presentation of fast fashion

What is fast fashion?

Fashion is fun. If you’ve ever seen a makeover montage in an ’80s movie, you’re well familiar. Trying on, buying, and keeping clothes to reflect our various moods fulfills complex human needs for comfort and individual expression—as well as for consumption.

Get to know and directly engage with senior McKinsey experts on fast fashion

Anita Balchandani is a senior partner in McKinsey’s London office, Achim Berg is a senior partner in the Frankfurt office, Gemma D’Auria is a senior partner in the Milan office, Clarisse Magnin-Mallez is a senior partner in the Paris office, and Patrick Simon is a senior partner in the Berlin office.

Fashion is also serious business. In 2023, the global industry was estimated to be worth $1.7 trillion . And more than 300 million people all over the world work on clothes, somewhere along the value chain. From 2000 to 2014, clothing production doubled  and the number of garments purchased per capita increased by about 60 percent. This is due, in part, to the rise of fast fashion.

Fast fashion retailers move, well, faster than their traditional counterparts. This means that they compress production cycles and turn out up-to-the-minute designs, enabling shoppers to not only expand their wardrobes but also refresh them quickly—and cheaply. And shoppers, it turns out, love a new look: according to the recent The State of Fashion 2024 report, published by Business of Fashion and McKinsey, 40 percent of US consumers and 26 percent of UK consumers have shopped at fast fashion giants Shein or Temu in the past 12 months. If you include other fast fashion retailers, the number would likely be much larger.

For all the growth it generates, the fast fashion industry is also responsible for considerable waste. Fast fashion consumers are quick to throw clothes away: some estimates suggest that consumers treat the lowest-priced garments as nearly disposable, discarding them after only seven wears . For every five garments produced, the equivalent of three end up in a landfill  or are incinerated each year. And total greenhouse gas emissions from textiles production clock in at 1.2 billion tons a year—that’s more emissions than those emitted by all international flights and maritime ships combined. Reports also indicate  that some clothing factory workers are underpaid and exposed to unsafe workplace conditions.

The true costs of fast fashion are coming into focus, especially for millennials and Gen Z . Young people are becoming more mindful  of sustainability with respect to how they consume. They’re also keenly aware that the fashion industry is a major contributor to global warming. And they’re walking the talk too: half of Gen Z shoppers in China , according to a recent survey about sustainable consumption, said they aimed to buy less fast fashion.

How can the fast fashion industry give itself a sustainability makeover? Read on to find out.

Learn more about McKinsey’s Retail  and Sustainability  Practices.

What is ultrafast fashion?

If fast fashion retailers speed up traditional product cycles, ultrafast fashion moves even faster. Back in the 1990s, the Spanish retailer Zara was one of the first fast fashion retailers to break the mold, offering hundreds of new items per week. As of 2023, the Chinese ultrafast fashion retailer Shein  consistently churns out up to 10,000 new designs a day. And Shein’s products are, on average, significantly less expensive  relative to the company’s more established fast fashion counterparts: Shein’s average SKU price is $14, compared with $26 at fast fashion retailer H&M and $34 at Zara.

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Shein grew dramatically during the pandemic. Due in part to a surge in online sales and digital adoption rates, the company more than doubled its market share in the United States during that time; it’s now the second-most-popular  shopping website among America’s Gen Z (after Amazon). In a 2022 funding round, Shein’s value was set at $100 billion (in 2023, it reportedly dropped to $66 billion, likely in anticipation of increased regulation).

How are fast fashion companies evolving the business model?

Ultralow prices are critical to the success of the fast fashion business model, as are condensed turnaround times. Upstart fast fashion retailers such as Shein and Temu are updating the model in the following ways :

• Agile, scalable manufacturer-to-consumer supply chains . Some next-generation fast fashion companies have developed large networks of suppliers who often manufacture exclusively for these companies.
• Data-driven product design and testing . Shein, for instance, uses demand-driven trend modeling to design and select its products. This includes a range of data inputs from current trends to viral products to customer perception.
• Loyal and growing customer bases . These are fed by affiliate marketing influencer  programs and organic social community building, which lower customer acquisition costs.
• High app adoption rates and engagement tactics . Companies have gamified their app experiences, allowing customers to earn loyalty points by setting up accounts, leaving reviews, watching live streams, and more.

How are fast fashion organizations addressing sustainability concerns in their C-suites?

One way fashion companies, fast and otherwise, are preparing for the sustainability challenges ahead is by restructuring their C-suites. According to McKinsey’s State of Fashion 2024 report, the C-suite teams at almost all of Europe’s 25 biggest fashion companies include at least one executive with environmental, social, and governance experience. These executives oversee a series of sustainability strategies, from shrinking their companies’ carbon footprints to reducing waste to improving labor relations.

The brands that execute sustainability strategies most successfully incorporate sustainability components into existing roles rather than create entirely new ones. For example, the UK-based fast fashion retailer Primark put Michelle McEttrick, the company’s first chief customer officer, in charge of leading sustainability strategy. And success as a sustainability executive can open doors to the top job, as in the case of Helena Helmersson, who was appointed CEO of H&M in 2020 after serving as the company’s head of sustainability.

How can the textile industry make business models more sustainable?

Many fast fashion players are considering how to make their business models more circular, in response to climate pressures and a quickly evolving regulatory landscape. In a circular model of value creation, resources are deployed over and over . Conversely, a traditional linear model begins with extraction and concludes with end-of-life disposal, with the expectation that consumers will discard goods and buy more.

Here are a few ways in which fashion companies can work toward complying with changing regulations.

• Improved traceability . Achieving full supply chain visibility across all tiers of manufacturing will be a critical enabler for regulatory compliance. Advances in blockchain and other technologies may help companies to enable more transparent and efficient monitoring. Brands such as Brooks Sports and Renfro Brands have deployed TrusTrace’s digital traceability platform to achieve traceability at scale.
• Sourcing and production . Upstream supply chain activities account for the majority of carbon emissions in the apparel industry, so in the future there may be a sharper focus on decarbonizing the production of materials and garments. Brands may increasingly shift to new suppliers or join strategic alliances. The luxury retail brand Hermès, for example, has partnered with start-up MycoWorks to secure access to its engineered mycelium (a network of fungal threads that can be used to produce a product similar to leather ).
• Design . A new emphasis on longevity and durability may demand fresh attention to design details such as stitching and seams. Materials that cannot be separated in recycling may be avoided in the future, meaning designers might have to think more creatively about their design choices.
• End-of-life waste . New business models are coming to the fore to minimize production and waste. Resale continues to grow through brand partnerships with secondhand marketplaces, such as the RealReal and Vestiaire Collective . There is also an opportunity to accelerate closed-loop recycling, a process whereby a product can be used and then turned into a new product many times over. Stockholm-based Renewcell is ramping up the world’s first at-scale fiber-to-fiber recycling factory and is already working with global brands including H&M and Levi’s.

As global business reckons with increasing climate pressures and a changing regulatory environment, the fashion companies that cut new patterns for sustainability are the ones most likely to excel in the future.

Articles referenced:

• “ The State of Fashion 2024: Finding pockets of growth as uncertainty reigns ,” November 29, 2023, Anita Balchandani , David Barrelet, Achim Berg , Gemma D’Auria , Felix Rölkens , and Ewa Starzynska
• “ Great merchandising never goes out of fashion ,” March 15, 2023, David Barrelet, Matthew Chapman, Erik Eklöw, Julia Huang, Felix Rölkens , and Hannah Yankelevich
• “ The State of Fashion 2023: Holding onto growth as global clouds gather ,” November 29, 2022, Imran Amed, Sarah André, Anita Balchandani , Achim Berg , and Felix Rölkens
• “ In search of fashion’s sustainability seekers ,” June 28, 2022, Elisa Albella, Anita Balchandani , Nic Cornbleet, and Libbi Lee
• “ State of Fashion 2022: An uneven recovery and new frontiers ,” May 2, 2022, Imran Amed, Achim Berg , Anita Balchandani , Pamela Brown, Hannah Crump, Amanda Dargan, Saskia Hedrich , Jakob Ekeløf Jensen, Leila Le Merle, Felix Rölkens , Michael Straub, and Robb Young
• “ Is luxury resale the future of fashion? ,” December 14, 2020, Miriam Lobis
• “ Refashioning clothing’s environmental impact ,” July 25, 2019, Clarisse Magnin-Mallez  and Saskia Hedrich
• “ Developing products for a circular economy ,” November 14, 2016, Eric Hannon , Marianne Kuhlmann, and Benjamin Thaidigsmann
• “ Style that’s sustainable: A new fast-fashion formula ,” October 20, 2016, Nathalie Remy, Eveline Speelman, and Steven Swartz

Want to know more about fast fashion ?

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What You Need to Know About Fast Fashion

The industry makes trends more accessible, but there is a high cost.

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Fast fashion is everywhere. A few steps into the mall or down a busy shopping street, and you’re sure to encounter dozens of brands that fall into this category. And that’s not including the abundance of online-only businesses. No matter where they are sold or how long they’ve been around, one thing all fast fashion companies have in common is their ability to churn out the latest trends at some of the lowest prices. 

The convenience of fast fashion is what draws many consumers to shop (and shop, and shop). It’s easy to get caught up in the affordability factor, which allows buyers to purchase various on-trend garments every season without breaking the bank. However, this quick and cheap business model can have hidden high costs — particularly when it comes to polluting the environment and fostering unethical working conditions. And although many fast fashion brands have made efforts to evolve and improve their practices, it’s important to know the true impact of such a common shopping habit.

So, if you’re curious about the evolution of fast fashion, what it offers, and where it falls short, here’s everything you need to know about the business model. 

What Is Fast Fashion?

Fast fashion is “an approach to the design, creation, and marketing of clothing fashions that emphasizes making fashion trends quickly and cheaply available to consumers,” according to Merriam-Webster . In other words, fast fashion refers to brands that mass-produce garments regularly to keep up with the latest styles, utilizing low-quality synthetic materials to aid their expedited manufacturing process. Unlike higher quality investment pieces, these more cheaply made items tend to deteriorate after a few wears and washes, which causes many consumers to discard them quickly. 

Fast fashion is intended to keep up with today’s fast-paced trend cycle. While smaller businesses and luxury brands may take months to produce a collection, fast fashion companies can generate items in a matter of weeks, or even sooner. “Fast-fashion companies used to brag about getting a new style up for sale in as little as two weeks. Boohoo can do it in a matter of days.” wrote The Atlantic in 2021.

When Did Fast Fashion Start?

The origins of fast fashion can be traced all the way back to the 1800s. The introduction of the sewing machine in 1846, and later the outsourcing of garment production to factories, prompted a decrease in clothing prices and an increase in the amount of clothes being made, according to Fashionista . 

By the 1960s and ‘70s, textile mills had opened around the world to meet the demands of consumers who desired affordable and stylish clothing. In 1966, paper dresses gained popularity when the Scott Paper Company created a disposable shift dress made of cellulose that could be thrown out after one use, according to the Victoria and Albert Museum . It was made to promote the brand's throwaway tableware collection but surprisingly became a phenomenon, with many other businesses creating their own versions. 

Although H&M was founded in Sweden in 1947 and Zara opened in Spain in 1975, most fast fashion brands didn’t reach the U.S. until decades later. When Zara opened a store in New York City in 1989, the New York Times coined the term “fast fashion” to explain the brand’s process of changing its stock every three weeks. 

The 2000s accelerated the rise of fast fashion with the introduction of social media and influencer culture. And as Instagram #OOTDs became a thing, having a new look daily fueled the need to shop. 

“Because of fast fashion and the low price of fashion, I think that the definition of style has changed a lot in recent years,” Elizabeth L. Cline, author of Overdressed and The Conscious Closet , told InStyle in 2020. “We all see style as this thing that's about newness and consumption and what's next, but it can mean something else. [When] clothes were more expensive, style was also about good fit, good quality — it was about looking really put together and not necessarily about looking new or fresh.”

The Impact of Fast Fashion 

Consumers often turn to fast fashion because of how affordable it can be, but it’s hard to ignore the long-lasting impact it has on the environment. From 2000 to 2014, clothing production doubled, and the number of garments purchased increased by 60 percent, according to a McKinsey and Company study . This process of overproduction and rapid consumption is part of the reason the fashion industry has quickly become a leading cause of pollution. 

The fashion industry accounts for 10 percent of global carbon emissions, produces 20 percent of wastewater, and is responsible for up to 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations . The synthetic fibers used to make fast fashion garments also create pollution during laundering; synthetic textiles account for 35 percent of the microplastic pollution in the world’s oceans, according to The New York Times . Garment disposal is also a major factor. Eighty-five percent of garments end up in landfills or are burned instead of recycled, according to the United Nations Climate Change Conference . 

In addition to the environmental impact, many fast fashion brands have been investigated for unsafe working conditions and wages below the legal minimum for garment workers. In 2022, The New York Times reported on a United States Department of Labor investigation that discovered Fashion Nova was paying sewers in Los Angeles factories as low as $2.77 an hour. This is only one of many examples that show how cheap fashion can come at a high cost to laborers.

Some fast fashion companies are making efforts to change some of their practices. H&M aims to be fully circular by 2040, and to have 100 percent recycled or other sustainably sourced materials by 2030. In July, Zara’s owner announced that it will be exploring new recycling practices and sustainable fibers in order to reduce its environmental impact by, according to Reuters . 

How to Identify Fast Fashion Brands

Brands including Boohoo, ASOS, Fashion Nova, H&M, Forever 21, Zara, and Shein are dominant in the fast fashion world. As a consumer, whether you’re shopping online or in-store, you can identify fast fashion retailers by paying attention to the product details. Synthetic materials (think: polyester or acrylic), offshore manufacturing locations (where labor is often cheaper), and consistent drops of new styles that reflect the latest trends are hallmarks of fast fashion. 

Alternatives to Fast Fashion

“Slow fashion” is gaining momentum and focuses on the quality of clothes rather than the quantity, encouraging brands to use more durable materials and fair labor practices. In turn, consumers are changing their shopping habits, which means buying less, embracing secondhand shopping, renting clothes for special occasions, upcycling clothes, and building a capsule wardrobe . 

