What is fast fashion? Well, fast fashion is cheap clothing that is trending or popular that moves from catwalks or fashion shows straight to the stores. It’s called Fast Fashion because of how rapidly they produce and sell these items. They are often based on styles presented on the catwalks. 

Fast fashion clothing is heavily mass produced and there are tons and tons of stores selling these types of clothing. These pieces of clothing catch people’s attention because it is affordable and trendy. Fast fashion can be either harmful or non harmful and here’s why. 

This fashion is usually cheap; it has toxic textile dyes, making this form of fashion a huge pollution problem. It can also affect the industry workers as well, causing them to develop lung or breathing problems due to the poor air flow and because they regularly breathe in dust and fiber particles from making the clothing. 

This fashion industry also provides people who can’t afford expensive clothing a chance to buy the same but at an affordable price. Companies gain profit to receive more items and since people love cheap, trendy clothing they’re going to buy more so that these companies get lots of money. Influencers usually lean towards Fast fashion when buying lots of clothes at one time because it is cheap and it’s trending. 

Why is this type of clothing so cheap? It has already been mentioned in the beginning about the textile dyes but let’s go more in depth. Usually Fast fashion is mass produced with cheaper, more delicate fabrics, and companies use more underpaid, oversea industries that will make them and then the companies sell them for a fraction of the cost. Therefore people buy more, which gives more money to the companies to repeat the cycle and give people what they want; cheap clothing. 

Where did Fast fashion come from? According to the website ‘Good On You’, “When Zara landed in New York at the beginning of the 1990s, people first heard the term ‘fast fashion’. It was coined by the New York Times to describe Zara’s mission to take only 15 days for a garment to go from the design stage to being sold in stores.” If you didn’t know, “Zara is a Spanish clothing retailer based in Galicia, Spain. Founded by Amancio Ortega in 1975, it is the flagship chain store of the Inditex group, the world’s largest apparel retailer.” `The Business of Fashion’ said.