What is fast fashion? Definition, social and environmental consequences

If you are told fast food, surely you imagine inexpensive food, prepared quickly, which you swallow more than you taste, and this, at great speed. Its low price is explained by the poor quality of the raw materials used (the whose origin is poorly cared for), the assembly line work of the employees, and the large volume produced to achieve significant economies of scale. The phrase ” junk food “, which can literally be translated as “waste food”, has also become synonymous with it. Good, fast fashion (literally “express mode”) is the equivalent mode: it’s a disposable fashion.

What is called fast fashion?

Fast fashion is treated like the big bad wolf of fashion. It’s right. Except it’s just one symptom among others of the many excesses of the fashion industry. in our entertainment and hyper-consumption societies. But what is fast fashion really?

It transformed an entire economic model that had reigned until then. In simple terms, before the rise of ready-to-wear in the second half of the 20th century, modest families always wore the same clothes, each year indulging in a new dress made by a small seamstress, not so much for vanity as to compensate for wear. We have only deviated from this utilitarian view of the wardrobe on Sundays to go to mass in our best clothes or for important events. Wealthier families could afford a larger wardrobe, but always made by a small seamstress with a fashionable pattern, or even ordered from a fashion house. But the popularization of prêt-à-porter, initially a luxury, gave the taste for a more frequent renewal of the wardrobe. In the 1970s and 1980s, we thus began to see the flowering in France of brands at relatively affordable prices, such as Naf Naf (1973), Camaïeu (1984) or Jennyfer (1985).

But it is with the arrival in France of Zara (founded in 1976 in Spain and established in France in 1990) and H&M (founded in 1947 in Sweden and established in France in 1998) that we really started talking about fast fashion in the 90’s.

The economic model of these fast fashion giants relies on the mass production, to obtain economies of scale, of mediocre quality collections, which follow each other every month (or more), in order to provide a sense of urgency, enhancer of desire. Until then, the fashion industry operated with two collections a year: one for spring-summer, the other for autumn-winter, or even four (one per season).

However, when collections change every month at more affordable prices, this can give the impression of an acceleration of the trend cycle and their obsolescence. This can give you want to get rid of clothes more often to buy new oneshence the term fast fashion or disposable fashion. Since the 2000s, other players are still picking up the pace like the British group boohoo (boohoo, PrettyLittleThing, Nasty Gal) or the Chinese behemoth sheinfor which there is even talk ofsuper fast fashion.

Today fast fashion brands can produce up to 36 collections a year, which has deleterious social and environmental consequences.

What are the consequences of fast fashion?

The environmental impacts of fast fashion

Upstream, fast fashion brands produce to optimize their finances, often in the so-called southern countries (especially in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa), where labor is cheaper, and where the laws are less severe on working conditions, as well as on the control of ‘pollution. Firms therefore have less to spend to choose the least polluting production technologies possible. However, transforming raw materials into fabric, chemically treating them, tanning them, dyeing them, etc., requires a lot of water and electricity. And especially, this releases many toxic wastes into the air and especially into the surrounding waters, contaminating the fauna and flora of an entire region. And in general, the more clothes we produce, the more environmental resources we consume, but we far exceed the resources that the planet is able to produce in a year to regenerate this consumption or absorb the waste produced, including CO2. We are therefore drawing more and more, irreversibly, from the Earth’s “non-renewable” (on a human timescale) reserve and accumulating waste that cannot be eliminated.

Downstream of the life of fast fashion clothes, if these are of poor quality and the fast fashion industry constantly pushes us to buy new clothes, we get rid of the ones we already have more regularly. However, we still recycle very little, and these garments are rarely resistant enough to change ownership several times in the flea market, or even in the form of donations to the most disadvantaged through associations. For this reason, most of the time they end up in landfills where they end up incinerated (which pollutes), buried (which also pollutes), or sent to the other side of the world to slowly degrade in “open landfills”.”. For example, the desert of Atacama in Chile or the city of Accra in Ghana are some of the most famous fast fashion cemeteries in the world, but they are not the only ones.From there, the clothes degrade in the environment, overflowing into the sewers, polluting the beaches, and decomposing painfully in the oceans, harming fauna and flora.

