“Fast fashion is a design, manufacturing, and marketing method focused on rapidly producing high volumes of clothing”

It has been on the rise in recent decades yet despite its name, fast fashion’s impact goes far beyond the fashion world. The industry frequently violates garment workers’ rights and is severely detrimental to the environment. When did fashion become fast? Fashion has always been innovative, evolutionary and with sufficient power to capture the vibe of a generation. In spite of these consistencies, a lot has changed in the fashion world in recent decades, with fast fashion rapidly increasing in the past 20 years.

Once upon a time, fashion houses unveiled new collections four times per year according to the seasons: spring, summer, autumn and winter. They would plan for the change in season up to a year in advance and consumers would wait in anticipation for their release. That was before fast fashion emerged in the 60s and 70s. During this time youth began to adopt clothing as a means of self-expression and trends began to change at unprecedented levels. 

By the 90s and early 2000s, high street fashion was becoming increasingly affordable with retailers such as H&M, Zara and Topshop replicating big fashion houses at much lower prices. Nowadays it is not uncommon for fast fashion brands to produce 52 collections a year. It was also around the early noughties that online shopping began to take off, making fashion more accessible. Since then fast fashion has only increased in a multitude of senses. 

The Fast Fashion Model 

The ‘fast’ in fast fashion is multifold, from production speed to delivery times, the latest fashion trends have never been so accessible. Fast fashion is a business model that offers a quick turnover of affordable clothes to consumers. It relies on a highly responsive supply chain and consumer over-consumption. Fast fashion brands offer consumers rapidly changing trends for bargain prices, consequently putting pressure on garment workers to increase production rates whilst paying them poverty pay. The fast fashion business model relies on and is exacerbated by ‘influencer culture’. To be successful, consumers must continue to needlessly buy more and more clothing pieces. Influencer marketing is a new technique used by brands to promote their products. Generally this technique works by influencers producing content on social media platforms, this content is then received by their loyal following who are influenced to consume that product. Influencer marketing is set to become a 15 billion dollar industry this year. 

The fast fashion industry makes extensive use of the influencer culture by ‘gifting’ pieces of clothing to influencers in the hope they will wear and promote these pieces to their following. This creates a cycle of followers consuming more- both content and fast fashion- followed by brands gifting more and so on. 

Fast Fashion, a Feminist Issue 

In the documentary “The True Cost”, author and journalist Lucy Siegle summed the issue up perfectly: “Fast fashion isn’t free. Someone, somewhere is paying”. Both human rights violations and worker exploitation are necessary components of the fast fashion business model. The average demographic of garment workers across the world are young women. It is estimated that 80% of garment workers are women aged between 18 and 35, many of whom have families to feed. According to Labour Behind the Label, 80% of garment workers are women earning as little at $21 a month and thus living in poverty. Furthermore, long hours, forced overtime, unsafe working conditions, sexual, physical and verbal abuse and repression of trade union rights are all commonplace within the fast fashion industry. 

Jeyasre Kathiravel’s case is a harrowing example, highlighting the dark side of the industry. The young garment worker was murdered by her supervisor last year, following an alleged rape and ongoing sexual harassment and intimidation in the workplace. Unsafe working conditions can also be a risk to life on a large scale for garment workers with the Rana Plaza disaster exemplifying just how prevalent this risk is for many women and children garment workers. 

The Environmental Cost of Fast Fashion 

From water and plastic consumption in the manufacturing process to over-consumption by consumers, the environmental impact of the fast fashion industry is huge. The fast fashion industry uses 93 billion cubic metres of water per year; a figure that is set to double by 2030. Water is a fundamental part of the manufacturing process, used for growing materials and in the dying, spinning and finishing process. In a single year, the fast fashion industry uses enough water to quench the thirst of 110 million people.

Around 60% of all materials used by the fast fashion industry are made from plastic, consequently the fast fashion industry is heavily reliant on fossil fuels to produce clothing, to the extent that the industry is responsible for 10% of the world’s carbon dioxide output. The industry’s reliance on polyester and other synthetic materials is especially worrisome as they cause  microplastic pollution which leads to a multitude of problems for aquatic life and has even been found to impact human health. 

In the United States alone, 11.3 million tons of textiles are thrown away each year, this equates to 2,150 pieces of clothing every second, most of which ends up in landfill. However, consumers are not the only ones throwing away garments, fast fashion brands frequently destroy or send unsold garments to landfill, leading to a serious waste problem. Fast fashion brands must do more to halt their negative impact on the environment and in doing so must avoid greenwashing, which is “the process of conveying a false impression or providing misleading information about how a company’s products are more environmentally sound.”

Finally, emerging in the latter part of the last century, fast fashion has taken the world by storm. Exacerbated in recent years by influencer culture, fast fashion brands offer new trends to consumers almost instantaneously for rock bottom prices. However, the cost often falls to garment workers who are overworked in unsafe conditions and underpaid. The industry is guilty of exploiting both garment workers’ rights and womens’ rights. Beyond this, the impact of the fast fashion industry on the environment is hugely detrimental. Fast fashion brands must do more to minimise their negative impact in all corners of this world. 

Emily Forbes 

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