🌱 The Fast Fashion Trap

We used to have 4 fashion seasons in a year: Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. The luxury brands would combine these into 2 because they did shows: Spring/Summer and Autumn/Winter. So how have we ended up in a world where companies are releasing weekly and almost daily collections? 52 collections, 20,000 pieces of clothing a year per brand creating 53 million tons of new clothing every single year. The short answer is a combination of tech, consumer behavior and trends over the last 10-15 years mean people are exposed to more media and want trendy clothes faster and the clothing brands have found a way to meet this demand.

Zara releases a new collection weekly, they are well designed and slightly better quality than the newer e-comm brands we would probably associate with fast fashion such as Boohoo, PrettyLittleThing, and EGO, who have super low quality products but a fast turnaround for trends business model. Shein has one upped them and taken this extreme business model even further and releases hundreds of new designs daily. As they are the manufacturer and the distributor, they don’t need to make the stock in advance to get it into stores or on the site, they simply put up mock designs on their website and make them after they’ve been ordered by someone allowing them to test thousands more designs without the cost of having to produce them.

The reality is most brands on the high street, regardless of where you shop or the price, have a manufacturer in China, India or somewhere else in Asia. They are able to produce products at a pace in Asia with cost effectiveness that you can not achieve in Western countries. This is not limited to clothing, Apple also does this, in fact most companies in the world do. So how do you even differentiate what is fast fashion and what is not?

We can define fast fashion as:

Mass produced clothing in Asia with a business model and strategy that prioritises speed of production over supply chain management, product quality & waste and toxins created.

This in my opinion has so much more to do with the brand itself and its values. Brands born on labour exploitation and pushing millions of tons of low quality products as waste into our world are never going to change. The better brands will try to pivot and make the effort to be more green or more transparent in their supply chains, Nike has released many collections with recycled materials. Although in the grand scheme of their supply chain this is a small step, it’s still a small step in the right direction. We will see businesses spin up whole sustainable brands such as H&M has done with & other stories and Arket. The publicly traded businesses will have to change to meet ESG measures or suffer the share price consequences. There is an opposing argument that fast fashion democratizes fashion because it gives lower income people access. I would argue the market is fair & open and there is a disappropriate amount of fast fashion brands which create more of the same problem. As with anything in life, it will be those not willing to change who will be left behind…

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