“I think from where we stand now, the idea of clothing being more expensive or fashion slowing down sounds sort of scary to us,” Cline told InStyle in 2020. “But really, in the not-so-distant past, clothes were more expensive and fashion was slower, and we were fine."

Cline recommends taking a step back, and thinking about long-term investments over of-the-moment trends. "I think it leaves more space for all of these other things that clothing can be about, whether it's cultivating a relationship with a tailor or dressmaker in your community, or even having a sewing circle or a mending circle.”

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Explainer: What Is Fast Fashion?

Fast fashion is a term used to describe cheap and low quality clothing that are rapidly produced and are cycled in and out the market quickly to meet new trends. 

People around the world have increasingly become more aware and conscious of their carbon footprint and impacts on the environment, especially in light of global warming and the worsening effects of the climate crisis. The fashion industry, and in particular, fast fashion companies, have come under the spotlight for its contribution to global waste and climate change. But what exactly is fast fashion? 

What Is Fast Fashion? 

The term fast fashion refers to a large sector of the fashion industry whose business model relies on cheap and speedy production of low quality clothing, which gets pumped quickly through stores in order to meet the latest and newest trends.

The term was first coined by the New York Times in the early 1990s when Spanish apparel giant Zara arrived in New York, to describe the brand’s mission to take only 15 days for a garment to go from the design stage to being sold in stores. Some of the biggest and most notable fast fashion brands in the world include the likes of UNIQLO, Forever 21 and H&M.

The fast fashion business model involves rapid design, production, distribution and marketing, allowing brands and retailers to pull large quantities of greater product variety and allow consumers to get more style and product differentiation at a low price.

However, a system that relies on such cheap and rapid production only encourages excessive consumption as people are inherently attracted to low priced goods, many of which are slaves to the latest trends. For individual consumers, it is also easier and more economic to snatch up cheap clothing that have short life spans compared to splurging on high quality, long lasting items that will very shortly fall out of popularity.

And therein lies the problem. The fast fashion model drives consumers to continuously purchase cheap clothing and discard them quickly due to its poor quality, which are significantly more susceptible to wear and tear. This cycle of buying and discarding creates a huge environmental problem, with the world accumulating mountains of textile and clothing waste every day, most of which are not biodegradable. 

You might also like: Fast Fashion: Its Detrimental Effect on the Environment 

Why Is Fast Fashion Bad?

Globally, an estimated 92 million tonnes of textiles waste is produced every year and that number is expected to soar up to 134 million tonnes a year by 2030. 

You might also like: The 9 Biggest Fast Fashion Statistics

Despite this, fast fashion companies and retailers have no real interest or incentives to change its current business model when it’s proven to be so profitable so far. Furthermore, manufacturers cut production costs even more by using synthetic and chemically treated materials rather than organic ones in order to lower prices and encourage more consumption.

Much like the argument to switch to a plant-based diet to help reduce deforestation and carbon emissions, it is up to consumers to actively choose to avoid fast fashion brands, and to support more sustainable and socially conscious labels in order to alleviate the devastating environmental impacts of the industry. 

Featured image by: Photo by Bicanski/Pixnio

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What is fast fashion and why is it a problem?

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Alex Crumbie explores the growing concern about the social and environmental impacts of the fast fashion clothing industry and sets out what's wrong with fast fashion.

Fast fashion is ‘fast’ in a number of senses: the changes in fashion are fast, the rate of production is fast; the customer’s decision to purchase is fast; delivery is fast; and garments are worn fast – usually only a few times before being discarded.

The rise of fast fashion has had devastating consequences, from its reliance on plastic fabrics and its enormous carbon footprint to its erosion of workers’ rights.

In this article we explain what we mean when we say ‘fast fashion’ and why it is so bad for people and the planet. 

What is fast fashion?

Fast fashion is widely considered to be low-quality apparel produced rapidly to follow current trends in the industry and sold at rock-bottom prices. Although the monetary cost is low, textile workers and the environment are paying a high price. Fast fashion is cheap because workers are not paid adequately. Clothes are poorly made, widely purchased, rarely worn and quickly thrown away.

The goal of fast fashion companies is to encourage people to spend more money on more clothes that they use for a shorter time. That's what makes them money.

Fast changing trends

Fashion brands have long used new styles and lower prices to attract customers, but previously brands would plan new ranges many months, even years, in advance. The pace of change was relatively slow and there were fewer products on offer. In comparison, fast fashion is focused on responding to ever-changing consumer tastes as quickly as possible.

For example, in the BBC’s 2020 ‘Breaking Fashion’ show we see Manchester-based fast fashion company, In the Style , reproducing a bodysuit worn by Kylie Jenner. The company manages to have the piece designed, manufactured and on sale within 10 days of the piece first being worn publicly by the celebrity.

The rise of fast fashion is intertwined with social media and celebrity/influencer culture. A celebrity posts a photo wearing a new outfit, and their followers want it, so fast fashion brands rush to be the first to provide it. Fast fashion brands often target young people - so called Gen Zs -, who have been brought up amongst social media and influencer culture. 

Of course, the flow of causality is not that simple: fast fashion brands are not simply reacting to consumer demand, they are also creating it. But the essential point is that these brands operate on the basis of constantly producing new lines of clothes to meet the insatiable and ever-changing consumer demand for all things new.

Fast production

Faster changing trends means that producers are under pressure to manufacture clothes more and more rapidly. Factories are expected to produce new lines with only a couple of month’s notice, meaning that their workload - and therefore the amount of employment they can offer to workers - is unpredictable and insecure.

The drive to produce garments rapidly has led many UK fast fashion companies to reshore clothing production to the UK, where previously almost all clothing brands sourced from less-economically developed countries such as Bangladesh or Vietnam.

Leicester has become a central hub for clothing production and many of the scandals associated with workers’ rights in the UK have been found in factories in the city.

The exploitation of workers in fast fashion supply chains is partly the result of brands pressuring suppliers to produce clothes as cheaply and quickly as possible. We talk about this more below.

Fast sale and delivery

The low-cost of fast fashion items encourages fast sale. The average person in the UK buys 60% more clothing today than in 2000. We buy more clothes per person in the UK than in any other country in Europe, and our addiction has grown - with online searches for ‘cheap clothes’ increasing 46.3% during the first coronavirus lockdown. 

Even if you are out-of-pocket you can buy items using Klarna and other easy credit services. Its post-purchase payment options allow you to defer paying for your garment for 14 to 30 days, much like a payday loan.

Most companies also offer cheap deals for quick delivery. At the time of writing, Boohoo offered unlimited next-day delivery for one year for just £9.99.

It’s estimated that the average item of clothing is worn just 14 times , and in 2019 The Guardian reported that one in three young women considered an item worn just once or twice to be old.

Much modern clothing is not made to last. Due to super-fast production, designs are generally not well stress-tested before sale, and cheap synthetic fabrics are used in order to keep costs low. Much of it will end up in landfill after only being worn a handful of times.

Five things you need to know about fast fashion

Which are the leading fast fashion brands.

It is important to note that most of the fashion sector has become ‘faster’ in recent years. As such, even the more mainstream, established brands will be ‘fast’ to some extent.What used to be called 'fast' fashion is now called 'ultra fast' fashion. However, there are some brands that stand out as much faster than the rest:

• Boohoo , which also owns the following brands: Burton, Coast, Debenhams, Dorothy Perkins, Karen Millen, MissPap, Nasty Gal, Oasis, Pretty Little Thing, Wallis, Warehouse
• In the Style
• I Saw it First
• Shein and Missguided

If a brand is offering vast numbers of ‘new in’ clothes (usually thousands of new items every day) and its products are super cheap, then it is a fast fashion brand.

France to ban fast fashion

France, with its celebrated and economically significant fashion houses, is taking the political lead in challenging fast fashion.

In March 2024, the French parliament approved a bill that targets fast fashion and ultra-fast fashion sold by online retail giants such as Shein and Temu to counter the fast fashion industry's environmental impact. It makes France the first country in the world legislating to limit the excesses of ultra fast fashion.

It will ban the advertising of certain ultra-fast-fashion companies – and penalise low cost items with a surcharge of €5 (£4.20) an item from 2025, rising to €10 by 2030, to cover their environmental impact. The bill would also mandate that fast fashion retailers include an item's reuse, repair, recycling and environmental impact near the product's price.

The bill states: "This evolution of the apparel sector towards ephemeral fashion, combining increased volumes and low prices, is influencing consumer buying habits by creating buying impulses and a constant need for renewal, which is not without environmental, social and economic consequences."

France will apply criteria such as volumes of clothes produced and turnover speed of new collections in determining what constitutes fast fashion.

“Shein offers 900 times more products than a traditional French brand,” it states, adding that the brand releases more than 7,200 new models of clothing per day, with a total of 470,000 different products available overall.

The problems with fast fashion 

What are the environmental problems with fast fashion.

The endless creation of new clothes comes with a heavy environmental price. Every year the sector requires 93 billion cubic meters of water, which is enough to meet the consumption needs of five million people , and is responsible for around 20% of industrial water pollution as a result of textile treatment and dyeing.

There are also numerous problems with the materials and processes used. For example , cotton production uses 6% of the world’s pesticides and 16% of insecticides. 

The industry also has a heavy carbon footprint, which is responsible for up to 10% of total global carbon emissions , more than the total form flying and shipping, and is estimated to increase by 50% by 2030.

The above problems affect the clothing sector more broadly, but one issue is particularly endemic to fast fashion: plastic.

How much plastic do clothes contain?

Not only does fashion heavily rely on fossil fuel for energy to produce their garments and transport them across the world, but a staggering 69% of all textile fibres are derived from fossil fuels , with projections indicating a potential for further expansion in the future. 

Polyester is the most widely used of these synthetic fibres and is now found in over half of all textiles produced. It is generally produced from polyethylene terephthalate, better known as PET, a type of plastic derived from crude oil and natural gas – also used to make items such as plastic bottles.

Changing Markets' research found that in 2015, polyester production for textiles alone was responsible for emissions of over 700 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent – similar to the annual GHG emissions of Mexico or 180 coal-fired power plants. This is projected to nearly double by 2030, reaching twice the GHG emissions of Australia.

The ubiquitousness of plastic in clothing means that the textile sector accounts for 15% of total plastic use; the only sectors that use more are construction and packaging. 

According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, clothes release half a million tonnes of microfibres  – the miniscule bits of fabric that are released when clothes are worn, washed, or disposed of, that find their way into our bodies and the natural world - into the ocean every year, equivalent to more than 50 billion plastic bottles. 

These fibres have been found almost everywhere: from the summit of Mount Everest to the placentas of unborn babies. We still do not know the effects they may have.

Clothing made of recycled plastics

Many fashion brands are pledging to address the issue of the use of virgin plastics in clothing manufacture, a material derived from the fossil fuel industry. However, this is often by replacing it with recycled synthetics.

Many brands are making a song and dance about using recycled plastics for their clothes, but a recent report by the RSA found that the actual level of recycled content was pitifully low. Across four major online fast fashion brands, the use of recycled fabrics was a mere 4%.

Our analysis of Shein ’s website found its recycled content was even lower, at only 0.5%, despite the brand claiming, “ When selecting materials, we do our best to source recycled fabric, such as recycled polyester.”

Recycling plastics where possible has some benefits, but it does nothing to address the problem of microfibres . 

And this may well be from recycled plastic bottles but, as a 2021 Guardian article points out: “PET bottles are also part of a well-established, closed-loop recycling system, where they can be efficiently recycled at least 10 times. The apparel industry is 'taking from this closed-loop, and moving it into this linear system because most of those clothes won’t be recycled', said Maxine Bédat, Executive Director of New Standard Institute. "Converting plastic from bottles into clothes may actually accelerate its path to the landfill, especially for low-quality, fast-fashion garments which are often discarded after only a few uses.”

The fashion industry, governments and consumers need to act to slow down consumption and ensure that garments are sustainable at every stage of their life cycle, from fibre production, to manufacture, to end-of-life.

How much waste does the clothing industry cause?

With the growing popularity of fast and ultra fast fashion, there comes a growing amount of textile waste.

The amount of textiles being produced globally per person more than doubled from 5.9kg to 13kg over the period 1975-2018. 

Many of the clothes bought are thrown away after being worn just a handful of times: the industry produces an estimated 92 million tonnes of textiles waste annually, much of which is burnt or finds its way to landfill , while less than 1% of used clothing is recycled into new garments.

Often textile waste is exported and ends up being dumped in countries such as Ghana and Kenya.  The environmental impact of all these garments, often richly laced with industrial chemicals, is severe for local ecosystems when they are dumped in their billions.

Some of this waste consists of new items that never even reached the consumer – clothing lines that have become outdated and so are destroyed instead of sold.

Atacama clothing mountain highlights over-consumption

The shocking reality of fast fashion’s waste problem hit the headlines in November 2021 with an Agence France-Presse (AFP) report on the mountains of discarded clothing ending up in Chile’s Atacama Desert. A total of 59,000 tons of second-hand clothing is said to arrive in Chile for resale each year from Europe, the US and Asia. However, an estimated 39,000 tons is unable to be sold and ends up dumped in the desert.

The situation highlights the myriad of problems in the fashion industry. The over-consumption of new clothing means that even an increasingly thriving second-hand clothing market cannot keep up, and this is exacerbated by the amount of poor-quality clothing not suitable for resale.

While second-hand markets certainly play a huge role in reducing the carbon impact of clothing when replacing the purchase of new items, a system where clothing gets shipped around the world multiple times, only to be wasted anyway is clearly not sustainable.

Why is it bad for workers?

Wages and conditions.

In order to offer clothes at ultra low prices, fast fashion brands need their costs to be low. One of the main ways of doing this is to drive down the wages of garment workers in the supply chain. 

For years, brands have ‘chased the cheap needle’ around the world, seeking countries with the lowest labour standards so that garment workers can be easily exploited. In recent years, many UK fast fashion brands have found the cheap needle closer to home, often in quasi-legal factories in cities such as Leicester.

In the UK, Boohoo has become somewhat the symbol of fast fashion’s worker exploitation problem. Numerous exposés have shown that while the pockets of Boohoo’s directors are bursting at the seams, the people who actually stitch the seams of its clothing are paid a pittance, with some found to have been paid under half the minimum wage.

