Fast fashion at the end of retail has unsustainable environmental impacts, and businesses and consumers are starting to pay attention. As more consumers demand a shift away from fast fashion and towards more sustainable fashion, we are seeing more and more retailers introducing high quality, environmentally friendly clothing and accessories.
Fast fashion brands have an average 52-season cycle, meaning they get a new collection every week, which goes into mass production quickly and reduces the quality of the garments. While consumers are educating themselves about the impact of fast fashion, the ethical clothing market has grown by 20 percent in value over the past decade. As clothing becomes more affordable, this idea of "fast fashion" is gaining ground in markets where customers are increasingly attracted to buying high-quality, environmentally friendly clothing and accessories. This is in addition to the fact that new clothes can be bought for a fraction of the cost of used clothes with the same quality.
"New collection every week, which goes into mass production quickly and reduces the quality of the garments."
When you look at the speed and scale of the fast fashion industry, it can create a huge waste problem, especially with regard to clothing and accessories.
Growing Demand
The Copenhagen Fashion Summit, reported that fashion is responsible for more than half of the solid waste that ends up in landfills each year. The average American throws away 36 kg of clothing each year, and clothing produced by fast-fashion brands is often made of cheap materials like polyester and acrylic, and is not built for life. With the growing demand for the fast fashion industry, we are experiencing an enormous overproduction of clothing. A major culprit is that this system of rapid production has created a market for inexpensive clothing, which is increasingly being treated as disposable. All this cheap clothing from the fast fashion industry leaves companies like Wearable Collection no choice but to find ways to recycle clothing for further use.
Fast fashion leads us to believe that we need to shop more and more to keep track of trends, creating a constant sense of necessity and ultimate dissatisfaction. The speed of fast fashion trends means that consumers shop more frequently to "stay up to date," which means more clothes are thrown away. Fast fashion can also affect the consumer himself by promoting a "throwaway culture," obsolescence and the speed at which trends are produced. We should try to break the fast-growing fashion trap of affordable clothing that leads us to create trends we don't need.
Being environmentally conscious does not mean being unfashionable, but it is important to promote sustainable fashion. There are already a number of factors contributing to climate change, and fast fashion consumption only adds to this list. One of the negative consequences of consumerism such as fast fashion is the environmental damage that textile waste causes. The focus on "sustainable" fashion is necessary to counteract the consequences of fast fashion, so it is important that we promote it.
While your newsfeed may be full of articles about climate change and plastic pollution, serious concerns that get much less airtime are used to describe fast fashion and its environmental impact, such as water pollution and food waste.
Fast fashion can be defined as cheap, trendy clothing that exemplarily takes ideas from catwalks, celebrities, and culture and transforms them into new styles to meet consumer demand. Usually the latest design trends are taken into account and cheap design pieces are created in short production cycles, which can last only one week. Fast Fashion speeds up the production process to bring a new style to the catwalk or the Internet as quickly as possible. In recent years, the industry has become faster in production, taking into account the costs and the high speed.
The fashion industry has developed into a kind of fast fashion industry, in which the mass production of clothing is exploited and sold for next to nothing. According to a recent report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, it has become a "fast fashion industry" because it can exploit the size of the clothing industry and sell it for free.
Fast fashion is a business strategy that aims to speed up the buying process and bring new fashion products to stores as quickly as possible to meet consumer demand at its peak. It is the practice to produce mass-produced clothing, the articles of which are produced cheaply and sold at a low price or sold on the mass market for a fraction of their original price.
Just as in the fast fashion industry, you can find ethically made clothing, but the shift to sustainable fabrics from fashion clothing made to the same model does not make a fast fashion retailer sustainable. The real problem with fast fashion is the speed with which it is produced, which puts enormous strain on people and the environment.
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