What is fast fashion?
Fast fashion is the business model used by many large clothing companies. Its essence is to design a lot of clothes, produce a lot of clothes, sell a lot of clothes and waste a lot of clothes. Its technical definition is ”an approach to the design, creation, and marketing of clothing fashions that emphasizes making fashion trends quickly and cheaply available to consumers”. (I liked mine better.)
”Fast” is the operative word in fast fashion. It is for this word everything else in the clothing manufacturing process is often flagrantly disregarded. Because these mammoth companies design and produce clothes on a weekly or daily basis, their supply chain is often outsourced to countries in Asia.
And it’s rare to find a fast fashion company actually pay these outsourced workers their deserved wages (despite making around $25 billion in 2020.)H&M, for example only pays their workers 1/3 of a livable wage in countries like Turkey and India. Unfortunately in fast fashion, injustices like these are the trend, not the exception.
A similarly egregious act for which fast fashion is responsible for: pollution. Manufacturing textiles cheaply and on this massive scale results in 20% of all industrial water pollution worldwide.
Actually, dyeing textiles is the second largest polluter of water in the world. Not only do the clothes impact water pollution, they also emit more carbons than international flights and maritime shipping combined.
Fast fashion is wasteful by definition. Producing clothes on this scale from cheap materials means massive amounts of resources will be wasted on them only for the majority of them to be thrown away. It’s a ruthless cycle that must be broken.
Is your favorite site considered fast fashion?
Wondering whether the spot you love to shop is fast fashion? Simply answer the questions below to find out now!
Fast Fashion Red Flags
- New styles every week or day: Zara sells new products twice a week. H&M releases 16 collections per year. Missguided releases 1,000 new products monthly. Production on this scale is unsustainable for an ethical supply chain and environmental impact.
- Cheap imitations: Fast fashion brands imitate luxury designers’ creativity for as little monetary investment as possible. What took a creative designer months to imagine and create, takes these companies days. The business model is an act of appropriation.
- Fleeting designs make for inevitable waste: Since the priority of these companies is speed, their clothes’ lifespan is similarly transient. Fast fashion clothes are made of cheap material and copy trends. Both these elements mean the clothes will not last long in customers’ closets. The cheap price we’re paying to hop on a quick trend equals huge waste in the long run.
- Too many sales all the d*mn time: As we know, profit is of equal importance to fast fashion as speed. They up the ante for customers by constantly pressuring them with massive sales on their already cheap offerings. By making all these products even more incredibly cheap, they’re selling more and more; fueling the wasteful fast fashion cycle to continue for as long as the executives remain greedy – forever.
- More than 100 products on their site at any time: It’s very difficult to offer more than 100 clothing items at one time that are ethically made. Consider this: reputable designers release a few collections per year of around 20 items each. The collections are specifically timed to account for proper manufacturing, shipping and other factors that ensure clothes are (hopefully) produced ethically and with the intent to last. That’s just for 20 items. For more than 100 that are constantly switching and increasing, the consideration becomes how is that even possible to be done ethically? It can’t.
What Can We Do Now?
Fast fashion has eclipsed the clothing industry. If you bought clothes in the past few months, chances are you bought them from a brand like Uniqlo, Nasty Gal, Fashion Nova or Shein. Maybe it’s been even longer than a few months. No matter the timeframe, the best practice moving forward isn’t to return those clothes. An atrocious amount of returned clothes are either incinerated or end up in landfills.
If you own clothes from fast fashion brands and you intend to wear them; wear them. The best way to reduce waste is to use what you have for as long as possible. By doing so, you avoid the ambiguity of donating or returning them – they may likely end up in a landfill in America or another country. It’s also obviously preferred to wear them than to throw them away.
The best way to break the fast fashion cycle is to stop supporting these brands. When you are in need of more clothing, be conscious about the company you purchase from.
Investigate whether they give their workers livable wages, how often they release collections and how they’re working to reduce fashion’s massive pollutive imprint.
Every purchase we make is an indicator of the kind of world we intend to create. Make your next purchase one that will last a long time and supports an ethical brand. The future of fashion depends on it!
References
- Statista – Fashion Market Value
- Fast Fashion Brands Ranked
- Business Insider’s Fast Fashion Facts
- Retail Dive Report: ”Ultra Fast” Fashion Players Gain on Zara, H&M