The Levitt report, which looked in depth at Boohoo’s Leicester supply chain, found that “The allegations of unacceptable working conditions and underpayment of workers are not only well-founded but are substantially true.” Levitt also claimed that these problems were endemic to the system and likely found across Boohoo’s supply chain.

Worker exploitation is an essential part of the fast fashion model. If an item is very cheap, chances are that the person who produced it was paid little. 

The Ethical Fashion Report published in 2023, 10 years after the first edition, found that although there has been some progress for garment workers, overall change is still too slow. Their research found that at the current rate of progress, it would be 75 years before all companies are paying a living wage at even a minimum of one factory per company. The vast majority of clothing companies (84%) were not sourcing from any factories which paid a living wage.

Harassment of women

A 2022 report Unbearable Harassment: The Fashion Industry and Widespread Abuse of Female Garment Workers in Indian Factories , found that every single woman spoken to for the report (90), had either experienced or witnessed gender-based violence and harassment (GBVH) carried out by male supervisors and managers at the factories they worked at.

“Verbal, physical, and sexual harassment exists in every garment factory – not just this one. It existed before COVID, it exists during COVID, and it will exist after COVID...” Smita, Tamal Nadu.

The report goes on to state that:

"Violence on the factory floor cannot be dismissed as just a factory-level problem; rather, it must be understood as an industry-wide culture of violence driven by the business model of global fashion brands”.

Awful conditions at a Shein factory exposed

A Channel 4 documentary broadcast autumn 2022 went undercover at a Shein factory to expose predictably awful conditions and exhausted, exploited workers.

The brand is also shown to copy designs from independent designers, rely on unpaid influencers for its marketing, and use manipulative sales techniques such as countdown timers and multi-buys to encourage overconsumption.

Yet the company is hugely popular and massively outsells its fast fashion rivals. Despite many similar documentaries and decades of campaigning on garment worker rights, it seems that cheap clothes are an addiction we just can’t break.

Check out our clothing guides to find some much more ethical options for new clothes, or choose second hand .

The climate impact of clothing

Update from cop28 on fashion.

A decisive phase out of fossil fuels wasn't announced at COP28 at Dubai in December 2023, but it was the first time a COP had acknowledged the need to shift away from fossil fuels. The COP called on countries to contribute to “transitioning away” from fossil fuels and for the first time delivered an unmistakable message that the time is running out on the use of coal, oil and gas.

According to Changing Markets , the fashion industry shifted from the side-lines to a more prominent role in the discussions at this climate conference. Panels, interactive events, sustainable fashion show and Stella McCartney’s pavilion exhibiting sustainable and innovative fashion materials signalled a growing recognition of fashion can play in mitigating climate change.

Some notable announcements at COP indicated a step in the right direction. Bestseller and H&M Group pledged to invest in a major offshore wind project in Bangladesh. While the project is still at the very early stages of development, it underscores that fashion brands hold immense power to support their suppliers in a just transition away from fossil fuel, provided they follow through with substantial investments. 

HSBC committed $4.3 million to the Apparel Impact Institute’s $250 million Fashion Climate Fund, which received an initial $40 million from lead funders, including Lululemon and H&M Group. The aim of the fund is to identify and scaling tools to reduce carbon emissions in the supply chain. However, in light of the estimated $1 trillion is needed to finance the fashion industry’s decarbonization by 2050, these efforts represent a drop in the ocean of what’s necessary. The industry still has a long journey ahead to achieve substantial change.

The Fashion Charter

The Fashion Charter was set up with the support of UN Climate Change in 2018 to provide a pathway for the industry to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, in line with global efforts to limit warming to 1.5C. Other commitments in the Charter include sourcing 100% of electricity from renewable sources by 2030, sourcing of environmentally friendly raw materials, and phasing out coal from the supply chain by 2030.

Charter members are expected to publicly report progress against interim and long-term targets annually, via the Carbon Disclosure Project CDP , a not-for-profit charity.

The charter currently has 130 signatories including brands such as H&M, Primark, Levi’s, Chanel and Adidas. Unsurprisingly, none of these companies are ultra fast fashion companies.

However, while 90% of signatories to the Fashion Charter are engaging suppliers with their green objectives, this reduces to just 50% when considering the entire fashion sector. Approved Science Based Targets (SBTs) falls to 10% on a sector-wide basis and reporting of total renewable energy consumed falls to 39%. Verified scope 2 emissions disclosures fall to 16% on a sector-wide basis.

Fast fashion coming under pressure

Whilst the global fast fashion business model is still based on exploitative low wages, the brands themselves are now coming under increasing pressure.

Profits at fast fashion pioneers ASOS and Boohoo are tumbling whilst last year Missguided, one of the UK’s flagship fast fashion companies went bust, all largely as a result of the cost-of-living crisis that’s seen soaring costs of everything from cotton to shipping.

In 2022, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority launched an investigation into whether eco-friendly and sustainability claims made by the fast fashion chains Asos, Boohoo and George at Asda constitute greenwashing.

Meanwhile over in Europe, the EU is stepping up its fight against throwaway culture by aiming to end fast fashion by 2030.

In an ambitious initiative launched last year, the EU announced its intention to vastly expand its clothing design rules on recycling and sustainability. In just seven years’ time, all textiles sold within the EU must be recyclable, free of hazardous substances and contain a high percentage of recycled fibres.

All these actions are clearly good news for the environment but the bottom line is that fast fashion still demands the exploitation of garment workers.

However, it’s important to remember that the problem is with the clothing companies, not with the clothing industry.

“We all need clothes and the clothing industry provides millions of jobs around the world from farmers who provide the cotton and fabrics to workers in garment factories,” says Heather Webb, a former researcher at Ethical Consumer who has since worked within the fast fashion industry as an ethical trade analyst.

“Big fashion brands are consistently treating the factories they buy from poorly and it’s the workers and environment who suffer,” says Fiona Gooch from Transform Trade that campaigns for a more ethical global trading system.

“We need a fashion watchdog to regulate UK garment retailers along the same lines as the existing supermarket watchdog that’s successfully reduced the unfair buying practices of the UK’s largest food retailers,” explains Gooch. “A fashion watchdog would reduce abusive and unfair purchasing practices of the garment retailers which would ultimately benefit garment workers.”

Whilst acknowledging that a fashion watchdog would be a good thing, Anna Bryher believes that it wouldn’t fix the problem of low wages within the clothing industry. What’s needed says Bryher is new legislation to enable clothing brands to be held to account for their unfair purchasing practices.

Heather Webb agrees. “We need government intervention in the market,” says Webb. “One of the key things that could improve both the pay and working conditions of garment workers is a law outlawing the unethical buying practices of clothing brands."

Improving fast fashion - slow fashion

Despite the pervasiveness of fast fashion, things are beginning to improve.

We are wearing clothes for longer

New research from WRAP has found that compared with similar research carried out in 2013, we are wearing our clothes for slightly longer. Jeans , for example, now have a longevity of just over four years, compared to just over three in 2013. The research also found that more than half of us are happy to buy second hand clothes; nearly 60% of us put a lot of effort into maintaining our clothes; and that a similar proportion look for ways to repair clothes when they’re damaged.

The WRAP research also estimates that the UK's wardrobes hold 1.6 billion items of unworn clothes, an average of 31 items for each adult. And yet we’re still spending more than £4 billion on shopping for clothes each month. WRAP makes the point that as textiles and fashion are responsible for between 4% and 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions , we need a revolution in our clothing habits to make our wardrobes sustainable.

Circular clothing industry

The purpose of the WRAP research was to understand the population’s receptiveness to circular business models for clothing . These included second hand, upcycling, subscription, rental (pay-per-wear) and repair (where a brand repairs an item of clothing a customer has purchased from it for a fee).

WRAP found that 40% of people are likely to use a subscription service and that 58% are open to using a repair service. Among those who have already used a circular business model, the majority said they would do so again.

WRAP argues that this shows there is a clear case for clothing brands and retailers to adopt circular business models.

Read the full WRAP report into clothing longevity on their website and read tips on repairing and buying second hand in our article on upcycling and buying second hand clothing .

Buying secondhand clothes

Our own 2023 Ethical Markets report found that sales of secondhand clothes rose by 49% in 2022 compared to the previous year.

Other surveys have spotted the same thing. According to GlobalData's figures, the clothes resale market in the UK grew by 149% between 2016 and 2022. They forecast that it would grow by a further 67.5% between 2022 to 2026.

Some of this growth will be due to the ending of Covid 19 lockdowns and the consequent rise in charity shop sales. Some will also be due to a genuine change of behaviours. The Guardian reported that there were “signs that the popularity of fast fashion is on the wane”. The boom in pre-loved clothes has largely been driven by generation Z. 

A research project by Boston Consulting Group and resale site Vestiaire in 2022 showed that this demographic of consumers was most likely to buy (31%) and sell (44%) second-hand items, with millennials close behind. Depop reports that 90% of active users are under the age of 26 and the hashtag ‘vintage’ has 28.7bn views on generation Z’s favourite app, TikTok.”

Some of it will also be due to more suppliers and innovators entering the market. In 2022, it was reported that eBay saw a 24% increase of circular fashion businesses join their site, and searches for pre-loved clothing on eBay UK skyrocketed 1,600% during that period. 

Our Ethical Clothing guide looks at clothing resale websites as well as the usual ethical innovators we have been featuring for years. We have also reviewed charity shops , which saw an 11% rise in sales in the three months to the end of September 2022, with Oxfam’s sales up 40% in the run-up to Christmas 2022.  

UK Government report on fast fashion 

In 2019 the UK Government published a report on fast fashion and sustainability . The Environmental Audit Committee published 'Fixing fashion: clothing consumption and sustainability', with a number of recommendations. Their report is available on the UK parliament website .

What can you do about fast fashion?

• Buy consciously and look for ethical brands . 
• Buy second hand or repair what you already have.
• Join a fast fashion campaign, such as Fashion Revolution or the Clean Clothes campaign .
• Follow our 10 tips to ditch fast fashion .
• Maybe most importantly, buy less clothing.
• Shopping guide to ethical clothing brands
• Shopping guide to high street clothes shops
• Ethical clothing choices: upcycling, repairing and second-hand

10 tips to turn your back on fast fashion

• Ethical high street fashion
• A quick guide to fair trade and fashion

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Student Editorial Contest Winner

How Fast Fashion Became Faster — and Worse for the Earth

We are honoring the Top 11 winners of our Student Editorial Contest by publishing their essays. This one is by Evelyn Wang, age 17.

By The Learning Network

This essay, by Evelyn Wang , age 17, from Naperville North High School in Naperville, Ill., is one of the Top 11 winners of The Learning Network’s Ninth Annual Student Editorial Contest , for which we received 16,664 entries.

We are publishing the work of all the winners and runners-up over the next week, and you can find them here as they post.

The spring dance is in two weeks, and my friend needs help choosing a dress. She beckons me to her phone where an endless mosaic of elegant dresses, not one over $20, dances before my eyes. After much deliberation, she settles on a glamorous sapphire gown with pleated details lining the bodice. Another two weeks later, the dress carpets the bottom of a landfill, worn only once.

Welcome to the world of fast fashion.

Fast fashion is a relatively recent phenomenon. During the 1990s, retailers began to introduce trendy, cheaply-priced, poorly-made clothes on a weekly basis, intending to match the breakneck pace at which fashion trends move. Style became cheap, convenient and consumable.

Fast fashion, however, is ultimately a privilege. It is a privilege to buy clothes solely for their style, and it is a privilege to ignore the environmental consequences of doing so. In reality, the aggressive cycle of consumption perpetuated by fast fashion means that the clothes we wear are now more likely than ever to end up as part of the 92 million tons of textile waste produced annually.

During the pandemic, as stores closed, consumers ditched fast fashion staples such as H&M and Zara, instead opting to order from e-commerce social media sensations such as Shein and Asos. (Shein is now valued at $100 billion, more than H&M and Zara combined.) These brands represent an escalation of both fast fashion and its environmental toll.

These fast fashion newcomers thrived during the pandemic because of their unique business models. They exist entirely online, allowing them to ship the thousands of new styles they release daily to consumers directly from their warehouses, avoiding supply chain snags and U.S. import duties in the process. Meanwhile, a reliance on cheap overseas labor and synthetic textiles keeps prices irresistibly low.

These practices, however, are hurting the Earth more than ever before. Because these retailers rely solely on international shipping to move their products, they only exacerbate the annual billion tons of greenhouse gasses released by shipping. Virtually all of these brands sell clothes that contain petroleum-based, resource-intensive synthetic fibers such as polyester and nylon. During their lifetime, these fibers are responsible for 35 percent of the microplastics contaminating our oceans and can subsequently take centuries to decompose in landfills.

Though fast fashion represents an understandably alluring combination of style and savings, now, more than ever, we simply cannot quantify the true cost of our clothing with a price tag. When consumers want to update their wardrobe, they can do so sustainably by thrifting, reworking old garments or researching environmentally-conscious brands.

For now, I’ll be at my next school dance rocking the same dress I did last year.

Works Cited

Beall, Abigail. “ Why Clothes Are So Hard to Recycle. ” BBC Future, 12 July 2020.

Monroe, Rachel. “ Ultra-Fast Fashion Is Eating the World. ” The Atlantic, 6 Feb. 2021.

Nguyen, Terry. “ Shein Is the Future of Fast Fashion. Is That a Good Thing? ” Vox, 13 July 2021.

Okamoto, Katie. “ Your Laundry Sheds Harmful Microfibers. Here’s What You Can Do About It. ” The New York Times, 21 April 2021.

Saul, Jonathan. “ Shipping’s Share of Global Carbon Emissions Increases. ” Reuters, 4 Aug. 2020.

Williams, Lara. “ Rise of Shein Tests an Industry’s Go-Green Commitments. ” Bloomberg, 10 April 2022.

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What Is Fast Fashion and Why Is It So Bad?

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Fast fashion is a relatively new phenomenon in the industry that causes extensive damage to the planet, exploits workers, and harms animals. Here’s why it’s best to steer clear when you can.

