirt could pass to his eldest son and then to a younger brother. A sari could become a kameez. The kameez could be cut into clothing for a child. When the fabric could no longer be worn, it might migrate to the kitchen as a cleaning rag.

Nothing about this was fashionable. Almost nothing was wasted. Modern consumer culture taught us to regard such practices as evidence of scarcity. They may increasingly look like evidence of common sense.

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Sagor Hasnath is a former government employee turned-entrepreneur. He is the CEO of Ahlan Agro