Livia Firth's Manifesto

We all get dressed every single day—fashion is an industry we are engaged with every day without fail. It's a full-spectrum industry, encompassing everything from agriculture to communications.

It's a $3 trillion industry with an enormous impact on people and the planet. Yet we never think about its depletion of the earth's resources, the pollution it causes (it's the biggest polluter after oil and mining), or, most important, the people at the very bottom of the supply chain.

Between 60 and 75 million people are employed in the textile, clothing, and footwear sector across the globe, often working very long hours, under deplorable conditions and in unsafe and unhygienic factories, while receiving poverty-level wages in return for backbreaking work.

To make it worse, they often face discrimination and physical and sexual harassment on a daily basis. Yet in the West, we rarely consider the way our clothes are made when we buy them.

Fast fashion has completely changed the landscape of the industry. It may be difficult to remember a time before it was possible to buy a T-shirt for $5, but fast fashion didn't exist 20 years ago. We used to buy in a completely different way: We saved to buy garments of quality that we loved, clothes we took care of and kept for a long time. Twenty years ago, we wanted better clothes, not more. But now the world buys 80 billion pieces of clothing a year. That is up 400 percent from two decades ago. And where does it all go?

Fast fashion is like the sugar addiction that causes obesity. Only it's not immediately so easy to see the damage created by disposable clothes: the environmental catastrophes, the corporate recklessness, the social injustice. Like my friend, the economist Guido Brera, always says, today we might not be able to afford education, health care, or a home, but we still feel rich or happy because we can buy tons of clothes a year very cheaply.

On the other side of the world, to satisfy our voracious consumer habits, millions of people —mostly women—are enslaved in a circle of poverty, producing clothes cheaply and quickly to satisfy demand. Or is it that demand is now fed by the fast and furious production cycles? The lines are murky, and this is fast fashion in action.

The only way to change this is for fast fashion brands to change their business models. It is not possible to be sustainable while producing 40 to 50 collections a year, no matter how many recycling and closed-loop schemes are implemented. One fast fashion brand claims it's a huge success to have made 1.3 million pieces with closed-loop materials, which sounds less impressive when you realize that this is just 2 percent of what the brand produces annually.

It's time to cut through the noise of sustainability claims inflicted on us by fast fashion brands. It's time for the industry to stop hiding behind carefully crafted reports and statistics that show just part of the picture —myths that are rapidly becoming truisms.

And all of us must become active consumers. If we stopped consuming at the rate fast fashion brands have addicted us to , then we would not need a summit dedicated to solving the environmental and social mess fashion has put is in.

This article was paid for by Copenhagen Fashion Summit and was created independently from VICE's editorial staff.