Sustainable, fair, responsible, circular, in recent years, fashion has taken on another dimension and beyond aesthetics, consumers attach more importance to brand commitments. Faced with these new habits, fast fashion is presented as the enemy to be defeated. Over the years (and critics), fast fashion brands have tried to adapt to customer demands by leaving lines that they present as more responsible: Mango with Mango Committed, Zara with Join Life, without forgetting H&M and its Conscious line. Even if they do not apply the principles of so-called “sustainable” fashion with the same intensity, most players in the sector seem to have taken on board the challenges that this represents. So everything was going relatively well until the appearance of ultra fast fashion headed by Chinese Shein. Since then, the ultra-low-cost fashion platform has become the number one enemy of responsible fashion advocates.

While fast fashion and ultra fashion brands are getting rich at high speed, some imagine a life without fast fashion, where purchases of fashion items would be considered and no longer be made on a whim. A Vogue journalist considered this scenario and applied it for three years. She makes a more than positive assessment: “I haven’t consumed fast fashion for three years now, and I feel like I’ve never dressed so well in my life. I love every piece of clothing I own and I wear them all as much as possible. I don’t know if I spend less, but I certainly don’t spend more: every purchase is perfectly thought out and essential”.

Describing this term that we hear everywhere, TV5 Monde explains “Fast fashion“, or fast fashion as we would speak of fast food, defines these clothes designed by major popular brands to be replaced as quickly as they were bought . The novelties follow the novelties and tons of barely worn clothes come to swell the landfills especially in Kenya”. The magazine took an interest in the Japanese designer Yuima Nakazato who, on the occasion of his unisex haute couture show presented at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, on January 25, wanted to denounce fast fashion and its excesses. “The floor of the room where the presentation of his collection took place, at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, evoked an open dump of clothes.

The consequences of fast fashion on developing countries

Leicester in England, Dhaka in Bangladesh, Karachi in Pakistan, in these areas there are many fast fashion brand subcontractor factories. The workers there work long hours, in difficult conditions and are underpaid. In an investigation, France Culture returns to a drama of fast fashion and wonders about the real culprits: “On September 11, 2012, 255 workers of Ali Entreprises, direct subcontractors of the German group KiK, perished in the fire at their jeans factory in Karachi. This tragedy remains today the deadliest fire in history. The disaster arouses contradictory reactions: should we blame the predatory logic of fast-fashion or the mafia methods of the political parties that control the city? “.

“Nearly 10 years ago, the collapse of Rana Plaza in the suburbs of Dhaka in Bangladesh left more than a thousand dead and at least 2,500 injured. The tragedy had prompted around thirty Western brands to strengthen factory safety and improve working conditions at their suppliers. But the fashion industry is a sector that remains poorly controlled and poorly regulated”, observes Rts.ch who describes fast fashion as an ecological disaster: “Low-cost fashion generates an increasingly considerable social and environmental cost. . Every year, in Europe alone, 4 million tons of clothes end up in the trash. A tiny part of used clothing enters the second-hand or recycling sector. The vast majority end up in huge open landfills, as in the Atacama desert in Chile or on the coasts of Ghana. Burned, they generate toxic gases for the surrounding populations”.