A tragic reality check for fashion

Fashion wasn’t always as destructive of an industry. Clothes shopping used to be an occasional event—something that happened a few times a year when the seasons changed or when we outgrew what we had. But about 30 years ago, something changed. Clothes became cheaper, trend cycles sped up, and shopping became a weekly hobby for many. Enter fast fashion and the global chains that now dominate our high streets and online shopping . But what is fast fashion? Why is fast fashion so bad? And how exactly does it impact people, the planet, and animals?

It was all too good to be true in the oughties. All these stores selling cool, trendy clothing well-off people could buy without a second’s thought, wear a handful of times, and then throw away. Suddenly brands were promising that almost everyone could afford to dress like their favourite celebrity and wear the latest trends fresh from the catwalk.

But, of course, someone was paying the price. Then in 2013, much of the world had a reality check when the Rana Plaza clothing manufacturing complex in Bangladesh collapsed , killing over 1,000 workers. That’s when many consumers really started questioning fast fashion and wondering at the true cost of those $5 t-shirts . If you’re reading this article, you might already be aware of fast fashion’s dark side, but it’s worth exploring how the industry got to this point—and how we can help to change it.

What is fast fashion?

Fast fashion can be defined as cheap, trendy clothing that samples ideas from the catwalk or celebrity culture and turns them into garments at breakneck speed to meet consumer demand. The idea is to get the newest styles on the market as fast as possible, so shoppers can snap them up while they are still at the height of their popularity and then, sadly, discard them after a few wears. It plays into the idea that outfit repeating is a fashion faux pas and that if you want to stay relevant, you have to sport the latest looks as they happen. It forms a key part of the toxic system of overproduction and consumption that has made fashion one of the world’s largest polluters . Before we can go about changing it, let’s take a look at the history.

Fast fashion plays into the idea that outfit repeating is a fashion faux pas and that if you want to stay relevant, you have to sport the latest looks as they happen.

How did fast fashion happen?

To understand how fast fashion came to be, we need to rewind a bit. Before the 1800s, fashion was slow. You had to source your own materials like wool or leather, prepare them, weave them, and then make the clothes.

The Industrial Revolution introduced new technology—like the sewing machine. Clothes became easier, quicker, and cheaper to make. Dressmaking shops emerged to cater to the middle classes.

Many of these dressmaking shops used teams of garment workers or home workers. Around this time, sweatshops emerged, along with some familiar safety issues. The first significant garment factory disaster was when a fire broke out in New York’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in 1911.  It claimed the lives of 146 garment workers, many of whom were young female immigrants .

By the 1960s and ’70s, young people were creating new trends, and clothing became a form of personal expression, but there was still a distinction between high fashion and high street.

In the late 1990s and 2000s, low-cost fashion reached a peak. Online shopping took off, and fast fashion retailers like H&M , Zara , and Topshop took over the high street. These brands took the looks and design elements from the top fashion houses and reproduced them quickly and cheaply. With everyone now able to shop for on-trend clothes whenever they wanted, it’s easy to understand how the phenomenon caught on.

How to spot a fast fashion brand

Some key factors are common to fast fashion brands:

• Thousands of styles, which touch on all the latest trends.
• Extremely short turnaround time between when a trend or garment is seen on the catwalk or in celebrity media and when it hits the shelves.
• Offshore manufacturing where labour is the cheapest, with the use of workers on low wages without adequate rights or safety and complex supply chains with poor visibility beyond the first tier.
• A limited quantity of a particular garment—this is an idea pioneered by Zara. With new stock arriving in store every few days, shoppers know if they don’t buy something they like, they’ll probably miss their chance.
• Cheap, low quality materials like  polyester , causing clothes to degrade after just a few wears and get thrown away—not to mention the microfibre shedding issue .

Why is fast fashion bad? 

Polluting our planet.

Fast fashion’s impact on the planet is immense . The pressure to reduce costs and speed up production time means environmental corners are more likely to be cut. Fast fashion’s negative impact includes its use of cheap, toxic textile dyes —making the fashion industry the one of the largest polluters of clean water globally, right up there with agriculture. That’s why Greenpeace has been pressuring brands to remove dangerous chemicals from their supply chains through its detoxing fashion  campaigns through the years.

Cheap textiles also increase fast fashion’s impact.  Polyester  is one of the most popular fabrics. It is derived from fossil fuels, contributes to global warming, and can shed  microfibres that add to the increasing levels of plastic in our oceans when washed or even worn. But even “natural” fabrics can be a problem at the scale fast fashion demands. Conventional cotton requires enormous quantities of water and pesticides in countries like India and China. This results in drought risks and creates extreme stress on water basins and competition for resources between companies and local communities.

The speed at which garments are produced also means that more and more clothes are disposed of by consumers, creating massive textile waste.

The constant speed and demand means increased stress on other environmental areas such as land clearing, biodiversity, and soil quality. The processing of leather also impacts the environment, with 300kg of chemicals added to every 900kg of animal hides tanned.

The speed at which garments are produced also means that more and more clothes are disposed of by consumers, creating massive textile waste. According to some statistics, in Australia alone, more than 500m kilos of unwanted clothing ends up in landfill every year .

Exploiting workers

As well as the environmental cost of fast fashion, there’s a human cost.

Fast fashion impacts garment workers  who work in dangerous environments, for low wages, and without fundamental human rights. Further down the supply chain, the farmers may work with toxic chemicals and brutal practices that can have devastating impacts on their physical and mental health, a plight highlighted by the documentary The True Cost .

Harming animals

Animals are also impacted by fast fashion. In the wild, the toxic dyes and microfibres released in waterways are ingested by land and marine life alike through the food chain to devastating effect. And when animal-derived products such as leather, fur, and even wool are used in fashion directly, animal welfare is put at risk. As an example, numerous scandals reveal that real fur, including cat and dog fur, is often being passed off as faux fur to unknowing shoppers. The truth is that there is so much real fur being produced under terrible conditions in fur farms that it’s become cheaper to produce and buy than faux fur.

Coercing consumers

Finally, fast fashion can impact consumers themselves, encouraging a “throw-away” culture because of both the built-in obsolescence of the products and the speed at which trends emerge. Fast fashion makes us believe we need to shop more and more to stay on top of trends, creating a constant sense of need and ultimate dissatisfaction. The trend has also been criticised on intellectual property grounds, with some designers alleging that retailers have illegally mass-produced their designs .

Who are the big players?

Many retailers we know today as the fast fashion big players, like  Zara   or  H&M , started as smaller shops in Europe around the 1950s. Technically, H&M is the  oldest of the fast fashion giants , having opened as Hennes in Sweden in 1947, expanding to London in 1976, and before long, reaching the States in 2000.

Zara follows, which opened its  first store in Northern Spain in 1975 . When Zara landed in New York at the beginning of the 1990s, people first heard the term “fast fashion”. It was coined by the New York Times to describe Zara’s mission to take only 15 days for a garment to go from the design stage to being sold in stores.

There are now even cheaper and faster brands like SHEIN, Missguided, Forever 21, Zaful, Boohoo, and Fashion Nova. These brands are known as ultra fast fashion, a recent phenomenon which is as bad as it sounds.

Other big names in fast fashion today include UNIQLO, GAP,   Primark, and TopShop. While these brands were once seen as radically cheap disruptors, there are now  even cheaper and faster alternatives like SHEIN, Missguided, Forever 21, Zaful, Boohoo, and Fashion Nova. These brands are known as ultra fast fashion , a recent phenomenon which is as bad as it sounds.

Is fast fashion going green? Think again

As an increasing number of consumers call out the true cost of the fashion industry, and especially fast fashion, we’ve seen a growing number of retailers introduce so-called sustainable and ethical fashion initiatives such as in-store recycling schemes . These schemes allow customers to drop off unwanted items in “bins” in the brands’ stores. But it’s been highlighted that only 0.1% of all clothing collected by charities and take-back programs is recycled into new textile fibre .

The underlying issue with fast fashion is the speed at which it is produced, putting massive pressure on people and the environment. Recycling and small eco or vegan clothing ranges —when they are not only for  greenwashing —are not enough to counter the throw-away culture, the waste, the strain on natural resources, and the myriad of other issues created by fast fashion. The whole system needs to be changed.

Will fast fashion ever go out of style?

We are starting to see some changes in the fashion industry. The anniversary of the Rana Plaza collapse is now  Fashion Revolution Week , where people all over the world ask questions like, “Who made my clothes?” and “What’s in my clothes?”. Fashion Revolution declares that “we don’t want our clothes to exploit people or destroy our planet”.

There is also a growing interest in moving towards a more circular textile production model, reusing materials wherever and whenever possible. In 2018, both Vogue Australia  and Elle UK dedicated entire magazine issues to sustainable fashion, a trend being taken up each year by more and more big names.

Pinning the hopes of a better future on each generation that emerges is nothing new—and it’s our collective responsibility to acknowledge that waiting for future generations to solve today's problems is not the answer.

Plus, younger people today are increasingly conscious of the climate emergency and many are taking action accordingly. However, there’s a gap between intention and reality. Millennials and gen Zers are the main drivers of the fast fashion economy today. Ultra fast fashion brands like SHEIN are selling more than ever, and young shoppers are still their target market.

Some analysts think up-and-coming  generation Alpha could finally create a new status quo for fashion in light of the climate crisis: “The signals are that Alphas are taking the expectations and behaviours of previous generations even further,” says Dr. Gordon Fletcher of Salford Business School. “They are the generation to ‘do’ something rather than just ‘talk’ about it.”

But similar things were said of gen Y and Z before them. Pinning the hopes of a better future on each generation that emerges is nothing new—and it’s our collective responsibility to acknowledge that waiting for future generations to solve today’s problems is not the answer.

In light of a looming climate catastrophe, industries like fashion that are responsible for such alarming amounts of waste and carbon emissions must be regulated if we are to limit global warming.

Of course, the onus doesn’t lie solely with shoppers. In fact, in recent years there has been a push towards government and industry regulations that would call for fast fashion brands to change their ways or face fines and persecution. In mid-2023, reports Vogue , “the European Union has backed a raft of new regulations to ‘end fast fashion’, including policies designed to make clothes more durable, easier to reuse, repairable and recyclable.” In light of a looming climate catastrophe, industries like fashion that are responsible for such alarming amounts of waste and carbon emissions must be regulated if we are to limit global warming to 1.5°C by the end of this century as outlined by The Paris Agreement in 2015. While these regulations are emerging and still don’t go far enough , critics say, it’s a step in the right direction.

What can we do?

Shift our consumption habits.

This quote by British designer Vivienne Westwood says it best: “ buy less, choose well, make it last .”

Buying less is the first step—try to fall back in love with the clothes you already own by styling them differently or even “flipping” them, or taking them along to a clothes swap with friends so you each get pieces “new to you”.   Creating a capsule wardrobe is also worth considering on your ethical fashion journey, or even renting outfits for special events so you’re not buying something new to wear once. 

Choose well is the second step, and choosing high-quality garments made of lower-impact materials is essential here. There are pros and cons to all fibre types, as seen in our ultimate guide to clothing materials, but there is a helpful chart at the top to refer to when purchasing. Choosing well could also mean committing to shopping your closet first, only shopping second hand , or supporting more sustainable brands like those below.

Finally, we should make it last and look after our clothes by following the care instructions ,  wearing them until they are worn out , mending them wherever possible , then  responsibly recycling them  at the very end of their life.

Get educated on the big issues

Learning more about the issues with fast fashion and how moving towards more sustainable fashion can make a real difference is key in any consumer’s journey. Here are some resources to get you started:

• A Beginner’s Guide to More Sustainable Fashion
• How to Encourage Your Friends to Shop More Ethically and Sustainably
• Happy Listening: the Best Ethical Fashion Podcasts
• Must-Read Sustainable and Ethical Fashion Books
• Sustainable Fashion Documentaries You’ll Be Glad You Watched

Learn about fast fashion’s responsible alternative, slow fashion

Here are some of our favourite brands giving fast fashion the flick and embodying a slow, circular, more sustainable way of wearing:

Dutch denim brand MUD Jeans is all about sustainability. Not only does it offer a repair service, but it also provides a rental service where you can lease a pair of jeans for up to a year. MUD Jeans uses a combination of GOTS certified organic cotton and post-consumer recycled cotton.

MUD Jeans are available in a range of sizes, usually from W25 L30-W33 L32 for women and W28 L34-W36 L34 for men.

See the rating .

Shop MUD Jeans .

Whimsy + Row

Whimsy + Row is a US-based lifestyle brand born out of a love for quality goods and responsible practices. Since 2014, its mission has been to provide ease and elegance for the modern woman. Whimsy + Row utilises deadstock fabric, and by limiting each garment to short runs, the brand also reduces packaging waste and takes care of precious water resources.

Find most products in XS-XL, with an extended sizing range up to 3XL.

Shop Whimsy + Row .

Shop Whimsy + Row @ Earthkind .

A.BCH is a Melbourne-based, Australian-made fashion label for individuals who care about garment provenance. It utilises renewable, organic, and recycled materials.

Find the range in sizes XS-XL, or customise to fit you.

Shop A.BCH .

Organic Basics

Organic Basics offers high-quality more sustainable fashion basics for men and women in organic materials. The Denmark-based brand puts sustainable thinking at the centre of everything—it only chooses fabrics that care for our environment, and only ever partners with factories that care about their impact.

Organic Basics' clothes are available in sizes XS-XL.

Shop Organic Basics .

Kings of Indigo

Kings of Indigo makes quality denims, tops, and accessories inspired by American classics with a Japanese eye for detail. The brand uses GOTS organic cotton as well as recycled cotton and wool, and avoids all chemicals from the REACH chemical list .

Offered in sizes XS-L.

Shop Kings of Indigo .

Born in Byron Bay, Australia, Afends is a more responsible brand leading the way in hemp fashion. Drawing inspiration from the environment, streetwear, and surf culture, Afends’ mission is to create more sustainable clothing through innovation, action, and positive change. As true hemp advocates, it purchased 100 acres of farmland called Sleepy Hollow to grow its own hemp crops and ignite the hemp revolution.

Find most of the range in sizes XS-XL.

Shop Afends .

