Do Oil and Fashion Mix Well? Maybe Not
What does the Strait of Hormuz have to do with your local H&M? A lot, it turns out, and the thorny intersection of fashion, the environment, and labor rights is likely to only get more complicated in the coming weeks and months. By now, the importance of the Strait is well-known: Something on the order of 20% of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas pass through the gap between Iran and the United Arab Emirates in the average year, in addition to around a third of the global fertilizer trade.1 But with the strait sitting in the economic and geopolitical center of off-and-on military attacks in the Middle East spanning several weeks, the price of crude oil has soared.2 Gasoline prices, in turn, have skyrocketed,3 and more broadly, global supply chains have been under extraordinary stress as a result of the ongoing hostilities.4
The fashion industry has not been spared. As of early March, literal tons of finished clothing were sitting with nowhere to go at the primary airport in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh and a major manufacturing and logistics hub in the region.5 The causes are myriad: cancellation of flights in and through the Gulf Region, drastically increased shipping costs, and the very real risk of cargo planes being shot down as collateral damage.6 To be fair, no industry that relies on long-distance, fossil fuel-reliant shipping has been spared these pains. However, few industries are as dependent on affordable intercontinental cargo as fashion—and the fact that much of the garment industry operates out of South and East Asia means that brands and manufacturers rely heavily on Gulf oil for their own operations.7 (This has shifted somewhat in recent years; numerous brands relied on Russian oil even after the country’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, adding yet another ethical quandary into the equation.8) All of these challenges are even more acute for the fast fashion market sector, where rock-bottom consumer prices and rapid turnaround to follow trends are critical to the business model.
And there’s another problem buried right below the surface: polyester. The man-made material, as you may already know, is manufactured from and with oil.9 Something on the order of 60% of material made into clothing is polyester or otherwise derived from plastics (and thus petroleum).10 Somewhere in the vicinity of 70 million barrels of oil are used in polyester manufacture every year, enough to supply France for about a month and a half.11 Even the comparatively high-end fast fashion companies, like H&M and Zara parent company Inditex use polyester in roughly a quarter of their products, and for online behemoths like Shein, that number can exceed 80%.12
As you have probably figured out, fast fashion’s reliance on oil, especially from the Gulf Region, is closely tied to its environmental impact. Manufacturing is just the start. On the whole, just the dyeing and finishing of textiles is responsible for an estimated 20% of water pollution, which runs downstream from factories into agricultural and home uses.13 The process is also resource-intensive, with a t-shirt requiring as much as 700 gallons of water to produce and a pair of jeans some 2,000 gallons.14 Of course, no matter how automated the processes are, workers have to be involved in the manufacture of fast fashion. And those workers often labor in factories with poor conditions, minimal safety protections, and poor pay.15 Beyond that, textile manufacture workers have limited legal protections, and are routinely subjected to all manner of harassment and abuse, women in particular.16
During the lifespan of polyester-based clothing, these items will invariably shed countless microplastic particles. It is estimated that washing a single polyester shirt every two weeks releases 52,000 plastic microfibers in one year, and one load of polyester-based laundry will release some 700,000 microfibers.17 All in all, around 35% of the estimated 51 trillion microplastic fibers in the world’s oceans today originate from clothing.18 While the exact links between polyester clothing and human health have not been rigorously studied yet, the use of PFAS and other “forever chemicals” in polyester clothing manufacturing are believed to cause skin irritation in some, and may pose an increased risk of cancer in people—such as manufacturing and retail employees—with extensive exposure to the products.19 Even once a consumer is done wearing a piece of clothing, its environmental and labor impact does not end. In the European Union, for example, annual textile consumption averages around 40 pounds per person, and while plastics-based clothing is theoretically recyclable, only about 1% of articles are recycled into new clothing, while 87% are incinerated or left in landfills, often in the global south.20
What to do with all of this information? The answer, of course, is not to go into your closet and systematically remove all polyester-based clothing; that just accelerates the disposal problems discussed above. On an individual level, we could all stand to be more intentional with our clothing purchases and related choices—where possible, buy more ethically-manufactured and durable items that you won’t have to replace as frequently. The answers, on a societal and global level, are more complicated. The fashion industry, especially fast fashion, needs to move away from its reliance on plastics and other energy- and petroleum-intensive raw materials and processes, not to mention its inherently exploitative labor practices. And that resource conundrum has only been thrown into starker relief by the energy and logistics crisis at the Strait of Hormuz. No matter how one views the unfolding conflict, the world’s dependency on oil, or the Hormuz shipping bottleneck, current events may nevertheless present society and the fashion industry an opportunity to pause and rethink the current model of apparel manufacture and consumption—perhaps with a more humane and ecological eye on what will benefit workers, consumers, and the environment alike in the coming decades.
1. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c78n6p09pzno
2. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CL%3DF/history/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29v Z2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAANomdQykjLJFI7-ySo1GhaE-6j-GhezgJJWOE7LTqeRRSiJiO9nE5rDERy571SgSI0qov-9JgWtRudlNaAMl5-2v_b3V6rjTx-jVdURhaOrDMB-zWjmZruE38rAHTiByGhsBekrXFTNdNKgDP_YIuYfNQDCY1TwFDrAq4r8nQS&period1=1767144192&period2=1774916549
3. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/soaring-gas-prices-and-supply-chain-disruptions-drive-up-costs-across-the-economy
4. Id.; https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/30/china-suppliers-warn-higher-us-prices-hormuz-closure.html
5. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/fast-fashion-garments-pile-up-south-asia-middle-eastconflict-grounds-planes-2026-03-06/
6. Id.
7. https://www.businessoffashion.com/podcasts/global-markets/how-oil-shock-fears-are-rippling-through-fashion-the-debrief/?utm_source=webpage&utm_medium=marketing&utm_campaign=global-markets
8. https://changingmarkets.org/report/dressed-to-kill-fashion-brands-hidden-links-to-russian-oil-in-a-time-of-war/
9. Id.
10. https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/fashions-tiny-hidden-secret
11. https://unric.org/en/from-petroleum-to-pollution-the-cost-of-polyester/; https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/france/oil-consumption
12. https://www.ft.com/content/0386a970-07ec-4294-bb2a-531cd70c013c?syn-25a6b1a6=1
13. https://unric.org/en/from-petroleum-to-pollution-the-cost-of-polyester/
14. https://earth.org/fast-fashions-detrimental-effect-on-the-environment/
15. https://unric.org/en/from-petroleum-to-pollution-the-cost-of-polyester/
16. Id.
17. Id.
18. Id.
19. https://www.npr.org/2026/01/20/nx-s1-5670290/polyester-fabric-clothing
20. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20201208STO93327/fast-fashion-eu-laws-for-sustainable-textile-consumption