The Hidden Cost of Fast Fashion

*The Hidden Cost of Fast Fashion* — written in a way that feels real, personal, and powerful.

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# **✨ *Threads of Yesterday* — 1000-Word Story on Fast Fashion**

The first thing Lerato noticed was the smell.

It wasn’t strong—just a faint mix of dust, sweat, and something like old paint—but it clung to the clothes piled on the metal table in front of her. The supervisor didn’t warn her about the smell. He just handed her a plastic cutter and pointed her to the sorting section. “You’ll get used to it,” he said. She wasn’t sure she would.

It was her first day working at *Second Chance Depot*, the biggest thrift sorting center in the city. It was the place where fast fashion came to die. Mountains of clothes that someone somewhere wore once and tossed aside ended up here—stuffed in black bags that arrived in trucks at dawn every day.

Lerato picked up a shirt from the pile. Light blue. Wrinkled. The price tag was still attached.

“Who throws away a new shirt?” she whispered under her breath.

Thato, the girl working next to her, heard her. “You’d be shocked. Some people buy clothes like they buy gum. Wear once, throw. And we spend the day drowning in it.”

Lerato forced a small smile, but her chest felt heavy. She had taken this job because she needed money. Rent went up, her mother’s medication wasn’t cheap, and her younger brother still needed school shoes. But standing there, cutting tags and sorting heaps of unwanted outfits, she felt something tightening in her stomach.

This wasn’t what she imagined when she thought of fashion.

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Back when she was 14, Lerato used to dream about becoming a stylist. She watched Instagram girls wearing pretty outfits and thought life must be perfect for them. Their clothes sparkled, flowed, hugged, and shimmered. She saved up birthday money to buy similar things from the fast fashion stores in town. Tops for P50. Jeans for P120. Shoes that looked cute until they broke after two weekends.

But she didn’t care. The clothes made her feel part of something—pretty, noticed, included.

She didn’t know then that the exact clothes she admired came from factories where people her age worked 12-hour shifts. She didn’t know how much water was wasted, how many rivers were stained with dyes that never washed out. She didn’t know her “cute top” might one day end up in a place like Second Chance Depot, smelling like dust and regret.

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On her lunch break, Lerato sat outside on a cracked plastic chair. She scrolled through her phone, half-mindedly, until she paused on a reel of a popular influencer doing a massive “Try-On Haul”—twenty outfits piled on the bed behind her.

“So affordable! I only wore this once but it’s totally worth buying again for content,” the influencer chirped.

Lerato’s thumb froze.

Behind her, she could still hear the beeping of machinery compressing bales of unwanted clothes. The contrast stung.

She locked her phone and stared at her boots. They were second-hand too.

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Later that afternoon, she found something that stopped her heart.

She was sorting another pile when she pulled out a dress. A familiar dress.

It was soft peach, with tiny floral prints. She remembered it from years ago—she had tried on the exact same one in a shop when she was 15. It made her feel beautiful, like she had stepped into someone else’s life. But she couldn’t afford it then, so she put it back.

Now here it was, discarded.

A tiny rip on the sleeve. Easily fixable. The fabric still gentle in her hands.

She held it against her chest, feeling tears prick behind her eyes.

Thato noticed. “You okay?”

“This dress…” Lerato swallowed. “I wanted it once. But someone else got it. And now it’s here—like it wasn’t even worth keeping.”

Thato softened. “That’s fast fashion. It makes you want things, quick. And makes people forget them just as quick.”

Lerato looked down at the dress again. She wondered who had worn it. A girl going to her first date? Someone celebrating a birthday? Someone hoping to feel confident for once?

Or did no one ever wear it?

The thought hit her hard.

She pictured rivers polluted with dye. Women in factories bent over sewing machines. Piles of clothes burning in landfills. And this peach dress, travelling halfway across the world only to be tossed away like it meant nothing.

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That evening, when she got home, her mother noticed how quiet she was.

“You’re thinking too much,” Mama said gently. “Your heart is soft, that’s all.”

“This job…” Lerato said slowly, “I didn’t think clothes… had stories.”

Mama smiled. “Everything has a story. Even people forget that sometimes.”

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The next morning, Lerato returned to work with a decision in her heart.

When she walked into the sorting area, Thato waved. “Ready for another mountain of nonsense?”

Lerato nodded, but there was something different in her eyes.

At the end of her shift, instead of clocking out immediately, she went to her supervisor.

“Can I buy something from the throw-out pile?” she asked.

He raised a brow. “It’s just scrap. But if you want, it’s P10 per item.”

She nodded and pulled out the peach dress.

It was hers now.

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When she reached home, she washed it, gently scrubbing the sleeve where the rip was. Then she sat with needle and thread—something Mama had taught her years ago. It took her half an hour, but when she finished, the dress looked whole again.

She held it up. It looked beautiful.

Not because it was new.

But because it was saved.

Worn.

Appreciated.

It had a future again.

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A week later, she wore the dress to work.

Everyone noticed.

Thato clapped. “Ooooh, look at you! Is that the one you found?”

Lerato nodded shyly.

“Girl, you look like you stepped out of a vintage magazine,” Thato laughed.

Lerato smiled—really smiled—for the first time in a long time.

As she sorted clothes that day, she felt something shift inside her. Instead of seeing rubbish, she saw possibility. She saw stories waiting to be revived. She saw hands—tired hands—from all over the world that stitched these fabrics with hope.

And most of all, she saw herself.

A girl who once wanted to fit into fast fashion.

A young woman now learning to live beyond it.

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That evening, she stood in front of her mirror, still wearing the peach dress.

She whispered to her reflection:

“I’ll treat my clothes better. I’ll treat myself better.”

And somehow, it felt like a promise strong enough to change something.

Maybe not the whole world.

But at least the little part of it that she touched—with her needle, her hands, and her heart.

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