Present Tense: Fast Fashion

A brief(ish) oral history of an ongoing disaster.

July 15, 2021

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When I started writing this piece it was meant to be exclusively about the hidden levels of the fashion supply chain and what really happens when a garment gets produced around the world. Black box supply chains negatively impact already-marginalized global communities every day, and this is definitely something that I will cover in more detail as this conversation goes on, but it occurred to me that an excellent jumping off point for this type of story is a chat around The Invention of ‘Fast Fashion’, with a bit of New York-centric freewheeling oral history for context.

Fast Fashion in 2021 has reached such a pervasive and seemingly omnipresent position in our industry that it is difficult to remember a time when it was not perpetually discussed as an unsolved evil. I myself have written stories about its evil in the last ten years, and the Fast Fashion sector is the subject of an enormous amount of scrutiny in labor practices, sustainability, and environmental damage, and for extremely valid reasons - due to the enormity of their grip on the market and the low-quality, churn-and-burn mentality, their impact as compared to the rest of the industry is indeed outsized. 

And unfortunately, the seemingly unstoppable nature of Fast Fashion is a beast of our own creation, and until we earnestly face the ways we are feeding it, it will continue to grab market share and change the face of our industry. Let’s chat about how we got here. 

Journey back with me 30-something years to late 80’s Manhattan. Women are flooding into the workforce in record-breaking numbers, thousands of Tess McGills making their crossing each morning on the Staten Island Ferry to land in the Financial District or the like and be paid, for comparable work, 29% less than their male cohorts (in 30 years we have only closed this metric by a little more than 10%, but we’ll cover that another time). The other proliferating entity in business districts in every major city at the time? Specialty-sized boutiques marketed toward working women dressing at a discount (see my earlier comment regarding the wage gap). 

Mike Nichols’ 1988 classic, Working Girl 

30 years ago in professional fields, when dress codes were more strict and online shopping still non-existent, there were suddenly loads of stores catering to this demographic, and even now after the pandemic has shuttered most of the businesses in professional districts, you can still see their skeletons all over the city from decades of success with working women of all ages. Bolton’s would get you a trendy suit dress and handbag at a bargain. Strawberry, an evergreen powerhouse who has only now succumbed to the financial injuries it sustained during COVID, was the trendiest of all, and even catered to after-work life as well. In 2003, when Donna Karan collaborated with Robert Lee Morris and sent a collection of viscose dresses adorned with his sculptural loops, 2005 followed thereafter with every Strawberry window in the city filled with their (albeit inferior) knock-off likenesses. There was even Joyce Leslie, in Greenwich Village, where a rising senior at NYU could find this same sort of bargain-priced workwear, but still with the gentle whispers of its Delia*s-come-gothgirl origins. 

These were all technically offering Fast Fashion. But we didn’t call it that yet. Before we all became Very Online, Fast Fashion was known as a simple ‘quick response’ manufacturing model, but the quick response was at the pace of the usual market presentation-to-manufacturing-to-release-to-advertising-to-public model. The use of the word ‘quick’ was itself fast and loose, all puns intended. But rapid response models have existed since apparel became mass-commercialized post WWII, to offer trend apparel to an audience that became more hungry for ‘new’ every year.

The same year that Donna Karan collaborated with Robert Lee Morris and inadvertently made her way to every Strawberry window display til the end of time, there was another important knock off moment. In the Spring of 2004, when the Prada Broadway store windows were filled with their brand new signature, the dip-dyed cashmere cardigan, debuted on the runway the previous September in Milan. And across the street, at Zara, a window full of seemingly the exact same cardigans, color-matched and lined up like an army. 

Prada Spring 2004 via Vogue.com 

Aside from the legendary chutzpah of the Zara window dresser in this situation, the remarkable thing about this scene was that the season when Zara produced an exact replica of nearly an entire Prada runway show, Fast Fashion had suddenly become fast. 

