Demand for fast fashion has more than doubled through the years as apparently, the world buys almost 80 billion pieces of clothing each year. Since 1980, demand for clothes has quadrupled, as per statistics. Earlier, fashion had four seasons—spring, summer, fall, and winter, which has now given way to almost 52 fashion season’s in a year as new trends come up every week.
Today, brands compete with each other by introducing more lines per year at lower costs. Fashion houses come up with 18 collections a year, as product cycles are reduced from six months to three weeks. Trends are delivered as quickly as possible and at highly affordable prices in the retail model of fast fashion. The goal is to entice consumers using ‘democratising luxury’ as a euphemism to buy as many clothes possible in the shortest time, particularly the middle-class. Fast fashion is supported by an estimated 40 million garment workers in a rush to make luxury ‘accessible’. It relies on low-wage, overseas labour, particularly in Eastern Europe and Asia.
One of the serious side effects of fast fashion is that clothes become disposable, which often goes unnoticed. Because fast fashion promotes a culture of disposability, consumers do not experience much remorse and loss when these clothes are only worn for a few times, donated to charity, or thrown away. Though consumers think that they donate clothes to charity, the sheer amount of donated clothing is in itself unpalatable. A mere 10 percent of the donated clothing is sold or recycled and most is dumped in developing countries, which in turn clogs landfills and is destroying the local clothing industry. Thus, the question is, what is the real price of fast fashion?
