“The high cost of cheap fashion”: there’s no greater cliché in the popular discourse about ethics and fashion. Countless books, articles, documentaries, and online social spaces are devoted to presenting and reinforcing this idea.

For its purveyors, the phrase is meant not only as a wake-up call but a call to action. “The high cost of cheap fashion” alerts consumers to the degrading labor conditions and environmental practices that are involved in the production of cheap trendy clothes, or so-called fast fashion. It implores consumers to quit shopping at fast-fashion retailers, to stop being duped by cheap prices and the short cut to fashion trends.

What may feel like a fashion steal, we’re told, is actually robbing workers of a living wage and safe working conditions, and robbing legitimate designers of their creative property. Like fast food’s convenient but empty calories, fast fashion offers a quick but ultimately empty fix. Paying more for clothes, fast fashion critics insist, is not only the ethical thing to do — it is the fashionable thing to do.