Entry on Fast Fashion Bridges Cultural Practice and Scholarly Impact
BLACK PEARL founder and CEO Samata Pattinson has contributed a chapter on fast fashion to The SAGE Encyclopedia of Environmental Justice, a comprehensive three-volume reference now available on SAGE Knowledge. Edited by Dorceta E. Taylor, Professor of Environmental Sociology at Yale School for the Environment, the encyclopedia brings together 300 to 450 entries spanning case studies, legal frameworks, key events, and voices shaping environmental justice globally.
Pattinson’s entry examines fast fashion through interconnected lenses: microplastic pollution from synthetic fabrics, labour exploitation within global supply chains, waste and recyclability challenges, and the racial disparities embedded in the industry’s business model. The chapter positions fast fashion not as an isolated consumer phenomenon but as a systemic issue with cascading environmental and social consequences.
The contribution reflects BLACK PEARL’s core approach—one where cultural production, strategic consulting, and policy-facing research operate as a single practice. As Pattinson notes, “Some days it’s producing cultural content. Some days it’s a published chapter. All of it is the same work.”
Pattinson’s chapter on fast fashion is cross-searchable across the platform’s thousands of social science titles, with full citation information and DOI: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781071908006.n160.
