Is Halara Fast Fashion?
It doesn’t matter where on Earth you live, if you are a fitness geek who wants to keep in shape or as an athlete then you might need specialized activewear for the gym. You can wear these dresses during hardcore gym time or for a little morning jogging. They are versatile enough to be worn for fashion as well! And for these types of activewear, you may have already relied upon Halara.
They offer a great amount of sporty active wear which is great for everyday use. If you use TikTok and Instagram then you may have been bombarded with Halara’s influencing ads and people dancing and wearing their leggings. But alongside selling activewear, is Halara fast-fashion? That is what we are here to find out! So let’s take a deep into all things fast fashion and if Halara matches those descriptions.
Key Takeaways
- Some of the fast-fashioned brands have created as many as ’52 micro seasons’. Meaning a newly designed dress every week.
- The fast-fashioned clothing industry is influencing its customers to buy newly designed clothes that are unnecessary for humans and nature.
- Fast fashion creates an immense amount of clothing that ended up in landfills and exploits workers by making them work faster to create more and more clothes, in a short time.
Halara: Its Journey
Halara is a Greek word that has the literal meaning of ‘Take it easy’ and has an additional meaning of ‘make it fun’. Halara was founded during the start of the pandemic, in 2020 by the company CEO Joyce Zhang and it is based out of Hong Kong. She set up the company to provide clothing for people who may to want exercise at home during this time. She took the perfect advantage of this situation by offering them a complete active wear solution at a cheap price.
Halara makes sure that its clients are buying high-quality clothes by having them made by the same factories as well-known activewear brands like Reebok and Adidas.
Is Halara A Fast Fashion Brand?
Usually, the fashion industry brings out their fashion designs keeping four seasons in their mind. But some of the fast-fashioned brands have created as many as ’52 micro seasons’. That’s insanely huge! That amounts to a new dress every week of the year. This is one of the clearest signs of a fast fashion brand.
Though Halara doesn’t bring that amount of new designs, they still offer quite a lot of new designs in regular intervals and thus too in big quantities. Like any other fast-fashion company, they prefer ‘Sales’ over anything. Halara’s clothes are largely made with synthetic fabrics thus they are durable which makes them suitable for wear during your exercise. But still, Halara tends to bring newer clothing much more often and making the consumers influenced to buy them unnecessarily.
Halara creates a ton of activewear apparel fast and sells it for a reasonable price. Their business model is to ensure a short turnaround time for new arrivals so they can ship out new clothing which creates an excess of clothing that is often discarded after a few months.
Halara doesn’t declare their product sourcing countries but as it is a China-based brand as China doesn’t have a good reputation for labor law enforcement thus creating a cloud of suspiciousness of enforcing the workers to work long hours in not so moderate workplaces, without being paid enough wages.
Most of Halara’s clothing criticism generally comes from its poor selection of sizes for plus-sized consumers, as some critics have noted.
How to Measure A Brand If It Is Fast Fashion?
Every fashion brand, as we’ve already established, eventually wants you to spend more. Fast fashion is not so much a gray area as it is a spectrum of how a brand promotes and pushes its selling agenda. But still, there are a few criteria by taking them into account a brand can be judged as Fast Fashioning.
Instant trendy products
A fast-fashioned brand tends to bring trends in its designs very often. Sometimes they keep the customer’s feedback and choose randomly over the trendy things that are happening around in social media. This means there is now and then a new trendy dress is out in the market. Sometimes they are catchy and fun to wear but most of the time they are just bizarre, a waste of time and money.
Launches new products so often
As mentioned earlier, a fast fashioned brand launched new products very often. Though in the fashion world, there are usually 4 prime seasons. Summer-Spring- Autumn-Winter, but the fast-fashioned brands have micro-seasoned them to as many as 52 seasons which means new designs in almost every week (or even too often). This makes the customers confused between what they need and what they are buying.
Lacks transparency
Another noticeable characteristic of a fast fashioned brand is that they tend to keep silent on the basic ethical information they were supposed to share publicly for the consumers to judge them on the moral ground if they want to buy from them or not. Such information’s what type of material they are using to make the products, if they are sustainable, if they are nature friendly, the factories they are being made in our maintaining labor and workplace laws properly, etc.
Is Fast Fashion Bad?
