We all love to shop
and these days the newer styles in clothes
are cheaper than ever
you can literally snag a dress for 4 bucks
which is basically the price of a vanilla latte
But buying cheap comes at a high cost
And I know, I know, I hear you
You're like "Wembley, what does that actually mean?"
And that basically means that fast fashion
just works on exploitative labor conditions
and it's destroying the environment.
Over the last two centuries
as the world has changed
our relationship with clothes has dramatically changed too.
From an era where clothing was bespoke
or tailor-made for each individual
to the ready-to-wear era
where pre-made clothing came in standardized sizes
and the current era of fast fashion
the fashion industry today
looks nothing like it did in the past
and, of course, not all change is good
an obscene amount of clothes,
stealing independent designers' ideas
low wages, unsafe conditions and harassment
factory works sewing pleas to help in their clothing
Yikes
Before we get into all of that
what exactly is fast fashion?
you're right if you think it sounds like fast food
It's cheap, quick and of questinable quality.
Back to the topic at hand
If fast fashion isn't bespoken, isn't ready-to-wear
then, what is it?
to answer that question
we need to travel to a small village
in Galicia, Spain, of La Coruna.
In 1963, a man named Amancio Ortega Gaona
launched a company which would go on
to become the biggest fashion retailer on Earth
that company is now known as Zara Inditex
you may have recognized its most famous holding, Zara
Retailer Zara pioneered the fast fashion model
there are four major points:
First, the vertical integration
That's just a fancy way of saying
the company does it all in-house
from design and manufacturing,
and selling clothes
this helps streamline cost
and optimize production processes
fast fashion is all about feedback
designers recieve data on what sells and what doesn't
as often as daily
they often conduct field research
on what's trending
and it's pretty much by just going out and seeing
what people are wearing on the street
Onto speadier design-to-reatil cycle
in fast fashion the emphasis is on fast
the time it takes to make clothing is now
a fraction of what it once was
For Zara, which leads the industry,
it just takes five weeks
instead of fixing new collections
fast fashion outlets generate the line share of profits
through designs produced in season.
ready-to-wear collections are made and debuted
one full season ahead of time
FInally, fast fashion is dependent on cheap labor
and those savings are passed on to the costumer
fashion has always run people power
more than anything else
Currently, one in six humans on earth
works in the fashion industry
It's massive!
And for the most part,
those humans live in developing countries
but cheap labor comes at a high cost
with globalization the world's economies
became increasingly