There was a time when clothes were made slowly. They were hand-stitched, hand-dyed, and deeply personal. In India, crafts like Kalamkari used hand-drawn patterns and natural dyes to create fabrics that weren’t just beautiful — they told stories. Across the world, in small workshops and home studios, garments came to life with a sense of care and connection. You knew where your clothes came from. You often knew who made them. And you passed them down generations
But that world changed. Machines came first. Then global supply chains. And by the late 20th century, fast fashion arrived — and with it, a new pace of consumption.
Suddenly, clothes weren’t made to last. They were made to sell, to ship fast, and to be replaced. Brands like Zara and H&M began rolling out new collections not twice a year, but every few weeks. Fashion became accessible, trendy, and cheap. But behind that glossy accessibility was a reality we don’t often see.
The fashion industry, once a symbol of artisanal craft, is now one of the biggest global polluters. It’s responsible for 10% of global carbon emissions and generates over 92 million tonnes of textile waste each year. It also consumes staggering amounts of water — enough annually to fill 32 million Olympic-sized swimming pools. The environmental toll is only part of the story.
Fast fashion relies on fast labor. Garment factories around the world — in places like Bangladesh, Vietnam, and India — employ millions, often underpaid and overworked. These workers, most of them women, are at the very bottom of the fashion ladder, making clothes that sell for less than a sandwich.
From Exploitation to Resistance
And yet, these same workers have also built resistance. In Bangalore, the garment industry employs over 500,000 women, many from Dalit communities. These women have faced not just labor abuse, but caste-based discrimination and systemic neglect. But they organized.
Through unions like GATWU and collectives like Munnade, Dalit women began pushing back. They fought for safe workspaces, fair pay, and dignity. They won changes in labor policy. They pressured multinational brands to acknowledge the human cost behind their price tags. Their activism changed not just the local industry, but also how labor rights are discussed in global supply chains, not just Fashion.
Fast fashion didn’t go away. But it could no longer hide behind its glossy storefronts.
A New Industry, A Familiar Pattern
Now something else is accelerating, promising speed and transformation. Artificial Intelligence is doing for white-collar work what fast fashion did for clothing: making creation faster, cheaper, and easier to consume.
In just a few years, generative AI tools have become part of daily workflows. Writing, designing, coding, image generation — once tasks requiring hours of skill and human intuition — can now be done in seconds. The pitch is familiar: democratized access, increased productivity, and lowered barriers.
But this too has a cost. We don’t often think about the invisible labor behind AI systems, but it’s very real.
Data annotators in Kenya, the Philippines, and Venezuela work long hours labeling images, writing sample dialogues, and moderating toxic content. Their work trains the very systems that now replace or augment skilled jobs. Many earn less than $2 an hour, working through mentally exhausting content so that generative AI can seem “smart” and safe.
Meanwhile, the environmental footprint of AI is growing fast. Training a single large AI model can consume as much electricity as 100 U.S. households use in a year. Cooling data centers requires massive water consumption — a challenge especially in drought-prone regions. The patterns are eerily familiar: hidden labor, resource strain, and a rush to scale without reflection.
The fast fashion industry didn’t just teach us about overproduction. It taught us how easy it is to forget the people behind the product.
But we’ve also seen how change happens. Consumers began asking where their clothes came from. Brands were pushed to publish supply chain data. Movements for slow, ethical, and circular fashion gained momentum. Today, there are growing pockets of the industry committed to doing better — and there’s a playbook for transformation.
AI is at a similar crossroads.
We can continue on the path of speed and disposability, flooding the internet with AI-generated content, automating knowledge work without accountability, and treating tools like replacements instead of partners.
Or, we can build something more thoughtful. We’re not going to stop using AI. Just like we’re not going to wear hand-stitched Kalamkari to work every day. These technologies are here to stay. The challenge is not whether we use them — it’s how.
We can design learning systems that treat AI as a tool for empowerment, not replacement. We can build reskilling and upskilling programs that include the very workers training these systems, giving them access to higher-paying roles. We can invest in digital literacy, critical thinking, and creative confidence, so that more people feel like participants — not just passive users.
Like the garment workers of Bangalore, the path forward will come from below — from those closest to the systems, those most affected by change, and those often least heard.
The future of work doesn’t need to be disposable. It can be rooted, intelligent, and fair.
Let’s build education products that empower, not replace.
Book a call to co-create tools that upskill, reskill, and truly serve the future of work.
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