The Problem With Fast Fashion | Teen Vogue

Do you love those cheap, fashionable, clothes you can find at places like Zara and H&M? The rise of "fast fashion" has changed the way we buy and wear clothes, but at what cost?

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The Problem With Fast Fashion | Teen Vogue

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