Undoubtedly, Fast Faison is a bad practice by any means. It doesn’t only make the brands richer by making the consumers confused to buy newer designs even though they don’t need them. It has both environmental and financial drawbacks of fast fashioning. Some of them are as follows:
Ends up in landfills
Every year, Americans throw away 12.8 million tons of textiles – an incredible 80 pounds for every man, woman, and child. Fast fashion always prioritizes quantity over quality. That means every fast fashioning item you are buying has less chance of likely being used for a long time. As new trends will come or due to the cheap manufacturing materials the clothing items will rip, lose shape, and pill much more easily. Almost all textile items are barely recyclable, meaning once you are done with using them you will throw them in the trash bin or randomly any place and they will eventually end up in the landfills- unrecycled, untaken care of.
Pollutes river & ocean
As mentioned earlier the huge stockpile of rarely used fast fashioned cloths will make your wardrobe jam-packed and you will eventually throw them away thinking you got rid of them but they may end up in the waterways. One major reason for river water pollution is the untreated chemical and other hazardous materials mixed water released by the textile mill and factories directly into the river ways threatens the natural ecosystem of the river and makes it inhabitable for the fish, plants, and other living organisms used to live there. These polluted waters then mixed with sea waters and contaminated them too in the process.
Uses natural resources
Fast fashion companies use a tremendous quantity of water to make clothing at such a rapid rate. An estimated 93 billion cubic meters of water are used annually in the making of textiles. That Americans use an average of 90 gallons of water per day, which is far more than the global average. That equates to approximately 750 million individuals could have to avail of necessary water per day.
Put health in Harm’s way
Fast fashioning brands use cheap materials like plastics, nylon, spandex, polyester, and acrylic to provide the clothing at a cheaper price to you. These materials often contain hazardous chemicals for the human body. While used when they are being washed these chemicals wash off from the clothes and one way or another come in contact with the human body. Causing diseases like asthma, bronchitis, autoimmune disorders, etc.
Exploits workers
Most of the Europe and American brands don’t manufactures their goods on their own. Rather they opt for third-party manufacturers to make for them. Countries like China, India, Vietnam, and Bangladesh have cheap labor, meaning cutting the cost even further. As the living standard is much lower in these countries meaning the brands could easily provide fair wages to them even after cutting costs. This allows these companies to turn a blind eye to the unethical practices required to produce so much, so quickly, and so cheaply.
Alternatives for Halara
Though we don’t forbid you to buy from Halara as it is a personal decision to take now you have a minimal idea about the brand Halara to consider as a fast fashioning and unsustainable brand and its impact on nature and humans. Rather we can suggest some alternative ethical active-wear brands for your easy relief:
COS
COS has been a continuous effort for providing customers with more and more sustainable products rather than cheap, fast-fashioned products. The most recent launch is made using recycled nylon and polyester along with eco-conscious cotton by the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI).
Girlfriend Collective
Girlfriend Collective has been a forefront runner in the arena of providing recycled sustainable fabricated products. This special fabric is made out of the fishing net, and plastics in Taiwan, and the cloths are assembled in Hanoi, Vietnam.
Pangaia
Pangaia fashion designs are made using organic cotton and Roica V550, a type of biodegradable yarn, as well as recycled or responsibly sourced trims and labels.
FAQs
Though Halara claims to use the same factories which Adidas and Reebok use for manufacturing but still they lack proper clarification and confirmation for not using ethical factories.
Halara Everyday Cloudful 2-in-1 Wannabe Activity Dress is undoubtedly the most popular Halara dress. They are trendy on TikTok with the ‘In My Feels’ hashtag.
All of the elements of fast fashion—trend replication, rapid production, low quality, and competitive pricing.
Final Thoughts
To conclude, Halara can’t be considered a full-fledged ethical brand. Though they don’t bring new designs every week still they offer plenty of swimwear and body-hugging athleisure designs. Their pricing is relative as they are made of polyester, nylon, and other synthetic non-recycled unsustainable yarns. Also, their source of product manufacturing and implementation of fair labor laws, and transparent supply chain management are doubtful. Their size charging is also in question as many have complained about the size being too small. We ask our readers to choose a fashion brand with better responsibility to prevent cheap fast fashioning for setting up a better Earth.
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