104 Seasons with Fast Fashion — Good for You Bad for the Climate
The climate change has been accelerating, till when?
Have you ever heard of the term fast fashion? Do you understand what it means or is it just one of those new “fancy words” for you? I know that for the longest time fast fashion meant nothing to me, it was just another “trendy” word.
To boil it down simply, fast fashion refers to using cheaper resources to churn out cheaper clothing at a much faster rate than usual. It aims at providing people affordable fashion with continuously changing trends and ever-increasing variety.
Understanding Fast Fashion
To better understand it, let us consider the example of the global retailer, Zara. While typically there are 4 seasons in a year and therefore 4 seasons of fashion, fast fashion negates this. Since the focus of fast fashion is on increasing the supply of cheaper clothes, the number of seasons in a year is drastically increased.
Zara wants you to purchase clothing for an astounding 104 seasons per year. This is because they deliver new designs to stores twice every week. The designated days have become known as “Z Days” by Zara’s fanbase.
Can you know begin to grasp just how fast fashion has become? It has moved from new designs in stores four times a year to almost 104 times per year. Does this make you wonder, how is Zara managing it?
While the market average for a new design to hit the market is 6 months, Zara takes only 3 weeks. There are almost 30,000 new designs per year, most of which are near copies of fashion’s biggest names, enabling the average person to be part of the “elite” fashion world.
Nothing is warehoused for more than 72 hours and the global distribution center, located in Spain, moves 2.5 million clothing items per week.
Price tags, security tags, etc. are already fixed and the clothes are ironed and hanged before reaching stores. As a result, once they do reach the store, all that is left to do is put them on display and wait for them to sell out, saving the stores prime selling time.
Due to Zara’s strong customer following, when it opened its first store in Australia, 80% of the stock was grabbed within 3 minutes of opening. This is the phenomenon that has become known as “Fast Fashion”.
From a logistical, business, and supply chain perspective, this is something extraordinary that opened the doors to a whole new concept of supply chain management and product development. However, as is the case with everything, there is a downside to it as well.
While many people tend to realize that the fashion industry needs to be circular and more sustainable, fast fashion is taking it in the opposite direction according to many. 104 seasons mean that wardrobes are switched much more often and therefore the amount of waste is exponentially increased. This makes the industry less circular and the ever-growing production makes it hard to make the industry sustainable as well.
The concern, hence, is raised by the question, are the dangers of fast fashion too large for the planet to bear?
The Impacts of Fast Fashion
One of the biggest impacts of fast fashion is the increase of unethical and unfair practices in an already unethical industry. Since fast fashion requires cheap resources to accomplish cheaper mass production and offer cheap prices, many companies resort to moving to developing countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan for production. Due to lack of proper laws or lack of implementation of available laws, exploiting labor in many of these countries is quite easy and even safe working environments are not maintained. The news is filled with cases of factories collapsing, workers getting seriously injured or dying, worker being underpaid and forced to work in miserable life-threatening conditions for a pay that doesn’t even meet the minimum wage criteria of developed countries. Child labor is also common in such cases. Examples include the collapse of the Rana Plaza clothing manufacturer in Bangladesh, which killed around 1000 workers, and the GAP scandals. Such practices not only hinder the economic development and prosperity of these countries but keep the population stuck in a cycle of illiteracy and poverty.
Facts indicate that approximately 1 in 6 people works in the garment industry and as many as 80% of them are women, who are not even earning basic pay and face major human right violations.
There is always the textile waste impact as well which we have touched upon numerous times and is a major threat to our planet. One estimator puts the pollution by the fashion industry in the following terms, driving a car 80 miles is equivalent to producing a pair of jeans in terms of the pollution created.
Another practice by some companies like Burberry, is to burn their unsold clothing items at the end of the season to reduce the discount markets for their brand. Not only does this result in excessive pollution and CO2 emissions but because of these items being burned, more need to be produced and therefore, the whole cycle repeats itself.
If we touch upon the example of Zara again, we talked about the global distribution center shipping as many as 2.5 million items per week. additionally, most of these need to be transported quickly to maintain the “new designs twice a week” ritual. Can you imagine the level of transport required to manage this every week and the kind of impact it has on the environment?
Hence, therefore many believe that as fashion becomes faster, it becomes deadlier for the planet. Not only is it seriously damaging the environment at an alarming rate, it is directly adversely affecting the lives of almost one-sixth of the world’s population. Instead of the industry becoming sustainable and circular, fast fashion seems to be making it more wasteful and unethical.
This are enough to explain the level of threat we are facing with in terms of resource scarcity, pollution and textile waste. A world where resources are thriving is not hard to do. Brands, manufacturers and recyclers can co-exist and empower each other with harmony.
Author: Basil Faisal
