The Fashion Industry- Fast Fashion

This post is strictly for raising awareness to this cause.

I will talk about one of the most disgusting practises of the fashion industry; fast fashion.

What is fast fashion?

 Fast Fashion is the rapid production of inexpensive, low-quality clothing that often mimics popular styles of fashion labels, big-name brands, and independent designers.

Brands such as Zara and H&M promote this by incessantly releasing new collections that keep up with the latest trends, encouraging customers to purchase and discard clothing  at an exorbitant rate. In fact, a staggering 88% of clothes manufactured in a year consist of fast fashion. 

Getty Images: Cezaro de Luca/Europe Press

However, this is a purely objective definition of fast fashion. What, other than the jaw dropping overconsumption fueled by this industry is so revolting?

The answer is quite simple in retrospect; the highly exploitative nature of the industry. Not just labour wise but also consumer wise.

Labour exploitation:

This industry despicably takes advantage of its workers. This is especially prevalent in the developing countries of Africa, Asia and South America, where the worker population has little rights set up against exploitation and little education to demand justice. Many of these workers are forced to work 16 hours a day and are face severe repercussions for refusing to work overtime. The factory owners knowingly expose the labourers to life threatening environments like tanneries that use toxic chemicals which cause haemorrhages and damages to the nervous system.

So many brands exploit child labour. For example one of the biggest and trendy beauty brands at the moment, Fenty beauty, run by Rihanna exploits child labour! Who would have thought? This is why they say there are no ethical billionaires, getting back on track though….

Consumer exploitation:

Fast fashion brands use manipulative techniques to draw customers towards their brand and buy clothes at a faster pace than they can use. Another technique that brands use is that of creating and image of exclusivity to capitalise on people’s fear of missing out. An example of this is the H&M x Mugler (a designer brand) collection.

Credits: H&M

This collection aspired to bring designer to the general public ,and while no doubt that it was successful and had better quality clothing than regular H&M, it was still so expensive  and was such an obvious cash grab , made to capitalise on the naïve young women who would like nothing more than to own a designer article of clothing (like me haha) , it disgusts me that they came out with this. I definitely lost respect for Mugler that day and Versace too (which is a shame because I absolutely adore their collections)  who has had a collaboration with H&M in the past.

In all, it is a humble request of mine that anyone reading this avoids fast fashion brands as much as they can and do not fall a victim to this scheme like so many people I know have.