Fellows – Abbie Morehouse - Pseads

Abbie Morehouse

Abbie Morehouse is a junior at Archie Williams High School in Marin, CA, with a deep love for writing and storytelling. She studies journalism as a staff member of the Archie Williams student newspaper, The Pitch, where she brings curiosity and care to her reporting. A varsity volleyball player, Abbie carries that same passion and commitment to teamwork into her creative and academic work. Beyond school, she is a longtime advocate for environmental stewardship in her community, including leading a campaign to reduce local reliance on single-use plastics. She also spent a summer learning with The New York Times fashion team, exploring the intersections of culture, fashion, and media. As a Pseads Fellow, Abbie is currently working on a series of essays that examine fashion through multiple lenses, from self-expression to environmental impact. When she’s not writing or playing volleyball, she loves to bake. Fun facts: she’s adopted an elephant and has been bucked off a horse.

Fellowship Project Description

As a Pseads Fellow, Abbie is writing a series of editorial-style essays that explore fashion as both a personal and cultural force. Building on her love of writing and her summer experience with The New York Times fashion team, her work examines what fashion means to people and how it shapes identity, self-expression, belonging, and social connection.

Through these essays, Abbie also investigates the fashion industry’s broader impacts, including the pressures of fitting in, the rise of fast fashion, and the environmental costs and possibilities of clothing production. She is especially interested in the tension between fashion as a form of creativity and fashion as an extractive industry, and in imagining what a more sustainable and inclusive future for fashion could look like. By weaving reporting, reflection, and analysis, Abbie’s project invites readers to think more critically about what they wear, why it matters, and how fashion might evolve in ways that honor both people and the planet. 

Essay One: Fast Fashion

by Abbie Morehouse

Growing up, I regularly transformed my closet into a new aesthetic depending on the style that was briefly trending — also recognized as a “microtrend.” It wasn’t until I cleaned out my closet, finding years’ worth of clothing used within a short span of time, that I realized how wasteful my constant switches in style had been.

According to the United Nations, as of 2025, the fashion industry is responsible for approximately 10 percent of microplastics and nearly 20 percent of global wastewater. A major contributor to this issue is fast fashion: the quick manufacturing of inexpensive clothing, using synthetic fibers like polyester, to conform and adapt quickly to the demands of ever-changing trends. This manufacturing model also relies on unsustainable and often unjust human practices and exploitative labor conditions, making it both an ethical and environmental concern for people and the planet alike.

Social media has become a driving force behind fast fashion, shaping the microtrends we follow by exposing millions of users to new clothing styles regularly. The more people adopt these trends, the higher the demand for the clothing items becomes. However, when trends become unpopular and fall out of favor on platforms like Instagram and TikTok — sometimes just weeks after their creation — clothing associated with them is often thrown away, ending up in landfills or incinerators. This rapid turnover and pollution results in more microplastics and chemical dyes that filter into our water supply and more greenhouse gases in the air we breathe.

These environmental impacts are especially likely to impact low-income communities, who are more likely to live near landfills, incinerators, or factories. They also disproportionately affect women, who are more likely to work in the factories where clothing is produced.

Research by Boston University shows that it can take hundreds of years for some of the fabrics used in such garments to decompose once they reach landfills. Additionally, according to WRAP, producing just one white cotton shirt generates as much carbon emissions as driving 35 miles in a car. Yet, we would never think about this when buying just one shirt.

Fast fashion also impacts our environment by poisoning wildlife and natural habitats with waste and contaminating the soil and riverways, as well contributing significantly to climate change. It is extremely harmful to the planet and the ripple effect is still extremely hard to measure. To mitigate the huge impact of fast fashion on our environment, consumers (including all of us, our friends, or our families) must help each other understand the bigger picture and find creative ways to resist the influence and pressures of trends when shopping.

Even though it can be extremely difficult to resist buying what’s on trend when all you wanna do is wear what your friends are wearing or buy something you saw your favorite influencer wearing, there is a bigger picture to consider. Being part of a fashion trend might seem important now, but overall the lasting effect constant consumerism is having on our world is detrimental. But our habits are a mechanism of change we can access.