fast fashion

The brands in this study include some “fast fashion” brands, which deliver new fashion trends in increasingly short cycles in response to customer preferences. From the early 1990s brands looked for ways to increase their profits by encouraging consumers to buy more clothes and to buy them more frequently. Faced with pricing pressure from low-cost supermarket brands such as Walmart, fashion companies shifted the bulk of their manufacturing to the Global South.

Cheap-and-not-so-cheerful: Fast fashion claims more victims in Bangladesh

A garment factory building near Dhaka, Bangladesh collapsed, killing 80 people, with many more injured. This, when 120 garment workers in Bangladesh are already dead from recent fires at factories known to be manufacturing inexpensive clothing for major international brands and chains. Today, we wring our hands; tomorrow we will live to shop again.

Such brief disposable bursts of moral indignation are as cheap as they are trendy.

Everybody gets dressed in the morning. Everybody eats. We deplore unsustainable fishing and boast about the local, deliciously morally superior fare in our fridge, while the dirty secret of how a cashmere sweater that’s supercute! can cost just! $29! gets pushed further to the back of our closets. And minds. Unless we start talking about the effects (and ethics) of the accelerated appetite for fashion trends and the cheap, mindless consumption it creates and feeds, eventually we’ll choke on the hanger.

Brands such as Zara, H&M, Gap, and Benetton focussed on speeding up fashion cycles by presenting trends to consumers mid-season. It is now the norm to have six to eight fashion seasons compared to the traditional two to four collections a year for many high street brands.94 To achieve this, they needed increasingly short turnaround times, from design through to the finished article, bringing the production of the more high fashion items closer to the point of sale, while keeping basic items manufactured in the Far East95, as well as some dyeing and wet processing.