Artknit Studios

Artknit Studios creates timeless knitwear in 100% lower-impact materials, made responsibly by Italian makers. Its partners are committed to anti-waste practices using only certified and locally-sourced fibres, true to the brand's motto of "buy less, buy better".

Find items offered in sizes XS-L.

Shop Artknit Studios .

Shop Artknit Studios @ Urbankissed.

Outland Denim

Outland Denim makes premium denim jeans and clothes, and offers employment opportunities for women rescued from human trafficking in Cambodia. This Australian brand was founded as an avenue for the training and employment of women who have experienced sex trafficking.

Find most of the brand's range in US sizes 22-34.

Shop Outland Denim .

Harvest & Mill

Harvest & Mill pieces are grown, milled, and sewn exclusively in the US, supporting American organic cotton farmers and local sewing communities. The brand makes basics for everyone, always ensuring they are not dyed or bleached, greatly reducing the use of water, energy, and dye materials. Even better, by cultivating different varieties of cotton, the brand is able to bolster biodiversity, which is essential for ensuring healthy ecosystems and keeping our planet resilient in the face of climate change.

Shop the range in sizes S-XL.

Shop Harvest & Mill .

Mashu is a British more sustainable vegan accessories label specialising in handbags. Mashu’s environmental rating is "Good", crafting its exterior with vegan leather alternatives while its interiors feature vegan suede made from recycled polyester, ensuring you never have to sacrifice your morals for style again.

Shop Mashu .

Editor's note

Feature image via Unsplash, other images via Fashion Revolution and the brands mentioned. Good On You publishes the world’s most comprehensive ratings of fashion brands’ impact on people, the planet, and animals. Use our directory to search thousands of rated brands.

Festival Style, Done More Sustainably

The ultimate guide to more ethical and sustainable children’s clothing, better brand edit: more sustainable puff sleeve tops and dresses, better brand edit: 12 little black dresses from top-rated brands you’ll love, ethical brand ratings. there’s an app for that..

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What Is Fast Fashion?

Fast fashion leaders, disadvantages, impact on the environment, the bottom line.

• Fundamental Analysis
• Sectors & Industries

Fast Fashion: How It Impacts Retail Manufacturing

Adam Hayes, Ph.D., CFA, is a financial writer with 15+ years Wall Street experience as a derivatives trader. Besides his extensive derivative trading expertise, Adam is an expert in economics and behavioral finance. Adam received his master's in economics from The New School for Social Research and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in sociology. He is a CFA charterholder as well as holding FINRA Series 7, 55 & 63 licenses. He currently researches and teaches economic sociology and the social studies of finance at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Gordon Scott has been an active investor and technical analyst or 20+ years. He is a Chartered Market Technician (CMT).

Investopedia / Laura Porter

Fast fashion describes low-priced but stylish clothing that moves quickly from design to retail stores to meet trends. The collections are often based on styles presented at Fashion Week runway shows or worn by celebrities. Fast fashion allows mainstream consumers to purchase a new look at an affordable price.

Fast fashion resulted from cheaper, speedier manufacturing and shipping methods, the consumer's appetite for up-to-the-minute styles, and increasing purchasing power—especially among young people. Fast fashion challenges the established clothing labels' tradition of introducing new collections and lines on an orderly, seasonal basis.

Key Takeaways

• Fast fashion describes low-priced but stylish clothing that moves quickly from design to retail stores to meet trends, with new collections being introduced continuously.
• Innovations in supply chain management among retailers make fast fashion possible.
• Zara and H&M are two giants in the fast fashion field.
• Fast fashion offers affordable prices and instant gratification for consumers.

Shopping for clothing was once considered an event where consumers save to buy new clothes periodically. The style-conscious would get a preview of the styles to come via fashion shows that displayed new collections and clothing lines several months before their appearance in stores.

In the late 1990s, as shopping became a form of entertainment, discretionary spending on clothing increased. Fast fashion emerged, offering cheap, trendy knock-off garments, mass-produced at low cost , that allowed consumers to wear something similar to the runway.

Fast fashion was boosted by innovations in supply chain management (SCM) among fashion retailers. The assumption is that consumers want high fashion at a low cost. Fast fashion follows the concept of category management, linking the manufacturer with the consumer in a mutually beneficial relationship.

$39.84 billion

The size of the fast fashion market is projected to reach $39.84 billion in 2025.

Major players in the fast-fashion market include UNIQLO, GAP, Forever 21, Topshop, Esprit, Primark, Fashion Nova, and New Look. Two leaders include:

Zara: Spanish retail chain Zara, the flagship brand of textile giant Inditex, is synonymous with fast fashion. Zara's designers can have a finished piece appear on store racks in as little as four weeks or modify existing items in as little as two weeks due to its short supply chain. Over half its factories are closely located to its corporate headquarters in A Coruña, Spain, and produces 11,000-plus pieces annually, vs. an industry average of 2,000 to 4,000 pieces.

H&M: Founded in 1947, Sweden-based H&M Group (short for Hennes & Mauritz ) is one of the oldest fast-fashion companies. As of 2024, H&M Group operates in 76 countries with over 4,200 stores. H&M Group functions like a department store, selling clothing, cosmetics, and home furnishings. It does not own any factories but relies on independent suppliers for its garments overseen by H&M production offices with state-of-the-art IT systems to track inventory and communicate with corporate HQ. The factories are based all around Europe, Asia, and Africa.

The traditional clothing industry model operates seasonally, with Fall Fashion Week and Spring Fashion Week showcasing looks for four traditional seasons. Fast-fashion labels produce about 52 “micro-seasons” a year—or one new “collection” a week of clothes meant to be worn immediately.

• Profitable for manufacturers and retailers : The constant introduction of new products encourages customers to frequent stores more often, which means more purchases. The retailer does not replenish its stock—instead, it replaces items that sell out with new items.
• Quick to consumers : Fast fashion enables buyers to get the clothes they want when they want them. Also, it's made clothing more affordable—and not just any clothing, but innovative, imaginative, stylish clothing.
• Makes clothes affordable : Smart new clothes and fun or impractical items have become available to all consumers.
• Decline in domestic manufacturing : Fast fashion has contributed to a decline in the U.S. garment industry, where labor laws and workplace regulations are stronger, and wages are better than in other countries.
• Encourages a “throw-away” consumer mentality : Fast fashion has been called disposable fashion. Many fast fashionistas in their teens and early twenties—the age group the industry targets—admit they only wear their purchases once or twice.
• Bad for the environment : Critics contend that fast fashion contributes to pollution, waste, and planned obsolescence due to its cheap materials and manufacturing methods. The garments can't be recycled because they're predominantly (over 60%) made of synthetics.
• Unregulated labor practices : Manufacturers in developing countries with little regulation may not oversee subcontractors, enforce workforce rules, or be transparent about their supply chain.
• Intellectual property theft : Some designers allege that their designs have been illegally duplicated and mass-produced by fast fashion companies.

Profitable for manufacturers and retailers

Offers fast, efficient delivery

Makes clothes affordable

Decline in domestic manufacturing

Encourages "throwaway" consumer mentality

Negatively impacts the environment

Unregulated labor practices

Consumers may find it difficult to avoid products manufactured by companies that practice fast fashion. However, due to the impacts on the environment, fast fashion consumers can investigate the brands to see if they use sustainable processes and fair labor practices.

Shopping for clothes at secondhand stores helps to reduce the amount of garment waste and extends their usage. According to statistics from the United Nations Environment Programme and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation:

• The industry uses 93 billion cubic meters of water per year.
• It takes 3,781 liters of water to make one pair of jeans.
• Of all the wastewater in the world, 20% is from textile dyeing and is highly toxic—many countries where clothes are made have reduced or no regulations for wastewater disposal.
• Microplastic fibers used in clothing make their way to the ocean, amounting to about 500,000 tons—close to 50 billion plastic bottles.
• Fashion emits more than 10% of global carbon emissions.

What Is Slow Fashion?

Slow fashion—a concept first introduced in 2008 by fashion and sustainability consultant Kate Fletcher—uses environmentally friendly processes and materials through "mindful manufacturing," focusing on quality rather than quantity. Mindful manufacturing, an idea championed by 3D printing company Stratasys, is the concept of developing more efficient production, sound chemical and solid waste disposal practices, reusable materials, and recycled packaging.

What Are Some Fast Fashion Examples?

Some examples of companies in fast fashion are Stradivarius, Victoria's Secret , Urban Outfitters, and Zara.

Who Benefits From Fast Fashion?

Consumers who enjoy the latest fashion with the convenience of low prices benefit, but the primary beneficiaries are investors, owners, and other stakeholders who profit from the practice.

Fast fashion increases consumer spending, profits, and the consumer's need to participate in a trend. However, critics say the industry contributes to climate change, pesticide pollution, and waste. The debate around fast fashion and its alternatives will continue as long as consumers seek to buy high styles at low prices.

Research and Markets. " Fast Fashion Global Market Report 2021-30: COVID-19 Growth and Change to 2030 ."

SCM Globe. " Zara Clothing Company Supply Chain ."

H&M. " Who We Are ."

H&M Group. " Supply Chain ."

The Good Trade. " What Is Fast Fashion, Anyway? "

The New York Times. " What Do Gen Z Shoppers Want? A Cute, Cheap Outfit That Looks Great on Instagram ."

The New York Times. " How Fast Fashion Is Destroying the Planet ."

The World Bank. " How Much Do Our Wardrobes Cost to the Environment? "

Kate Fletcher. " Biography ."

Stratasys. " Stratasys Calls for More Mindful Manufacturing ."

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January 10, 2019

How fast fashion hurts environment, workers, society

by Neil Schoenherr, Washington University in St. Louis

The overabundance of fast fashion—readily available, inexpensively made clothing—has created an environmental and social justice crisis, claims a new paper from an expert on environmental health at Washington University in St. Louis.

"From the growth of water-intensive cotton, to the release of untreated dyes into local water sources, to worker's low wages and poor working conditions, the environmental and social costs involved in textile manufacturing are widespread," said Christine Ekenga, assistant professor at the Brown School and co-author of the paper "The Global Environmental Injustice of Fast Fashion," published in the journal Environmental Health .

"This is a massive problem," Ekenga said. "The disproportionate environmental and social impacts of fast fashion warrant its classification as an issue of global environmental injustice."

In the paper, Ekenga and her co-authors—Rachel Bick, MPH '18, and Erika Halsey, MPH '18—assert that negative consequences at each step of the fast-fashion supply chain have created a global environmental justice dilemma.

"While fast fashion offers consumers an opportunity to buy more clothes for less, those who work in or live near textile manufacturing facilities bear a disproportionate burden of environmental health hazards," the authors wrote.

"Furthermore, increased consumption patterns have created millions of tons of textile waste in landfills and unregulated settings. This is particularly applicable to low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) as much of this waste ends up in second-hand clothing markets. These LMICs often lack the supports and resources necessary to develop and enforce environmental and occupational safeguards to protect human health."

In the paper, the researchers discuss the environmental and occupational hazards during textile production, particularly for those in LMICs, and the issue of textile waste.

They also address a number of potential solutions, including sustainable fibers, corporate sustainability, trade policy and the role of the consumer.

Globally, 80 billion pieces of new clothing are purchased each year, translating to $1.2 trillion annually for the global fashion industry. The majority of these products are assembled in China and Bangladesh, while the United States consumes more clothing and textiles than any other nation in the world.

Approximately 85 percent of the clothing Americans consume, nearly 3.8 billion pounds annually, is sent to landfills as solid waste, amounting to nearly 80 pounds per American per year.

Journal information: Environmental Health

Provided by Washington University in St. Louis

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How Zara’s strategy made her the queen of fast fashion

Table of contents, here’s what you’ll learn from zara's strategy study:.

• How to come up with disruptive ideas for your industry.
• How finding the right people is more important than developing the best strategy.
• How best to address the sustainability question.

Zara is a privately held multinational clothing retail chain with a focus on fast fashion. It was founded by Amancio Ortega in 1975 and it’s the largest company of the Inditex group.

Amancio Ortega was Inditex’s Chairman until 2011 and Zara’s CEO until 2005. The current CEO of Zara is Óscar García Maceiras and Marta Ortega Pérez, daughter of the founder, is the current Chairwoman of Inditex.

Zara's market share and key statistics:

• Brand value of $25,4 billion in 2022
• Net sales of $19,6 billion in 2021
• 1,939 stores worldwide in 2021
• Over 4 billion annual visits to its website
• Inditex employee count of 165,042 in 2021

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Humble beginnings: How did Zara start?

Most people date Zara’s birth to 1975, when Amancio Ortega and Rosalia Mera, his then-wife, opened the first shop. But, it’s impossible to study the company’s first steps, its initial competitive advantage, and strategic approach by starting at that point in time.

When the first Zara shop opened, Amancio Ortega already had 22 years of industry experience, ten years as a clever and hard-working employee, and 12 years as a business owner. Rosalia Mera also had 20 years of industry experience.

As an employee , Ortega worked in the clothing industry, first as a gofer and then as a delivery boy. He quickly demonstrated great talent for recognizing fabrics, understanding and serving customers, and making sound business suggestions. Soon, he decided to use his insights to develop his own business instead of his boss’s.

As a business owner , he started  GOA Confecciones  in 1963, along with his siblings, his wife, and a close friend. They started with a humble workshop making women’s quilted dressing gowns, following a trend at the time Amancio had noticed. Within ten years, that workshop had grown to support a workforce of 500 people.

And then, the couple opened the first Zara shop.

Zara’s competitive positioning strategy in its first year

The opening of the first Zara shop in 1975 wasn’t just a new store to sell clothes. It was the final big move of a carefully planned vertical integration strategy.

To understand how the  strategy was formulated , we need to understand Amancio’s first steps. His first business, GOA Confecciones, was a manufacturing business. He was supplying small stores and businesses with his products, and he wasn’t in contact with the end customer.

That brought two challenges:

• A lack of insight into market trends and no direct consumer feedback about preferences.
• Very low-profit margins compared to the 70-80% profit margin of retailers.

Amancio developed several ideas to improve distribution and get a direct relationship with the final purchaser. And he was always updating his factories with the latest technological advancements to offer the highest quality of products at the lowest possible price. But he was missing one essential part to reap the benefits of his distribution practices:  a store .

