Fast fashion

Fast fashion, a business model that focuses on the rapid design, production, and promotion of low-cost clothing reflecting the latest fashion trends. The term is widely believed to have been coined by The New York Times in 1989 to describe the objective of Spanish retailer Zara to move garments from the design stage to store shelves in as little as 15 days. In 2022 the Chinese e-commerce platform Shein aimed for a 10-day turnaround. Other fast fashion brands include UNIQLO, H&M, Primark, Mango, and ASOS.

Although fast fashion can make clothing more affordable, broaden access to current styles, and support jobs and export income in garment-producing countries, these benefits are often offset by serious environmental costs and labor concerns, including chemical pollution, excessive water use, textile waste, low wages, and poor working conditions. Many of these issues have long plagued the fashion industry, but fast fashion accelerates and magnifies them through a business model based on speed, low cost, high volume, and frequent replacement.

History of fast fashion

The beginnings of fast fashion can be traced to the 18th and 19th centuries, when the Industrial Revolution gradually transformed the production of clothing from a slow, largely domestic or skilled craft into a highly mechanized, factory-based industry. Machinery, including the spinning mule and power loom, sped up the manufacture of yarn and cloth, while the sewing machine assembled garments quicker than hand sewing had. These changes laid the groundwork for mass-produced, ready-to-wear garments, making clothing more affordable and accessible to a wider range of consumers. However, from the earliest years of the ready-to-wear garment industry, the demand for more and cheaper garments created a system of labor exploitation. Garment work was often poorly paid, insecure, and organized through subcontracting and piecework; by the late 19th century, the sweatshop had become a defining feature of the clothing industry.

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Cultural, technological, and economic changes in the decades after World War II converged to further transform the clothing industry. In the 1950s and ’60s, a booming youth culture challenged the authority of haute couture as the primary source of fashion innovation and helped create a market for inexpensive, trend-driven, ready-to-wear clothing that came from the so-called street. At the same time, synthetic fibers such as nylon, acrylic, and polyester—popularized after the war as lower-cost alternatives to natural fibers—made garments cheaper to produce, easier to care for, and more adaptable to mass manufacturing. Meanwhile, trade policies and changing production costs shifted the location of the garment industry. Apparel companies increasingly relied on offshore suppliers in countries with lower wages, weaker labor protections, and, in many cases, less stringent environmental oversight.

The fashion cycle, however, did not truly accelerate until the last decades of the 20th century. Zara, whose first store opened in A Coruña, Spain, in 1975, is frequently credited with establishing an approach that, instead of planning months ahead to create a few collections a year, tracked consumer demand or adapted to emerging trends to deliver new styles to stores several times a week. Previously, new clothing collections could be expected four times a year, but by the 21st century consumers could expect new lines of clothing much more frequently, with some brands generating 36 collections a year. “They broke up a century-old biannual cycle of fashion,” Masoud Golsorkhi, the founder and editor of Tank, a London-based magazine focusing on culture and fashion, told The New York Times in 2012. “Now, pretty much half of the high-end fashion companies make four to six collections instead of two each year. That’s absolutely because of Zara.”

Environmental impacts

Fast fashion has significant environmental impacts both during and after production. The fashion industry as a whole is responsible for 10 percent of carbon emissions, uses large quantities of water, and employs dyes and chemicals that pollute the environment. It also produces a lot of textile waste. Fast fashion in particular, with its low prices and poor-quality items, encourages consumers to discard an item of clothing even if it has been worn only a few times. The clothing ends up in landfills around the world, including in the so-called “clothing graveyard” in the Atacama Desert, Chile. Moreover, fast fashion companies primarily use synthetic fibers, such as polyester, nylon, and acrylic. All of these materials are inexpensive to produce, but they are derived from fossil fuels. Hence, items made from these materials are not biodegradable and will remain in landfills for centuries.

Exploitation of workers

In addition to its environmental impacts, fast fashion tends to exploit the workers responsible for its production. Most clothing production is done in the Global South, including postcolonial countries in Africa, Asia, and South America, where laborers have few protections against long hours and unfair wages. Many work 16 hours every day, make very little money, and face retaliation for refusing to work overtime. Garment workers also labor in unsafe conditions, including windowless spaces, dangerously high temperatures, violent managers, and harmful chemical exposure. Perhaps the most famous event illustrating the poor conditions of garment workers was the Rana Plaza tragedy. In 2013 an eight-story building that housed several garment factories in Savar, Bangladesh, collapsed and killed some 1,100 laborers and injured thousands more. Factory owners had ignored warnings not to use the building when cracks were discovered a day earlier. Because the supply chain is incredibly complex, retailers are mostly unfamiliar with the sourcing and production of their clothing and are therefore unaware of the conditions workers face to make their products.

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Finding solutions

The consumer can play a pivotal role in mitigating the effects of fast fashion by practicing so-called “slow fashion,” which involves purchasing fewer and higher-quality pieces of clothing. Although more expensive, such clothing can last longer. Once a user is done with a garment, he or she can donate it instead of discarding in order to help divert textiles from landfills. Although some donated clothing goes directly to landfills, a lot of the items that are not resold at donation stores are sent to textile recycling centers, where they are processed into filling for furniture or insulation for buildings. The overproduction and poor quality of fast fashion, however, has increasingly challenged donation centers and secondhand clothing shops that struggle to keep up with the volume of donations and find it difficult to sell inferior products.

Retailers have taken steps toward moderating the damage caused by fast fashion. Some brands now offer sustainable collections, but, because there is no oversight or consensus about what constitutes sustainability, the legitimacy of claims that these items are better for the environment is up for debate. Moreover, many of these measures fail to take into account the harsh working conditions of manufacturers. In addition, retailers, such as H&M, have begun accepting gently used clothing in exchange for store vouchers. These items are then either sold secondhand, reused for other clothing products, or shredded and recycled for insulation and furniture padding.