🧦 Fast Fashion

Hey,

Welcome to the issue.

Consumers have the power to move markets.

The choice of which t-shirt to buy (or not) and which brand to shop at (or not) are linked to our identity, budget and many other variables.

Those choices at scale output purchasing data, which brands follow closely. This data, coupled with influencer driven fashion trends gives them a picture of demand and in turn informs what they design, produce and sell next.

They then market it, nudging consumer choice through ads and influencers, to buy what the brand has produced.

And the cycle goes on. Until we choose to break it.

Let’s dive in 🔎

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🧠 The Problem

• Fast fashion as a term first emerged in 1989 by The New York Times as the brand Zara opened in New York with the promise of a 15 day turnaround from design to pieces stocked in stores.

• It is a business model where a piece of clothing goes from design to manufacturing, distribution and sales as quickly as possible to try to keep up with and commercialise on evolving fashion trends.

• Fast fashion causes serious problems from environmental destruction to human rights exploitation.

🧶 How big’s the issue?

• Roughly 150 billion garments are produced annually, that’s 20 pieces of clothing per person on Earth every year.

• 30% of these are never sold and never worn, ending up incinerated or in landfill.

• 88% of American consumers prefer to purchase from fast fashion retailers buying more than 1 garment per week. Over 50% of garments produced are disposed of in under a year. 66% of discarded clothes end up in landfill.

🌎 Why it matters?

• To be able to buy a piece of clothing for next to nothing, brands and manufacturers need:

  • Cheap materials that fall apart after a few washes fuelling even more consumption.

  • Cheap labour leaving many workers (80% of who are women) under the poverty line and with multiple instances of forced child labour.

  • Cheap and unsafe working environments that have significant health, safety, labour, environmental and human rights issues.

• Fast fashion accounts for 10% of global pollution, more than air and maritime transport combined. 20% of global water pollution comes from garment manufacturing: 500,000 tons of microplastics from garments enter oceans every year.

• Fast fashion fuels a culture of returns. Up to 40% of clothes are returned and this process accounts for more emissions than 3 million cars a year in the US.

🌱 Root Causes

• Offshoring: Companies move their manufacturing to developing countries to take advantage of low-wage workforces and less oversight. Only by paying a worker in a developing nation 0.6% of the retail cost of a T-shirt (or 18 cents), can brands deliver it to consumers for a bargain.

• Influencer culture: Social media fuelled culture has warped the fashion industry from 2 seasons a year (Spring/Summer & Fall/Winter) to hundreds of micro seasons and trends. Fast fashion uses (and facilitates), FOMO and the constantly changing trends to sell more clothes.

• Mass-Consumerism: We have more choice, more affordable options and more ways to buy clothes than ever before. Shopping, especially for perceived ‘deals’, activates the reward centres in our brain hitting us with a shot of dopamine.

• ‘Disposable’ items: Marketing, next-day delivery and the low price of fast fashion has developed clothes into transient objects, coming and going immediately, and at the tap of a button. It fuels a disconnect between the item and where it’s from, what it’s made of, and how and who made it, enabling a generation of consumers to guiltlessly wear it only once ‘for the gram’.

🫵 Who’s solving it?

The ethical fashion market is expected to be worth over $11bn by 2027, compared to the fast fashion market exceeding $165bn by 2030. So there is a long way to go to solve this issue = a huge opportunity.

• Fair Wear / FairTrade / BCI / Bluesign - Standards and activations for sustainable and ethical fashion.

• Buy me once / Good on you - Drawing attention to brands with lifetime warranties and clothes designed to last.

• Rent the Runway / SOJO / eBay - Rent, resell and repair clothes so there’s no need to buy new ones.

• Vitro Labs / Renewcell / Worn Again - Next-generation material science to create new materials and reuse the ones we already have.

Even more below - including:

• 7 predictions for where the business of fashion is going

• 1 opportunity to disrupt the fast fashion industry

• 3 books to dive deeper