So, in 1972 he opened one under the brand name  Sprint . An experiment that quickly proved unsuccessful and, seven years later, was shut down. Although it’s unknown the extent to which Amancio put his ideas to the test, Sprint was a private masterclass in the retail world that gave Amancio insights that would later turn Zara into a global success.

Despite Sprint’s failure, Amancio didn’t abandon the idea of opening his own store mainly because he believed that his advanced production model was vulnerable and the rise of a competitor who could replicate and improve his system was imminent.

Adding a store to his vertical integration strategy would have a twofold effect:

• The store would operate as a direct feedback source. The company would be able to test design ideas before going into mass production while simultaneously getting an accurate pulse of the needs, tastes, and fancies of the customers. The store would simultaneously reduce risk and increase opportunity spotting.
• The company would have reduced operating costs as a retailer. Since the group would control all aspects of the process (from manufacturing to distribution to selling), it would solve key retail challenges with stocking. The savings would then be passed on to the customer. The store would have an operational competitive advantage and become a potential cash cow for the company.

The idea was to claim his spot in prime commercial areas (a core and persistent strategic move for Zara) and target the rising middle class. The market conditions were tough, though, with many family-owned businesses losing their customer base, giant players owning a huge market share, and Benetton’s franchising shops stealing great shop locations and competent potential managers.

So the first Zara store had these defining characteristics that made it the successful final piece of Amancio’s strategy:

• It was located near the factory = delivery of products was optimized
• It was in the city’s commercial heart = more expensive, but with access to affluence
• It was located in the city where Ortegas had the most customer experience = knowing thy customer
• It was visibly attractive = expensive, but a great marketing trick

Amancio’s team lacked experience and expertise in one key factor:  display window designing . The display window was a massive differentiator and had to be bold and attractive. So, Amancio hired Jordi Bernadó, a designer with innovative ideas whose work transformed display windows and the sales process.

The Zara shop was a success, laying the foundations for the international expansion of the Inditex group.

Key Takeaway #1: Challenge your industry’s conventional wisdom to create a disruptive strategy

Disrupting an industry isn’t an easy task nor a frequent occurrence.

To do it successfully, you need to:

• Understand the prominent business mode of your industry and the forces that contributed to its development.
• Challenge the assumptions behind it and design a radically different business model.
• Develop ample space for experimentation and failures.

The odds of instantly conquering the industry might be low (otherwise, someone would have already done it), but you’ll end up with out-of-the-box ideas and a higher sensitivity to potential disruptors in your competitive arena.

Recommended reading:   How To Write A Strategic Plan + Example

How Zara’s supply chain strategy is at the core of its business strategy

According to many analysts, the Zara supply chain strategy is its most important innovative component.

Amancio Ortega and other senior members of the group disagree. Nevertheless, the Inditex  logistics strategy  is extraordinarily efficient and plays a crucial role in sustaining its competitive advantage. Most companies in the clothing retail industry take an average of 4-8 weeks between inception and putting the product on the shelf. The group achieves the same in an average of two weeks. That’s nothing short of extraordinary.

Let’s see how Zara developed its logistics and business strategy.

Innovative logistics: how Zara’s supply chain evolved

The logistics methods developed by companies are highly dependent on external factors.

Take, for example, infrastructure. In the early days of Zara, when it was expanding through Spain, the company considered using trains as a transportation system. However, the schedule couldn’t keep up with Zara’s needs, which had the goal of distributing products twice a week to its shops. So transportation by road was the only way.

However, when efficiency is a high priority, it shapes logistics processes more than anything else.

And for Zara, efficient logistics was – and still is – of the highest priority.

Initially, leadership tried outsourcing logistics, but the experiment failed and the company assigned a member of the house with a thorough knowledge of the company's operating philosophy to take charge of the project. The tactic of entrusting important big projects to employees imbued with the company’s philosophy became a defining characteristic.

So, one of Zara’s early strategic decisions was that each shop would make orders twice a week. Since the first store was opened, the company has had the shortest stock rotation times in the industry. That’s what drove the development of its logistics methods. The whole strategy behind Zara relied on quick production and distribution. And the proximity of manufacturing and distribution was essential for the model to work. So Zara had these two centers in the same place.

Even when the brand was expanding around the world, its logistics center remained in Arteixo, Spain, despite being a less-than-ideal location for international distribution. At some point, the growth of the brand, and Inditex as a whole, outpaced Arteixo’s capacity, and the decentralization question came up.

The debate was tough among leadership, but the arguments were strong. Decentralization was necessary because of:

• Safety and security.  If there was a fire or any other crippling disaster there (especially on a distribution day), then the company would face serious troubles on multiple fronts.
• Arteixo’s limitations.  The company’s center in Arteixo was reaching its capacity limits.

So the company decided to decentralize the manufacturing and distribution of its brands.

Initially, the group made the decision to place differentiated logistics centers where the management of its chain of stores was based, i.e. Bershka would have a different logistics center than Pull&Bear, although they were both part of the Inditex Group. That idea emerged after Massimo Dutti and Stradivarius became part of Inditex. Those brands already had that geographical structure, and since the group integrated them successfully into its strategy and logistics model, it made sense to follow the same pattern with its other brands.

Besides, the proximity of the distribution centers to the headquarters of each brand allowed them to consolidate them based on the growth strategy and purpose of each brand (more on this later).

But just a few years after that, the group decided to build another production center for Zara that forced specialization between the two Zara centers. The specialization was based on location, i.e. each center would manufacture products that would stock the shelves of stores in specific locations.

Zara’s  supply chain strategy  is so successful because it’s constantly evolving as the group adapts to external circumstances and its internal needs. And just like its iconic fashion, the company always stays ahead of the logistics curve.

Zara’s business strategy transcends its logistics innovations

Zara’s business strategy relies on four key pillars:

• Flexibility of supply
• Instant absorption of market demand
• Response speed
• Technological innovation

Zara is the only brand in the Inditex group that is concerned with manufacturing. It’s the first brand in the clothing sector with a complete vertical organization. And the production model requires the adoption or development of the latest technological innovations.

This requirement is counterintuitive in the clothing sector.

Most people believe that making big investments in a market as mature as clothing is a bad idea. But the Zara production model is very capital and labor intensive. The technological edge derived from that investment gave the company, in the early days, the capability to manufacture over 50% of its own products while maintaining an extremely high stock rotation frequency.

Zara might be one of the best logistics companies in the world, but that particular excellence is a supporting factor, or at least a highly contributing factor, to its successful business strategy.

Zara’s business strategy is so much more than its supply chain strategy.

The company created the “fast fashion” term and industry. When other companies were manufacturing their collections once per season, Zara was adapting its collection to suit what people asked for on a weekly basis. The idea was to offer fashionable items at a fair price and faster than everybody else.

Part of its cost-cutting strategic priority was its marketing strategy. Zara didn’t – and still doesn’t – advertise like the rest of the clothing industry. Its marketing strategy starts with choosing the location of the stores and ends with advertising that the sales period has started. In the early years of the brand’s expansion, Amancio would visit potential store locations himself and choose the site to build the Zara shop.

The price was never an issue. If the location was in a commercial center, Zara would build its store there no matter how high the cost was because the company expected to recoup it quickly with increased sales.

Zara’s marketing is its own stores.

The strategy of Zara and her Inditex sisters

Despite Zara’s success (or because of it), Amancio Ortega created – or bought – multiple other brands that he included in the Inditex group, each one with a specific purpose.

• Zara  was targeting middle-class women. ‍
• Pull&Bear  was targeting young people under twenty-five years old with casual clothing. ‍
• Bershka  was targeting rebel teens, especially girls, with hip-hop-style clothing. ‍
• Massimo Dutti  was targeting both sexes with more affluence. ‍
• Stradivarius  was competing with Bershka, giving Inditex two major brands in the teenage market. ‍
• Oysho  was concentrating on women's lingerie. ‍
• Zara Home manufactures home textiles and decor.

Pull&Bear  was initially targeting young males between the ages of 14 and 28. Later it extended to young females of the same age and focused on selling leisure and sports clothing. It has the slowest stock turnaround time in the group.

Bershka’s  target group was girls between 13 and 23 years of age with highly individualized tastes. Prices were low, but the quality average. Almost a fiasco in the beginning, it underwent a successful strategic turnaround becoming today one of the biggest growth opportunities for the group. And out of all the Inditex chains, Bershka has the most creative designs.

Massimo Dutti  was the first retail brand Amancio bought and didn’t create himself. Its strategy is very different from Zara, producing high-quality products and selling them at a high price. It’s an extension of the group’s offer to the higher end of the price spectrum in the fashion industry. It’s also the only Inditex chain brand that advertises regularly.

Stradivarius  was the second acquired brand, with the purchase being a defensive move. The chain shares the same target group with Bershka, making it, to this day, a direct competitor.

Oysho  started as an underwear and lingerie company. Its product lines evolved to include comfortable night and homewear along with swimwear and a very young children’s line. The brand’s strategy was aggressive from its conception, opening 286 stores in its first six years of existence.

Zara Home  is the youngest brand in the Group and the only one outside the clothing sector, though still in the fashion industry. It was launched with the least confidence and with immense prior research. An experiment to extend the Zara brand beyond clothing, it was based on the conservative view that Zara could extend its product categories only to textile items for the home. But it turned out that customers were more accepting of Zara Home selling a wide variety of domestic items. So the brand made a successful strategic pivot.

Key Takeaway #2: The right people are more important than the best strategy

It might not be obvious in the story, but a key reason for Zara's and Inditex’s success has been the people behind them.

For example, a vast number of people in various positions from inside the group claim that Inditex cannot be understood without Amancio Ortega. Additionally, major projects like the development of Zara’s logistics systems and the group's international expansion had such a success precisely because of the people in charge of them.

Zara’s radically different model was a breakthrough because:

• Its leadership had a clear vision and a real strategy to execute it.
• People with a deep understanding of the company’s philosophy led Its largest projects.

Sustainability: Zara’s strategy to make fast fashion sustainable

Building a sustainable business in the fast fashion industry is a tough nut to crack.

To achieve it, Inditex has made sustainability a cornerstone of its business model. Its strategy revolves around the values of  collaboration ,  transparency,  and  innovation . The group’s ambition is to make a positive impact with a vision of prosperity for the planet and its people by transforming its value chain and industry.

Inditex’s sustainability commitments and strategy to achieve them

Inditex has developed a sustainability roadmap that extends up to 2040 with ambitious goals. Specifically, it has committed to

• 100% consumption of renewable energy in all of its facilities by 2022 (report pending).
• 100% of its cotton to originate from more sustainable sources by 2023.
• 100% of its man-made cellulosic fibers to originate from more sustainable sources by 2023.
• Zero waste from its facilities by 2023.
• 100% elimination of single-use plastic for customers by 2023.
• 100% collection of packaging material for recycling or reuse by 2023.
• 100% of its polyester to originate from more sustainable sources by 2025.
• 100% of its linen to originate from sustainable sources by 2025.
• 25% reduction of water consumption in its supply chain by 2025.
• Net zero emissions by 2040.

The group’s commitments extend beyond environmental issues to how its  manufacturing and supplying partners conduct their business . To bring its strategy to fruition, it has set up a new governance and management structure.

The Board of Directors is responsible for approving Inditex’s sustainability strategy. The  Sustainability Committee  oversees and controls all the proposals around the social, environmental, health, and safety impact of the group’s products, while the  Ethics Committee  makes sure operations are compliant with the rules of conduct. There is also a  Social Advisory Board  that includes external independent experts that advises Inditex on sustainability issues.

Finally, Javier Losada, previously the group’s Chief Sustainability Officer and now promoted to Chief Operations Officer, will be leading the sustainability transformation of the group. Javier Losada first joined Inditex back in 1993 and ascended its rank to reach the C-suite.

Inditex is dedicated to its commitment to reducing its environmental impact and seems to be headed in the right direction. The only question is whether it’s fast enough.

Key Takeaway #3: Integrating sustainability with business strategy is a present-day necessity

Governments and international bodies around the world are implementing more stringent environmental regulations, forcing companies to commit to ambitious goals and developing a realistic strategy to achieve them.

The companies that are impacted the least are those that always had sustainability as a  high priority .

From the companies that require significant changes in their operations to comply with the new regulations, only those who  integrate  sustainability into their business strategy and model will succeed.

Why is Zara so successful?

Zara is the biggest Spanish clothing retailer in the world based on sales value. Its success is due to its fast fashion strategy that is based on a strong supply chain and quick market feedback loops.

Zara's customer-centric approach places a strong emphasis on understanding and responding to customer needs and preferences. This is reflected in the company's product design, marketing, and customer service strategies.

Zara made fashionable clothes accessible to the middle class.

Zara’s vision guides its future

Zara's vision, as part of the Inditex Group, is to create a sustainable fashion industry by promoting responsible consumption and production, respecting the environment and people, and contributing to the communities in which it operates.

The company aims to offer the latest fashion trends to its customers at accessible prices while continuously innovating and improving its operations and processes.

Growth by numbers (Inditex)

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What is Fast Fashion? Environmental Impact and Issues (1) - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

What is Fast Fashion? Environmental Impact and Issues (1)

Have you ever thought about how your fashion habits have been affecting the globe here is the environmental, social and economic impact of fast fashion. – powerpoint ppt presentation.

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fast fashion

what does it mean?

fast fashion is the term used to describe clothing designs that move quickly from the catwalk to stores to exploit trends

and here is how fast fashion drastically affects the environment

fast fashion stores may have affordable and fashionable clothes but is it in our best intrest to continue to support them? fast fashion is a crime not only do those companies overwork and take advantage of their workers it also affects the environment in many ways.

fast-fashion deeply affects the landscape of clothing business with severe repercussions on the environment

Italy, Germany, the UK, and France had the highest amounts of clothing in residual waste in the EU, with Italy being the highest (440,170 tons of clothing going to residual waste in 2014, 7.2 kg per person) (WRAP, 2017). Textile industry is thus one of the fastest-growing waste producing industries in the world

The United States Environmental Protection Agency estimated that US landfills received 11.2 million tons of municipal solid waste textiles in 2017, the main source of which was discarded clothing

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It takes about 700 gallons of water to produce one cotton shirt. That’s enough water for one person to drink at least eight cups per day for three-and-a-half years.It takes about 2,000 gallons of water to produce a pair of jeans. That’s more than enough for one person to drink eight cups per day for 10 years.Fashion causes water-pollution problems, too. Textile dyeing is the world’s second-largest polluter of water, since the water leftover from the dyeing process is often dumped into ditches, streams, or rivers which in exchange destroys our world and demolishes it.

