The Fate of Fast Fashion

BY ANASTASIA KOUTAVAS

Multiple levels, hundreds of racks of organized clothing, live DJs spinning out reverberating beats—welcome to one of the largest H&M stores in New York City. From its open layout, to impossibly high ceilings, every customer feels small in this shining beacon of the global fashion industry. And yet despite the enticingly cheap prices that jump out from tags, the impact you create when you buy from a store like this is far greater than you might care to believe.

Stores like H&M and its competitors represent fast fashion at its finest: clothing companies that mass produce trends, expediting not only the process from runway to market, but from the consumer’s hands to the trash. With locations around the globe, these chain stores use their international market to diversify their inventories and produce a high volume of products, and fast—so fast, even, that the description for ZARA’s New Arrivals page reads, “WEEKLY FASHION TRENDS FOR WOMEN.” 

Fast fashion brands are criticized for their methods on a variety of fronts. They’re most notably called unoriginal for “stealing” couture designs and stripping them of their innovation. Instead of illuminating fashion as an artform, these brands convey the message that fashion is, well, disposable. 

Fashion, as we all know, involves keeping up with trends. What we choose to wear helps define us, showcases our changing interests, and, of course, reveals our methods of expressing ourselves. Being able to change what we wear, and fast, is a token of our generation—fast fashion has made this process a coveted reality. Even more, fast fashion producers can easily reflect their ideas of what they believe to be in season onto their shoppers. With last season’s clothing on messily displayed sale racks, you, as a customer, are encouraged to engage with (and purchase!) new pieces every time they are displayed in the front of the store. You would think that with so many options, fast fashion brands were allowing their shoppers a voice. And yet, increasingly, customers don’t feel like that’s the case. 

It’s not that people no longer rely on fast fashion brands—they’ve instead chosen to supplement their wardrobes with other distributors like thrift stores. For obvious reasons, selling recycled clothing removes one of the major culprits in disposable clothing: surplus. 

In large part, what has also made thrifting more appealing than shopping at chain producers is the ability to be innovative. With fast fashion, you know what you are getting, how much you should expect to pay for it, and how long you expect it to last. And, because of continuous efforts to phase out old clothes for new ones, fast fashion brands actively limit the futures of their products. In direct contrast, clothes bought secondhand are often timeless. Without the overbearing influence of explicit trends in chain stores, secondhand clothing is oftentimes chosen more carefully.

So, if fast fashion is detrimental in so many ways, why do we keep it around? 

The truth is, the appeal of fast fashion is vast. There is more value in the idea of new, readily available products that meet your current desires and demands than there is in the desire to thrift everything. The accessibility and reliability of fast fashion brands is a pull that can’t be ignored.

Still, these are no reasons to maintain a status quo of disposability. There is a serious issue that exists in the overproduction of clothing, and large retailers are obvious culprits. The ideals promoted by fast fashion chains can affect the way that we shop at other providers. While it is more sustainable to shop at a secondhand store, if these clothes end up thrown away quickly after we purchase them, little difference has been made. 

We shouldn’t have to pick one or the other, fast fashion or secondhand shopping. In the end, both work to give customers agency in expressing themselves. What clothing distributors need is a new, innovative way of viewing our relationship to fashion . 

We’ve already seen several brands take baby steps towards this goal. Madewell, for example, offers discounts to customers who bring in old jeans, which are forwarded to organizations that use denim to help insulate houses. H&M provides coupons for clothing donations, encouraging people to recycle old pieces in their wardrobes. Yet, although these brands’ efforts are a step in the right direction, they also deflect responsibility for hazardous production practices. Only a revolution in the fast fashion industry will ultimately make a difference.

Clothing distributors play a critical role in deciding what’s in and what’s out. The value of each and every article of clothing needs to be reintroduced to the shopping experience. Fast fashion entities need to make clothes to be worn, not to be thrown out, and to remind their customers of this. By encouraging large consumer bases to reimagine the essence of fashion, sustainability will become industry’s objective.

So, next time whether you decide on a shirt from H&M or score big in your local thrift store, think critically about where it will lead you. Fashion’s ability to be innovative lies in your intentions, and especially so once fast fashion brands have envisioned a brighter tomorrow.