By Estefanía Camacho

The other day I read someone saying that their excess clothes and plastic didn’t really count as fast fashion if they didn’t throw them away. In a way, they had a point — but it also completely ignores how we got here in the first place. This year I wrote a feature piece about what fast fashion is, where and how it started, and what we can actually do about it. That helped me understand the whole know-how behind it.

Buying clothes and simply not throwing them out is not really the answer. Even Marcelo Claure, the global vice president of the Chinese ultra fast-fashion company, told El Universal that they manufacture only 100 to 200 units of each product and then increase production depending on sales. Claure also confirmed that Mexico and Brazil are among its top five global markets, after the United States.

If you’re unsure what fast fashion means to this day, it’s basically when companies copy high-fashion designs and reproduce them on a massive scale, at low cost, using mainly outsourced labor — all within 15 days or even less.

The impact of imports on Mexico’s textile industry
This is true in the United Kingdom and in Mexico. Everything depends on how each country regulates the entry — and the disposal — of imported goods, especially in industries it could produce itself. So with lax rules for textile imports, it’s not surprising that the national industry has declined, just as it has in countries in the Global South like Chile, Ghana, or Kenya.

Mexico’s INEGI (National Institute of Statistics and Geography) documented this in May 2024: between 1995 and 2000, the textile and clothing industry’s GDP grew an average of 6.5% per year, boosted by NAFTA. But in 2001 — the year China joined the World Trade Organization — that momentum dropped sharply and stayed low for the next decade.

Recently, while researching autonomous vehicle manufacturing, I realized something funny: the cars aren’t even on the roads yet, and developers are already planning how they’ll be disposed of at least a century from now. Meanwhile, the textile industry — especially fast fashion — never thought this way about clothes. Even the cement industry has disposal solutions.

Measures against fast fashion: tariffs and environmental proposals
In Mexico, digital access is still uneven, but you’ll still find second-hand shops almost anywhere with a sign that says, “We take Shein orders here.”

At the end of 2024, President Claudia Sheinbaum announced a temporary 35% tariff on textile imports from countries without free trade agreements. On the surface, it looks like part of a larger tariff war with China, but internally it also affects how Shein orders arrive in Mexico.

This basically ends the tax loophole that allowed imports under $50 USD to skip duties.
Rafael Zaga, president of the National Chamber of the Textile Industry, told Forbes that the Mexican textile sector loses $3.2 billion per year due to imports from online platforms like Shein. China is the main origin of Mexico’s textile imports (35.4%), followed by the United States (24.6%).

Mexico City: new practices for collecting textile waste
Denmark, for example, collects clothing directly from people’s homes and sends it to companies that sort what can be reused or recycled — but only after an awareness campaign that teaches households how to prepare the textiles. It’s still a very new system: it only began in July 2023.

Mexico City recently joined other regions working to properly collect textile waste. In September 2025, Mexico City’s Congress approved changes to the Solid Waste Law to officially recognize textile waste. It also authorized the Ministry of the Environment to create agreements with the industry to promote collection, treatment, recycling, reuse, and finally the disposal of textile waste. And, just like Denmark, it plans to promote collection programs through awareness campaigns on proper sorting.

In Europe, a person bought an average of 6 kilos of new clothes per year in 2020. And in Mexico City alone, 3.7 billion tons of textile waste are discarded each year, including bedding and curtains.

But these proposals will also need to consider the problems that other Global North countries have already faced with parts of this process. For example, the sorting phase requires workers who specialize in this job, and these tasks are usually done by nonprofits or private companies with their own interests because it’s minimized.

Europe sends much of its textile waste to sorting centers located in countries with lower labor costs, mainly in Eastern Europe or the Middle East. And that matters because the better this sorting process is, the more opportunities there are for reuse, resale, and recycling, but if this specialized work depends on underpaid workers, it might not be as useful or advantageous as we urgently need it to be.

Fast fashion, fast rewind
The term fast fashion is basically the same age as Taylor Swift — it was coined by a journalist in New York in 1989, when Zara opened its first store in that city and outside Spain for the first time. So, if you think about it that way, reversing this practice is not impossible; it’s not like we’ve been overconsuming for centuries.

The woman online who said she wasn’t contributing to pollution as long as she didn’t throw clothes away wasn’t totally wrong: wearing an item as many times as possible is the first solution given when trying to tackle this situation. The problem is that fast-fashion materials are lower quality so the cycle continues, lasts less, and even pollutes when washed.

But that doesn’t mean the garment can’t get a second life. You can repurpose it, mend it, redesign it, or give it another cycle. And if you’re part of the group that uses their clothes 37% less before discarding them, consider selling them on digital platforms or donating them if they’re still in good condition.

And if you finally decide the item is trash — even after waiting for it to cross the ocean, accumulate CO₂ emissions by air, sea, and land — then, before tossing it with everything else, check for local textile recycling centers or ask your waste collector if you can separate it.
Meanwhile, we’re also waiting for governments to adopt stronger measures, like the ones proposed in France, which would require fast-fashion companies to display environmental disclaimers on their websites or set a limit on how many new items they can upload per day, as well as their marketing.

In Mexico –where we don’t need a lot of justifications to keep on partying– we know this famous phrase first told by rancheras singer Vicente Fernández: “Mientras sigan aplaudiendo, yo sigo cantando” which means “as long as you keep clapping, I’ll keep singing”. It reminds me of the fast fashion cycle and how it sometimes feels like companies think exactly like Chente: “as long as you keep buying, I’ll keep producing.”

Estefanía Camacho is a freelance Mexican journalist working across media and digital magazines. She is a specialist in gender, SMEs, economics, and business.