The fashion industry is also the second-largest consumer of water worldwide.

Emma Watson uses social media to educate her followers about social and environmental concerns. She wears and supports sustainable businesses in her everyday life and on the red carpet. She vowed to only wear sustainable fashion on the red carpet and she had worked with many famous designers like calvin klein to create sustainable outfits made of recycled plastic bottles and other sustainable, vegan materials.

Olivia Wilde is the co-founder of Conscious Commerce, a firm that helps multinational corporations incorporate social conscience into their business models. She recently collaborated on a capsule collection with ThredUp, an online consignment company that encourages people to buy and use secondhand clothing.

many celebrites have come out and encouraged against the use of fast fashion due to it's danger to the environment and some of those celebrities are: olivia wilde and emma watson.

Fashion causes water-pollution problems, too. Textile dyeing is the world’s second-largest polluter of water, since the water leftover from the dyeing process is often dumped into ditches, streams, or rivers which in exchange destroys our world and demolishes it.

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• https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fast-fashion.asp#:~:text=Fast%20fashion%20is%20the%20term,shows%20or%20worn%20by%20celebrities.
• Mason, Michela Cesarina, Rubens Pauluzzo, and Rana Muhammad Umar. "Recycling habits and environmental responses to fast-fashion consumption: Enhancing the theory of planned behavior to predict Generation Y consumers’ purchase decisions." Waste Management 139 (2022): 146-157.
• https://psci.princeton.edu/tips/2020/7/20/the-impact-of-fast-fashion-on-the-environment
• https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-fashion-industry-environmental-impact/
• https://theprettyplaneteer.com/9-hollywood-actresses-sustainable-fashion/

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Brandy hellville & the cult of fast fashion, tv-ma | documentaries | 1 hr 31 min | 2024.

Through a calculated social media presence and an unattainable aesthetic, Brandy Melville has become the must-have clothing brand for teens around the world. Behind the scenes, however, a toxic work environment and discriminatory recruiting methods have flourished. Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion exposes a system of exploitation within Brandy Melville and the global fashion industry — from the fast fashion brand's impossible beauty standards to the far-reaching consequences of cheap, mass-produced clothing.

HBO Documentary Films presents Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion , a Lightbox Production. Director, Eva Orner; producers, Jonathan Chinn, Simon Chinn, and Eva Orner; line producer, David Kraemer; editor Claire Didier; director of photography, Nick Higgins; original music by Cornel Wilczek.

Stream all of HBO, plus hit series, movies, reality, and more.

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‘A very odd and ugly worldview’: the dark side of fast fashion brand Brandy Melville

The successful clothing store is the focus of a new film that uncovers shadowy business practices and a bigger picture of environmental damage

I f you haven’t heard of Brandy Melville, you probably don’t have a teenage girl in your life. The clothing brand – confusingly named for two characters, an American girl named Brandy and an Englishman named Melville who fall in love in Rome – is synonymous with a certain large swath of gen Z, very online and inundated since consciousness with images of very skinny celebrities like Bella Hadid. As one ex-store associate puts it in a new HBO documentary on the brand: Brandy Melville was for the kinda basic but very trend-aware girl.

Over the past decade and a half, the brand built a giant following via Instagram, Tumblr and TikTok posts of and by teenage girls channeling a certain recognizable aesthetic: tiny outfits accentuating pre-adult metabolisms, exposed midriffs so taut they seem to be begging for a tape measure, long hair flowing cheerily in motion, overwhelmingly white. Most of the brand’s pieces sold for less than $40, in “one size fits all”, that size being small. What Abercrombie & Fitch was to millennials at the mall, Brandy Melville was to teenage girls on their phone – organically popular, ubiquitous and reinforcing existing, retrograde ideas of what’s cool and popular. A divisive status symbol spotted on such rail-thin celebrities as Kaia Gerber and Kendall Jenner that many people love to hate, and also secretly want.

More recently, the brand has also become synonymous with the environmental scourge of fast fashion and shady, discriminatory business practices. Brandy Hellville and the Cult of Fast Fashion, which premiered at SXSW and on HBO this week, digs deeper into a 2021 exposé by Business Insider’s Kate Taylor on the company’s murky, outright creepy management – not just the “opaque minefield” of “sustainable” fashion, as the director, Eva Orner, told the Guardian, but allegations of discrimination, “pedo energy” and sexual assault by company leadership.

The 91-minute film sifts through the appeal of the brand to young, mostly white girls; the exploitative and manipulative behavior of the company, as attested by numerous former employees; and the exploitative nature of the fast fashion industry in general, as evidenced by sweatshops in Prato, Italy, and beaches in Accra, Ghana, buried in piles upon piles of secondhand clothes dumped by western countries. Orner and her team spoke to hundreds of ex-employees, though most didn’t want to go on camera for fear of retribution or diminished future job opportunities. “It’s a very, very odd and ugly worldview coming from that company,” she said.

Unlike most fashion brands, Brandy Melville has no public CEO, no mission statement or top-down brand persona. Every store is owned by a different shell company; the name is owned by a Swiss company. The company’s structure is “designed to be not traceable”, said Orner. In her reporting, Taylor identified the CEO as an Italian man named Stephan Marsan, a shadowy figure with almost no internet presence and precisely two Google image results. “How do you run this business that’s all around the world – there are over a hundred stores – that is all over the internet, all over social media, and this guy has never done an interview? He doesn’t exist. And that’s very purposeful and crafted,” said Orner. Marsan, unsurprisingly, declined to participate in the film.

According to former store managers and several employees, almost all of whom were recruited in-store for their outfits and almost all of whom struggled with an eating disorder while representing the brand, Marsan was a suspicious, vindictive presence. Shop employees, usually girls around the age of 16, had to pose for their “daily photograph” every morning – photos of their outfits, for “brand research”, texted to and kept by Marsan. (Brand research, as several note, usually constituted blatantly ripping off their clothing, as cheaply and as quickly as possible, resulting in several lawsuits.) Marsan reportedly preferred skinny redheads, liked Asian girls and “didn’t want a lot of Black people”, said an anonymous former assistant.

A former employee, who has sued the company for wrongful termination, says he was instructed to fire girls if they were too heavy or Black. “If you’re white, you had to be in sight,” recalls one Black employee relegated, as most people of color were, to the stock room. Another former employee in the New York flagship store recalls how Marsan installed a button at the register, which he would flash if he spotted a “Brandy girl” checking out whom he wanted hired and photographed.

It gets worse – as in, Hitler jokes and anti-Black racist memes worse, sent by Marsan in a text thread with other managers. An alleged sexual assault of a young girl living in the Brandy Melville-rented Manhattan apartment. Marsan, a Trump supporter and self-described libertarian, using his personal copies of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as store props. The brand’s doubling down on its not-so-subtle eating disorder messaging (“one size fits most ”, it rebranded when customers complained about the lack of sizing options), especially in its very profitable expansion into China.

Worse, too, in the company’s dogged pursuit of a business model that, like other fast fashion retailers such as Zara and H&M, prioritizes churn and zeitgeist over quality, clogging landfills and exploiting cheap human labor. Orner and her team visit Prato, Italy, where Brandy Melville is one of several companies to produce quick garments in sweatshops using immigrant labor under the “made in Italy” label, and to Accra, Ghana, a country whose trade deals with western countries strong-arm it into accepting loads of western clothing waste. To drive the point home: a Brandy-typical “made in Italy” tag buried in the sand of a Ghanaian beach, literally knee-deep in tangles of discarded clothes. “Not a lot shocks me,” said Orner, but the sheer amount of western clothing waste dumped in Accra – one worker there suspects the sea floor around the city is now completely covered in clothes – was among the “worst” things she’s ever seen. “We are sending them our trash and destroying their country,” she said. “It’s things they do not want or need.”

Though nominally about a certain buzzy brand, Orner hopes the film offers a larger call to rethink one’s relationship to fashion. The film offers the standard small prescriptions to sustainable fashion: buy natural fibers and secondhand, avoid polyester, recycle and reuse, keep your clothes out of a landfill as long as possible. But also, that “none of that’s going to fix anything”, said Orner. “There are too many clothes on the planet. We overproduce. We make 100bn garments that are produced annually globally. And most of those are in landfill within the first year.”

Brandy Hellville is resolute on keeping the vision trained on the bigger picture, if not particularly optimistic on either the brand’s possibility for change nor turning the tide of fashion waste. Since the Business Insider article triggered social media backlash against the company three years ago, Brandy Melville has soldiered on. Management, from Marsan on down, said nothing. Unlike the case with Abercrombie, the subject of its own 2022 Netflix documentary and backlash to discriminatory practices, there was no acknowledgement, no apology, no brand shift. No admission, just more clothes. Annual sales for Brandy Melville totaled $212.5m in 2023, up from $169.6m in 2019, according to the Wall Street Journal . “It’s a very Trumpian thing to do,” said Orner. “What we need to do is stand up and keep, keep the story going, and not let them get away with it by outsmarting us.

“The power’s in the consumers who don’t buy the product,” she added. “And if we don’t let them get away with it, we have all the power. They’re just making stupid clothing.”

Brandy Hellville & The Cult of Fast Fashion premieres on 9 April on HBO and will be available on Max with a UK date to be announced

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Moving on from fast-fashion: shopping sustainably

Editor's Note: The following is part of  a class project originally initiated in the classroom of Ball State University professor Adam Kuban  in fall 2021. Kuban has continued the project, including this fall semester, challenging his students to find sustainability efforts in the Muncie area. The students pitched their ideas to Deanna Watson, editor of The Star Press, Journal & Courier and Pal-Item.

MUNCIE, Ind. – In a world increasingly aware of fast-fashion's harmful environmental and health impacts, the quest for sustainable wardrobe choices is growing rapidly.

Extensive landfill use, fast-fashion consumption and the over-purchasing of low-quality clothing are harming the environment. In a 2020 study by Toshiro Semba, Yuji Sakai, Miku Ishikawa and Atsushi Inaba titled "Greenhouse Gas Emission Reductions by Reusing and Recycling Used Clothing in Japan," it found that globally, 73% of used clothing is either landfilled or incinerated.

Additionally, according to Cheryl Fenton's 2023 Indy Star article, "Sustainable Fashion Brands to Shop Right Now," the fashion industry creates roughly 100 billion items annually, selling 80 billion and discarding 20 billion in landfills. Sustainable alternatives like upcycling, thrifting and reselling are gaining popularity as eco-friendly solutions.

Some college students in Muncie, Indiana, have embraced these alternatives, choosing to build creative, lifelong wardrobes.  

Mitchell Wiley, a Muncie local, began his journey toward a more environmentally friendly and unique fashion choice at the age of 16. He transitioned from fast-fashion to vintage reselling, primarily using the Depop app, and occasionally participating in vintage popup shop events. Wiley turned his passion for clothing into a career.

"Fashion, in my opinion, was the biggest way for me to express myself from a young age, so I figured out how to monetize it. I knew I loved clothing, so if I could make money from it, I knew I'd be happy with my career," Wiley shared. Since 2019, vintage reselling has been Wiley's full-time occupation. He works to cater to his customer base, primarily mid-20-year-old college students, scouring thrift stores every day of the week.

Wiley prefers the unique and vintage feel of well-made secondhand clothing and does not support fast-fashion. He empathizes with lower-income individuals and families who may feel fast-fashion is their only option but believes affordable, high-quality items can be found.

In ThredUP’s 2022 Gen Z Fast Fashion Report , it was found that 45% of college students buy into fast-fashion due to the temptations that fast-fashion offers, like low prices for large quantities of clothing. To support individuals with lesser incomes, he prices his goods $10–20 below market rates, offers $5 options and provides discounts on apparel bundles. Wiley encourages people to explore local resale shops, and even consider reselling as a hobby. As he puts it, "Reduce, reuse, recycle, keep clothing out of landfills, and on our backs!"

In April 2022, Lily Brannon, a graduate from Ball State University and longtime thrifter, opened Lily's Labyrinth, a vintage store in Muncie, Indiana. Her inspiration struck during a thrifting trip with a friend in February 2022, leading to her filling her home with curated vintage items. Just two months later, she launched her store, which has since become a popular destination for Ball State students. It has also earned the silver award in Muncie's Quest for the Best for two consecutive years. Lily's Labyrinth offers a diverse range of products, including clothing, home decor, inclusive sizes, and regular discount and sale events.

"I feel vintage clothes are cool since they've been worn by someone else. It was made in America rather than China, where most clothing is now, and the quality is much better,” Brannon shared. The 2023 Annual Resale Report from ThredUp states that "resale is expected to grow nine times faster than the broader retail clothing sector in 2027." This speaks well for Brannon's business and suggests that the demand for vintage apparel and resale will rise. For people who wish to start thrifting or maybe start their own vintage business, Brannon advises going often, taking your time, and not skipping any sections.

In addition to the various alternatives to fast-fashion, Trevor Rapoport, a Ball State fashion industry studies major graduating in 2025, advocates upcycling fashion. Upcycling involves transforming old clothing that no longer fits, has stains, or simply isn't to one's taste into fresh, wearable pieces. Rapoport initially began altering his own clothes in college as a hobby, modifying items he liked but that didn't quite fit. After taking a beginning fashion course at his college and learning how to use a sewing machine, he expanded his skills, turning poorly fitting t-shirts into patches on jeans. Rapoport draws inspiration for his designs from his favorite NBA stars and music artists.

"I don't think fast-fashion is necessary when you can just learn to make whatever you want,” Rapoport stated. He wants to see change since he thinks fast-fashion is currently one of the world's worst polluters.

