Ultra-fast fashion — what is this concept all about?
The pace of fast fashion has been accelerating for years now. It is getting more and more common for us to invest in our styles and often change our outfits. Fashion — especially affordable and adapted to constantly developing trends may be addictive for many customers who want to be up to date with the latest trends. But there is something new coming out nowadays — ultra-fast fashion. This concept is increasingly popularized by the brands such as Shein, Fashion Nova and Boohoo. Ultra-fast fashion is a concept where everything from fast fashion is sped up, starting from materials sourcing and production up to the moment the trends appear at the stores. But what about the environment, sustainability and animal welfare? Can this popular concept be environmentally friendly?
What is ultra fast fashion?
Let’s start shortly with what ultra-fast fashion means. Ultra-fast fashion concept takes upon fast fashion practices but unbelievably speeds them up. This means that the production process is faster, fashion trends churn faster and more and more clothing sadly ends up in the landfills. For ultra-fast fashion brands, basically, it happens within no time to spot the trend online till the clothing starts being produced by the factories.
The story of ultra-fast fashion solely relies on Social Media and starts with TikTok where plenty of users share their short funny videos, including increasingly popular fashion shopping hauls. Usually, a shopping haul has a similar pattern to this — a young woman receiving plenty of fashion items that she ordered from online stores, cutting or ripping the plastic packaging and unpacking every item in this short video. 15 billion people have viewed the videos with the hashtag #haul! Whaaat? And this number is constantly increasing every hour or even every minute.
Ultra-fast vs fast fashion
Ultra-fast fashion has already started taking over fast fashion. As I have mentioned in this post, everything is faster from production, and consumption to trend churn. While fast fashion brands have both online and physical stores, ultra-fast fashion brands keep their operations entirely online, making their overhead costs low and encouraging their customers to continuously make impulse purchases.
This faster pace, unfortunately, contributes to very low-quality materials being used. It is stated that almost half of the garments from big fashion brands such as Boohoo or Asos are made from entirely new and plastic-based materials. This number rises even to 80% while considering the share of clothes that contain plastic fibers blended with other materials such as cotton or wool.
Another thing that differentiates ultra-fast from fast fashion brands is the price range of the items. Let’s take a look at Zara and Shein. Zara’s price for a dress starts at approx. 26€ and Shein’s only 3€. What about the costs of materials, production and employees’ salaries? Sadly, a dress with a price starting from 3€ screams low quality of materials, high-speed production and most importantly, very poor working conditions. A shocking fact is that many of the workers at Shein work 12 hrs a day to sew the fabrics together. And commonly, the working hours can be up to 75 hrs a week.
So considering all of these, can ultra-fast fashion be environmentally friendly?
Unfortunately, considering that ultra-fast fashion is increasingly faster in every aspect, it also has ultra negative consequences for the environment. The factories use tremendous amounts of water and plastic for production, they pollute the synthetic materials and produce plenty of waste. We could say that the items made from plastic are packed in very unsustainable plastic packaging. This sadly leads to huge quantities of waste. Moreover, most ultra-fast fashion brands aren’t transparent about their production process. The customers don’t know who makes their clothes, where the clothing is produced and what materials are used. Not surprisingly, while taking a look at the social responsibility page of Shein, it contains plenty of meaningless buzzwords and it resembles a classical case of greenwashing (if you are interested in Greenwashing, read more here: https://medium.com/second-trend/greenwashing-in-the-fashion-industry-5d36e40b1945)
It leads me to the conclusion that we, as the customers should always be able to check who and where produced our clothing, what kind of fabrics were used and what practices the brand uses both in terms of employees’ working conditions and environmental welfare.
