Between 2000 and 2014, clothing production doubled, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. According to Euromonitor International, the number of times an article of clothing is worn before being thrown away has decreased by over one third to the number it was 15 years ago. What is the reason for this change? Planned obsolescence is a strategy often used in business that involves deliberately making sure that a product will become out of date or useless within a certain time period. This can take many forms, from designing software with built-in defects, designing a product with a shorter lifetime, making sure a product is impossible to repair, or by making the style or the program quickly obsolete. This strategy is used by the fashion industry, which uses poor manufacturing quality to ensure that products wear out as quickly as possible, so consumers keep buying. Planned obsolescence, designed to increase profit as much as possible, has already shown detrimental social and environmental impacts.  
Planned obsolescence in fashion is not a completely modern thing, as it might seem; one early example of it occurred in 1939. At the New York World’s Fair, women’s tights called DuPont tights were advertised as “as strong as steel and as fine as a spider’s web.” 64 million were sold, as the women customers loved it. However, the problem arose from it being so durable that women had no reason to buy new tights anymore. Thus, the company asked the designers to create a less durable product, so women would keep replacing their tights. This is a perfect example to show how the people involved in product design deliberately downgrade their own product to be competitive in a market where encouraging consumerism is everyone’s main purpose. Planned obsolescence has positives and negatives: it adds to companies’ profits, but also adds to the ever-growing problem of waste and diminishes the trust of consumers. There are two main types of planned obsolescence: absolute and relative. Absolute obsolescence means that the product can never be used again, because it can no longer fulfill its function. It is completely worn out, broken, or ruined, and needs to be replaced. An example would be a shirt that starts to completely tear with a few washes. Relative obsolescence, however, is more diverse, subtle, and common. Consumers don’t use the product until its lifespan ends, because they believe it has become obsolete before then. This can happen when an article of clothing is no longer trendy, or when it becomes slightly damaged. 
In the modern day, planned obsolescence has only gotten more commonplace with the influence of fast fashion, where consumers are encouraged to buy a large amount of cheap clothing, wear them very few times, and then throw them away. Consumers are buying 5 times more clothing than they did in the 1980s. The classic example of fast fashion is the well-known company Shein, which is designed to make shopping as convenient and cheap as possible for customers, allowing them to constantly look trendy and replace clothes almost as quickly as they were bought. Just 6% of Shein’s inventory stays in stock for more than 90 days. Suppliers in China produce batches of clothes, and Shein ships to 150 countries. If clothes are returned, they are immediately thrown away by the company rather than put back in circulation, because it costs too much. At its height, TikTok influencers would encourage the population to spend money on ‘hauls’, where they would make videos showing them unpacking a large quantity of cheap clothing from online companies such as Shein. If the clothes didn’t fit, or didn’t look like what they seemed online, it was easy to just throw them away, as everything was mass-produced and cost only a few euros. Social media survives through novelty; people want to see new outfits, new clothes, and new content every time they open an app. Thus, trends disappear quickly, sometimes in weeks. “The fast fashion industry is not being propped up by people who need to shop there,” Loach, a student and climate activist says. “It’s being propped up by people who want to wear a new outfit every week, or by influencers who promote people buying huge amounts of clothing.” Gen Z is perhaps the demographic that contributes most to this phenomenon. A 2020 Vogue Business survey of 105 members of Gen Z found that more than 50% of them bought their clothes from known fast fashion brands. 64% of British 16- to 19-year-olds said that they’ve bought clothes they have never worn, compared to 44% of all adults surveyed. Through the influence of social media, influencers, and the pressure to stay trendy, Gen Z is massively contributing to an unethical, unsustainable industry, harming both people and the environment. 
The environmental impacts of planned obsolescence in fashion are severe and often mentioned. Factories produce more and more clothes to meet demand, adding to pollution. People throw away clothes that have begun to wear out quickly, or clothes that are no longer trendy, which add to waste in landfills. The UNCTD considers the fashion industry to be the second-biggest polluter after petroleum. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a UK based charity, says that the equivalent of a garbage truck full of clothes is thrown away as trash in landfills or is incinerated every second. The World Bank states that 10% of global carbon emissions are caused by the clothing industry, which is more than all the emissions from international flights and maritime shipping together. 85% of all clothing is dumped in landfills every year. The fashion industry is responsible for 20% of industrial water pollution around the world. This pollution, waste and detrimental environmental impact comes from one of the most unnecessary and most superficial industries today: the fashion industry. All these consequences come from corporations' desire to make profits through selling poor-quality products, or from manipulating people into buying new clothes over and over again to stay on trend.  
The ethical costs of the fashion industry are devastating and not completely hidden. Most of the world’s fashion brands use sweatshops in order to mass produce incredibly cheap clothing. Sweatshops are defined as ‘a factory or workshop, especially in the clothing industry, where manual workers are employed at very low wages for long hours and under poor conditions’. For clothing to be so cheap, the sweatshop workers are greatly exploited. This comes in the form of making them work long hours, in terrible conditions, without rest days, and with incredibly low pay. Because these brands are only interested in their own profit, the buildings where their clothes are produced are extremely unsafe: with barred windows and a lack of fire safety. With these brands cutting corners like this, it is not a stretch of the imagination to assume that horrible accidents will happen, claiming lives. For example, in 2013, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, an eight-story garment complex called Rana Plaza Factory collapsed, killing 1,000 and injuring 2,500. In 2012, also in Bangladesh, a factory fire killed 112 people. Out of 75 million factory workers worldwide working for the fashion industry, less than 2% of them make a living wage. The European Parliament has described the conditions of the sweatshop workers in Asia as ‘slave labor’. A lot of workers work 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, and because the job requires limited skill, children are often exploited as well. These ethical implications of the fashion industry are almost impossible to ignore, as they cause suffering and exploitation all around the world. 
Planned obsolescence is much more than a business practice designed to earn companies' profits: it is a driving force in the machine of fast fashion. As the years pass, its impact on our environment and people all around the world grows. Considering the millions of people suffering in sweatshops to mass produce cheap clothing, and considering the polluted water, air, and ever-increasing landfills, one question arises: is it worth it?