This year is not likely to be remembered as a high point for the fashion industry. The “un-fun,” as Women’s Wear Daily’s Bridget Foley has described it, started early with the first showings of the fall collections back in February and March. Even then, Foley declared, “a dangerous aura of over-it-all permeated the season.”

Then the September fashion mega-mags hit newsstands amid mockery and even disgust. Critics blasted the fashion editors for a lack of economic sensitivity. Even within the industry, the stars of the fall collections have been outshone by plenty of buzz about falling stocks, accompanied by falling hemlines.

Balenciaga's "power chic" LBD, fall 2008. (Courtesy of Balenciaga.com)

One would think, therefore, that editors’ advice about wardrobe investments and carefully selected bargains would have been taken more seriously. Or that affordable fashion would have replaced Balenciaga to become the new fall favorite.

And yet, the un-fun continues.

The release of a hefty report on waste reduction by the British House of Lords has marked the latest chapter of autumnal down-and-out. Its far-reaching allegations about Britain’s “culture of ‘fast fashion’” have made style section headlines across the U.S. and Europe.

But like all the eye-rolling over fashion editors’ “aspirational frugality” this fall, the peers’ case against so-called fast fashion is heavy handed.

In a angst-ridden section on Britain’s “throwaway society,” the British Lords wagged a finger at the fashion industry for “encourag[ing] consumers to dispose of clothes which have only been worn a few times in favour of new, cheap garments.” Even those new garments, the peers explain, are themselves destined to “go out of fashion and be discarded within a matter of months.”

As anyone who has ever found a favorite garment from H&M or turned to Forever 21 as a trusted source for decent wardrobe staples, such a sweeping argument is hard to believe. Have the peers taken issue with “fast” fashion’s speed, or simply its price?

Cheap fashion, of course, is not without its problems. Low prices make it easy to buy on impulse, feeding the cycle of season-to-season waste. Environmental costs are high of transporting garments from country to country, which is typical among brands with predominantly overseas factories. And the labor records of many fashion companies leave a lot to be desired.

But these problems are not exclusive to makers of affordable garments. As Foley remarked about this fall’s presentations, much of the gloom came from Americans who “just emerged from an endless pre-fall in New York with couture hiatus in the middle, which followed like this on the heels of spring, and who fretted like mad that, come fall, nobody will be able to afford anything anyway.”

Clearly fashion does need to slow down. But the British Lords’ diagnosis of the fast fashion problem is as pessimistic as it is flawed. Corporate social responsibility programs are gaining popularity among cheap fashion peddlers. Ethical fashion companies are seeing unprecedented success. And more and more consumers are demanding higher ethical standards – the most encouraging sign that progress may not be as far off as we think.

Affordable clothing brought fashion to the masses. But it is consumers – not companies – who have decided that it is disposable. There’s some common sense advice missing from condemnations of waste-prone “fast” fashionistas: Take care of your clothes. And if you’re having problems seeing yourself wearing that $20 bubble skirt next year, don’t buy it.