Even during the life cycle of clothes, they pollute relatively (but it is negligible compared to production and end of life). In fact, when you wear them and especially wash them, they generate micro particles. We can say that it is not serious for cotton or wool, but more concern for polyester, acrylic and other synthetic raw materials. In effect, this forms microplastics that end up in the oceans and help form the “7th plastic continent” (derisory, again, compared to industrial plastic pollution).

The social impacts of fast fashion

In addition to economies of scale, to earn even more, brands outsource their production mainly to Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa where textile workers will cost less than in the so-called northern countries where fast fashion is more consumed . However, this contributes to the fact that the economy of the producing countries depends enormously on this industry, to the detriment of the development of a more autonomous economy.

To keep their profits, brands pay their subcontractors on the other side of the world as little as possible, without always worrying about their working conditions. However, the collapse of Bangladesh’s Rana Plaza garment factories in 2013 sadly illustrated the consequences of such neglect: 1,127 killed on the spot, and 1,135 dead according to later estimates. In Tangier, Morocco in 2021, 28 more people died making our clothes. Disasters of this type are numerous and rarely mentioned in the media. But that’s just the tip of the fast fashion iceberg.

Under the ice, in these exploited factories, 80% of the women work, subjected to infernal rhythms and the orders of men who maintain the pressure by any means. These obviously include bullying, sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape, as highlighted in an April 2022 Business & Human Rights Resource Center report.

At the end of the life of ready-to-wear clothes, since they are massively produced and thrown away (France got rid of 205,000 tons of clothes in 2020 for example), and their poor quality does not allow them to last over time. used side, this therefore pollutes the environment, as we have just seen, but it also suffocates the clothing markets of some countries. For example, how In Ghana alone, 15 million second-hand clothes arrive every week (which has 32 million inhabitants), 40% of which comes from waste, the remaining 60% find it difficult to sell on local markets, to the detriment of what is locally produced. And the sorting is done mainly by women and children, which maintains and reinforces a vicious circle of precariousness.

What brands do fast fashion?

The best known fast fashion brands are those of the H&M group (H&M, COS, & Other Stories, Arket), the Inditex group (Zara, Pull & Bear, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Stradivarius, Oysho, Zara Home), the boohoo group (boohoo, Nasty Gal, PrettyLittleThing) or the Fast Retailing group (Uniqlo, Comptoir des Cotonniers, Princesse Tam Tam, Theory). Let’s not forget Asos and Shein who contribute a lot.

But in reality, the economic success of these brands has inspired much of the fashion industry to follow suit to produce ever more frequent collections. Thus, even by certain well-known luxury brands, it happens that they offer more than ten collections a year (in lower production volumes, anyway). Even premium/mid-range brands offer dozens of collections a year. It is therefore a matter of production and marketing dynamics that today are found in all price ranges. For this reason it is better to try to understand them in order to be able to identify them everywhere, rather than trying to remember a list that is all the same here:

• H&M
• SOC
• and other stories
• Market
• Zadar
• Pull and bear
• maximum Dutti
• Bershka
• Stradivarius
• Oysho
• boohoo
• Bad girl
• Pretty Little Thing
• Uniqlo
• asos
• shein

How to fix fast fashion?

If we are to remedy fast fashion on an individual scale, we can start by buying less clothes overall, let alone first-hand. Because buying several second-hand items every month means continuing to participate in the global system that disposable fashion has become, contributing to the fast fashionization of second-hand. If you buy 2-3 times a year, 2-3 pieces from ready-to-wear, especially if you bought them second-hand, for example, there’s really nothing to feel guilty about. On an individual scale, the most important thing is to reduce overall consumption, repair what you already have, try to reuse it in a different way if it is no longer portable by reinventing and/or recycling it.