Hi everyone!
For our first few posts, we would like to provide a crash course on fast fashion in order to help you contextualize our future more detailed, pollution-focused posts. First up, I'll be talking about the history of fast fashion and how it revolutionized our relationship with fashion.
A bit of history
It all started with a brand you probably know and love, Zara. Zara's founder, Amancio Ortega, opened the first Zara store in Spain in 1975. With Zara, Ortega successfully created a business model that is now known as fast fashion. In our next post, we will go into more detail into how this works, but in short, Zara was able to cut down the design and production process of garments that could take up to 21 months to 4 months or even as little as 15 days. With this model, clothes can be released every week – instead of the traditional two seasons per year in which releases conform to the spring/summer and fall/winter seasons, fast fashion brands now have 52 seasons per year. Now, Zara, and other brands under its parent company Inditex, have a total of 7,412 stores all over the world, which produces roughly 840 million garments each year.
Source: Fashion United edited by Katya
The democratization of fashion
Other than speeding up the production process, fast fashion brands are notorious for stealing designs from other designers, especially high-end designers. For Zara, this method of copying other designers' designs has been done from the start by Ortega himself, as it reduced the risk of his garments failing to sell. This is because by copying designs from already successful boutiques, Ortega was able to take out the guess-work in attempting to figure out what the customers want and thereby optimizing the design process, making it less expensive. Today, this is standard practice not only for Zara-Inditex but also for other brands that employ the fast fashion model. Inditex justifies this by saying that "fashion had to be democratized" – by making garments that look almost exactly to those produced by luxury brands with a fraction of the cost, fast fashion opens up the proverbial gate that previously only lets in a small number of elites into the world of fashion. This also means that fast fashion constantly creates demand by its ability to provide "trendy" clothes to the masses, as trends in fashion are ever-changing. However, lower costs also mean lower quality – fashion magazine Mochni contends that fast fashion is "high fashion trickled down to the masses – diluted into coarser fabrics and less careful cuts".
An example of Zara's practice of copying luxury: the fast-fashion chain copied Christian Louboutin's trademarked red soles in 2008. While a pair of Louboutin heels can cost more than $1,000, Zara was able to produce a similar design for less than $100. Source: http://www.fashionlawnotes.com/
Planned/perceived obsolescence
Fast fashion's choice to lower the quality of their garments doesn't only serve to cut costs and make their clothes cheaper, but also to keep customers buying more – the whole industry rests on the principle of planned obsolescence. These clothes aren't made to be an investment, but instead, they are made to be disposable to fuel the cycle of production and consumption. Other than planned obsolescence, it has also been argued that fast fashion fuels perceived obsolescence, a concept that describes "when consumers deem their apparel to be 'unusable' because it is no longer trendy". Dana Thomas, the author of Fashionopolis, calls this "fashion bulimia", which perfectly describes our current relationship with fashion – we constantly "binge" the new trends available in fast-fashion stores then "purge" them when we no longer need it in order to make space for our next "binging" session. However, according to Thomas, this is learned behavior just like bulimia itself – she argues that "we’ve raised whole generations to put convenience and cost ahead of anything else. And so we want disposable and we want cheaper, cheaper, cheaper." This "fashion bulimia" is exactly why fast fashion is so pollutive – everyday resources are always exploited, factories never stop manufacturing, and clothes are constantly getting thrown away.
I hope that this short explanation of what fast fashion is and its history will help you understand why the industry is bad for the environment. Stay tuned for our next post, where Bremen will explain a bit more on how the fast-fashion business model works.
Yours truly,
Katya
References:
Badía, E. (2009). Zara and her sisters: The story of the world's largest clothing retailer. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Philip, Reena Susan; Anian, Aswathi Mary; Raja, Anand Shankar M. (2020). Planned fashion obsolescence in the light of supply chain uncertainty. Academy of Strategic Management Journal; Arden Vol. 19(1): 1-17.
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