An article from 2022 stated that “the fashion industry is responsible for 10% of annual global carbon emissions, more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined.” His objections to these fast-fashion businesses' use of technology and materials extend to their immoral treatment of their employees. Rapoport currently only creates items for his own closet, but he hopes to expand his love beyond a hobby by accepting commissions from other people.

"I think more people should try making their own clothing alterations. It's a skill that gets a lot simpler with practice and would definitely help a lot of people's personal closets,” Rapoport shared.

[PHOTO 2&3 SIDE BY SIDE: TREVOR RAPOPORT1 AND TREVORRAPOPORT2]

Photo by [Natalie Cauffman] With the rise of fast-fashion consumers, comes the rise of textile production as reported by Nikita Shukla in an article, "Global per capita production of textiles increased from 5.9kg per year to 13kg per year from 1975 to 2018.” With excessive amounts of clothing and limited closet space, this trend leads to the ultimate disposal of clothing. Unfortunately, when clothing is discarded into landfills and accumulates, a study reveals that "they begin producing a number of byproducts, chief among them being methane. Methane is a greenhouse gas that is far more potent than carbon dioxide, absorbing 20 times more heat in the atmosphere." According to an article titled "4 Main Reasons Why Reducing Your Carbon Footprint is Important," reducing greenhouse gas emissions slows the rate of temperature and sea-levels rising, improves air and water quality, boosts the economy and mitigates the rate of climate change.

This article originally appeared on Lafayette Journal & Courier: Moving on from fast-fashion: shopping sustainably

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'Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion' doc examines controversial retailer Brandy Melville

A new HBO Original documentary takes viewers inside the world of a fast fashion purveyor: controversial Italian fashion brand Brandy Melville .

"Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion" highlights the brand, which infamously makes clothes of only one size, and accusations of racism and misogyny in their stores by former employees, executives and fashion insiders.

The Italian retailer, founded in the early 1980s, has stores in over 15 countries. The brand rose in popularity in the U.S. among teen girls in the 2010s and with its "one size fits all" clothing, Brancy Melville is often linked to the "skinny aesthetic" promoted on social media sites like Tumblr at the time.

The documentary highlights how this marketing sexualized and promoted unrealistic beauty standards among young girls. At a point, the brand was worn and promoted by celebrities like Kaia Gerber and Kendall Jenner .

The documentary also looks into the company's impact on the environment and promotion of overconsumption. Here's what we learned.

Brandy Melville racism accusations: CEO accused of excluding Black customers

In 2021, an ex-store employee, Franco Sorgi, told Business Insider that Brandy Melville CEO Stephan Marsan told him he did not want overweight or Black people to wear his clothing. Sorgi opened the first Brandy Melville store in Canada in 2012 and, at one point, owned 11 locations.

Sorgi claimed Marsan said he wanted "good-looking rich little girls" as his customers, to sway the popular high school girls and increase sales.

Business Insider reported at the time that it spoke to more than two dozen current and former employees, who claimed the company's employment practices were impacted by race. Its investigation also uncovered claims that Marsan and other executives regularly made jokes about Adolf Hitler in text messages, including an image that reportedly showed Marsan's face edited onto Hitler's body.

The investigation is highlighted in the documentary, as well as testimony from Black former employees about the brand's alleged racist and discriminatory work practices, including Black employees pushed to work backstock, claims reminiscent of accusations by former Abercrombie employees.

Kali, who is Black and worked in the Broadway store in New York City, said she started in the fitting room and moved over to the stock room.

"There was no white people working in the stock room. If you were white, you had to be in sight," she said. "We all knew it was not right that we were all pushed in the back, out of sight, but it wasn't something we were necessarily mad about."

'Brandy Hellville' takes deeper look at fast fashion pitfalls

The HBO documentary examines the company's promotion of fast fashion, or inexpensive and trendy clothing produced by mass-market retailers.

The practices of brands like Brandy Melville, Shein and Fashion Nova, result in clothing that finds its way into landfills even when attempts are made to donate clothing. The clothing ends up elsewhere, like Accra, Ghana's capital and home to the country's secondhand market and called a "dumping ground" for America's unwanted clothing.

"From the beginning of the supply chain to the end, we're all being exploited by the same system,"  Chloe Asaam , a Ghanaian fashion designer and program manager for The OR Foundation, says in the documentary.

Textile waste that arrives in Accra are either burnt or end up in the gutters before they're swept out to sea. The documentary showed a beach along the Gulf of Guinea where mountains of garments clog the shoreline and, likely, litter the sea floor. A test of the water here showed 96 microfiber counts in a 10 milliliter sample, Joe Ayesu of The OR Foundation said.

This contamination would then end up in local residents' bodies via the fish they eat, Ayesu said.

Former Brandy Melville employees share their stories on social media

Brandy Melville is known for doing little traditional marketing and instead relying on its young employees and customers for promotion on its Instagram page. According to the documentary, their social media account is run by the company's mysterious CEO.

Delaney Rinke, whose TikTok about her Brandy Melville experience went viral, opened up to People magazine in an interview published Wednesday. Rinke was scouted by the retailer at 14 and worked there for four years.

"I was really, really young, so I was quite miserable at work," Rinke told the outlet, later recalling an "insane" practice where employees were required to take photos of their outfits.

"Photos had to be very staged and make us look a lot older than we were," the now 22-year-old said.

Despite this, the film's director, Eva Orner, told Teen Vogue in an interview published Wednesday it was hard finding former employees who wanted to appear on camera. "Everyone was very young when they worked there, and now they're young women embarking on careers or in their twenties," she told the outlet. "A lot of them were really scared."

Brandy Melville accused of copying its clothes off employees' fashion

Kali, the former New York store employee, alleged "the higher-ups" loved a pair of lavender high-waisted pants she wore to work one day and they bought the product online to copy the style.

"They were able to mass-produce what these cool girls were already wearing," Business Insider senior features correspondent Kate Taylor , one of the expert voices in the doc, said. "In some cases, the names of these things on the Brandy Melville website, (they'll) be like Jocelyn shirt. And it'll be because this shirt was literally purchased off of Jocelyn's back."

One of the participants, who asked to remain anonymous due to ongoing litigation, claimed Brandy Melville CEO Stephan Marsan would send girls from Los Angeles' more affluent neighborhoods on shopping trips to curate outfits from various stores and copy the looks, with some alterations.

How to watch 'Brandy Hellville & The Cult of Fast Fashion'

"Brandy Hellville & The Cult of Fast Fashion" is available to stream on Max.

Contributing: KiMi Robinson

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‘brandy hellville’ director hopes teens and parents will be “horrified” by fast-fashion doc.

The HBO documentary highlights allegations of a racist, sexist and discriminatory work environment and emphasizes the destructive environmental impact of fast fashion.

By Katie Kilkenny

Katie Kilkenny

Labor & Media Reporter

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The director of HBO ’s new documentary Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion never wanted the film to be just another brand exposé, even though it does, in part, operate on that level.

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The documentary shows snippets from a group text allegedly involving company leaders that contained crude sexual and racist jokes, while some workers recall how people of color were relegated to less front-facing roles at the store. (Orner builds on an investigation originally conducted by Business Insider reporter Kate Taylor, who appears in the film.)

But Orner also uses Brandy Melville to epitomize the larger system of abuse she sees in fast fashion in general: “I really wanted to go a little into the exploitation of workers and also the environmental damage done by the industry,” she says. “It makes it a harder film to weave all of these complex ideas into, but I thought without it, it wouldn’t be as impactful.” The documentary spends time in Accra, Ghana, the site of massive secondhand clothing market Kantamanto , where clothes pollute local waterways and wash ashore on beaches. The mayor of Prato, Italy — where some Brandy Melville and other fast-fashion garments are produced — describes sometimes finding people “like slaves” who are employed illegally at factories. The overall message of the doc, says Orner, is “buy less.”

Why did it make sense to you to have Brandy Melville exemplify labor and environmental issues with fast fashion?

Because it’s worse than a lot of other companies. Obviously, look, there are some really terrible companies out there: It started with Zara, now it’s Shein and Fashion Nova. But what’s interesting about Brandy is it hits every bad mark: It is fast fashion, there is exploitation of workers, they employ very young people, underage people, they exploit them, they don’t pay them properly. They are shockingly racist and that is very open and clear. They are shockingly antisemitic. There’s something very creepy, predatory and discriminatory about the way they operate. Kate Taylor, who did the initial exposé at Business Insider talks about it when she says, “This company is not like every other company.” It is very deliberate and very opaque, and I think there’s a lot there to explore. Also Brandy’s got this very cult-like following, which I think also makes it different from a lot of other labels, people really defend it. I think it’s a pretty dark story.

How did you find the process of gathering people with firsthand experience to appear on camera?

Given that there has been prior reporting about Brandy Melville, was there anything that really surprised you in the filmmaking process?

There was so much. There were just little things like [employees] being asked to take the photos and submit them to management. These were really young girls, they were 15, 16, 17, [for] most of them it was their first job and they didn’t know what normal was, and so they were so easy to manipulate. [There were] details like the button that [CEO] Stephan put next to cash registers in the New York store so that he could sit and watch, and if a pretty girl was paying, he would buzz the buzzer, and then the young girls [at the register] would offer them jobs really uncomfortably.

I found the fact that these men that run the company have young daughters really disturbing. I don’t want to drag people’s families into these films, I don’t think it’s necessary, but they all have young daughters, who by accounts from former employees, wouldn’t fit into the clothing at Brandy Melville. And I found that really dark, these men perpetuating this myth of what a woman should be and not foisting it on grown adult women, but manipulating young women. But I think the biggest shock to me was standing on the beach in Accra in Ghana and seeing where all of our clothes end up. I found that that is something you can’t unsee, and I hope it has the same effect in the film.

Since the trailer came out about a week ago, it’s had I think over 2.8 million views on TikTok, which is staggering for a documentary. Every time I check my Instagram messages, there’s just scores of young women who say, “Oh my God, thank you so much, this is my story. Can I be in the film?” It’s been really heartening to [see] the response to the trailer on TikTok because obviously that is teenage girl heaven. So I think it’s got a life of its own there, and I hope that translates into audience as well. I think the other key audience for this is parents. I’m hoping parents watch this with their kids and I hope they’re horrified. I want there to be screenings in schools and colleges and for people to talk about it. And I’m hoping that next week after it starts airing, it’s a little bit like what used to be the water cooler conversation at work. I hope that at school everyone is talking about it, and this is an example of [how] TikTok can work if people keep posting from the film and not posting that they want to buy clothes.

After going through this process of making this film, have you found certain particular solutions to the quandary of fashion’s environmental and labor impact?

The documentary notes that, as of its release, Brandy Melville still seems to be doing major business globally. Has its cultural cachet in the U.S. taken any kind of hit, in your view?

I mean, I noticed a few weeks ago, Lily-Rose Depp was photographed wearing some Brandy Melville. There’s cachet in it, there’s skinny girl clout in it. It’s a really dark world. Stores keep opening: I know in Australia, where I’m from originally, it’s fairly new [and] it’s really popular with young girls. So I’m hoping this will maybe put a dent into it because it doesn’t have the history that it’s had here. Right now it feels unstoppable, and the only way to have an impact is to stop buying their clothes. Wouldn’t it be great if this film goes out globally through HBO and their retail goes down, I don’t know, 10, 20, 50 percent? And the thing is, it’s all in the hands of young women. Young women have the power, so they can be creating content about this. They can be talking about it online and in person, and they can stop shopping there.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Movie Reviews

Three eye-opening documentaries you can stream right now.

Linda Holmes

From the HBO documentary Brandy Hellville & The Cult of Fast Fashion. HBO hide caption

From the HBO documentary Brandy Hellville & The Cult of Fast Fashion.

True crime docs, scammer docs, serious docs ... one of the most notable developments of the streaming era of television is that there are new documentary films and series coming out constantly . The difficulty for someone who might want to check some of them out is that they go by in a blur, and a lot of them have similar-looking titles and promotion. There are still big-ticket entries — on April 21, HBO will premiere a follow-up series to its huge true-crime hit The Jinx — but there are also a lot of lower-profile projects flying by, so let's take a moment to check in with a few current ones.

What Jennifer Did

A feature-length film about a 2010 home invasion that killed a woman and left her husband in a coma, What Jennifer Did is mostly told from the point of view of the police who gradually zeroed in on the couple's daughter, who was home at the time. Police-side crime documentaries tend to be the least interesting to me, and in this case, it feels like there's a tremendous amount of context missing about the family in favor of a fairly simple "she wanted to be with her boyfriend" narrative. But I say that in part because I have read the 2015 piece by Karen Ho in Toronto Life that considers more broadly what led to this bizarre act. Netflix, available now.

Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion

I can honestly tell you I was not very familiar with the Brandy Melville brand before I watched this film, which tells the story of how social media helped make a juggernaut out of a whole lot of nondescript tiny shirts. (It's more complicated than that, and ... also not.) The story of the gross in-store culture (which reminded me a lot of parts of the Netflix film White Hot, about Abercrombie & Fitch ) is interesting and pretty lively, but I would have preferred a little more time spent on the fast-fashion element, which I do think is ripe for more documentary work. Max, available now.

The Synanon Fix

Sometimes, it feels like documentaries are their own expanded universe. I was just watching an entirely different show about the "troubled teen" industry and its dark history, and it mentioned how Synanon, which began in California as a program to treat addiction, influenced much of what became the "we will grab your badly behaved teenager from their bed, take them to some secluded location, allow them no contact with anybody, and turn them around" model. And now, Synanon has its own docuseries, which considers whether and when Synanon turned into what you would call a cult. (Was it the head-shaving? The mass weddings? The dictates about reproduction?) But what stands out the most is the consideration of how a program and a community can change shape, and it takes a while for people inside and outside it to register those changes. HBO, airing now.

We're only scratching the surface of what's out there — Netflix's #1 show as I write this is their Unlocked: A Jail Experiment , about a "program" that gives incarcerated men more freedom. And I am 100% committed to finding time before it expires on April 20 to watch Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros , the latest from the great documentarian Frederick Wiseman, which is available on PBS.

This piece also appeared in NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don't miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what's making us happy.

Listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour on Apple Podcasts and Spotify .

Oscars 2024

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