A quick break from this to explain why it was so shocking, because I realize now, 20 years later, this scenario is old hat and we don’t spend enough time appreciating how breakneck this pace got, and how quickly it became so. If you can, take a moment to recall the cell phone you might have owned in the year 2004. At best, you may have been able to use it to snap some grainy photos of a night out, but some of us were still scrolling through letter selections on our Nokias to send choppy text messages. In 2003/2004, only half of American households even had internet access at home. Information sharing globally was just…. different.

And so the fashion inspiration life cycle was also quite different. Creative directors would regularly seek inspiration from vintage loan archives (like What Comes Around Goes Around), who would rent reference pieces to design teams that would then be interpreted onto international runways. Trend forecasting groups like WGSN and Doneger made their living aggregating info on texture, color and cut as a service to major apparel brands and retailers. Runway coverage for major collections began appearing online at the beginning of the 21st century, but their scope was limited, and if you wanted a full overview of the season or trends you would buy a physical magazine from the likes of a Universal News or the Relay at Charles de Gaulle, and these magazines were available months after the shows. So the trend department at any of these quick response shops would mostly have to wait, just like you, to see in detail what they were supposed to make. 

I went through college working in luxury retail, and a few of my clients were trend designers for brands like Abercrombie & Fitch, who were given a budget to come in and shop for sample references from luxury houses, which would then be used as trend references in some iteration or another in the coming years. So they would spend a few thousand dollars on a few reference pieces, and then after their concepting and prototyping and production model I would see some highly commercialized version of it in a Bruce Weber billboard 1.5-2 years later.

If this was happening now, we would call it Slow Fashion. So, in 2004, when Zara came for Prada’s neck with their perfectly-executed knock-offs, the speed was a little jarring, and quite new. Remember that at this point Zara had not substantially penetrated the market, and even H&M only had a handful of locations across America. 

Then, in 2008, everybody got an iPhone and the world economy collapsed, and suddenly even the wealthiest of Americans was bargain hunting on a lightweight handheld computer, and high/low dressing was born. It was a watershed moment for the new fast fashion. 

Now let’s turn our attention back to production. Mass market components, embellishments, and garments are often made in the same workshops and factories that work with their luxury counterparts. While you may find work orders for many similar brands in the same places, it is also just as likely that the embroidery studio in India that is beading paillettes for Dolce & Gabbana is also beading paillettes for Zara, and the primary differences between the finished product will be the material used in those paillettes and the quality of the craftsmanship (if D&G is paying more per piece than Zara, which is not always the case).

But the other relatively new aspect of our industry is the medium-sized fashion brand, which is typically an independently-owned brand producing on-trend apparel or accessories at a market-competitive (read: non-luxury) price. This company profile has bloomed over the last fifteen years into a mid-market space that also draws the attention of the high/low dresser, such that all three tiers are often competing for the same customer’s attention. 

And as we have seen over the last decade from knock off after knock off, these medium, independent brands are equally as ravaged by Fast Fashion as their luxury counterparts, the difference being that they often lack the industry weight or financial resources of a major luxury group.

Pangaia is a relatively young UK-based brand that rose quickly to prominence in the first few months of the pandemic as they became well-known for their cozy sweatsuits and loungewear in bright, Instagram-friendly colors, all produced centering the responsibility of sustainability and technology. Their site is a wealth of material science information and requisite study for any global brand embarking on their sustainable path, if only for a model of responsible reporting and communications.

Beyond that, their price point sits well within the streetwear category - what might be considered “contemporary” or “accessible” to those that are used to dedicating any substantial portion of their paycheck to apparel, particularly if it carries the well-known social cache of a logo, color, and brand with an ethos. 

And so it was surprising when Zara knocked off Pangaia’s signature sweatsuit, because it was a pure reaction to trend for a company whose stores are essentially a multi-brand experience akin to early-aughts Barneys New York, but all of the clothes are knock offs and they’re all produced by the same billionaire’s supply chain.

To be sure there are many, many people who, knowingly or unknowingly, bought their Pangaia knock off this spring. But Pangaia has built a global brand with the pillars of product and story, so their customer is as aware of the special nature of their production as might be a customer of Hermès buying a handbag. Not the same market, I know… but the concept is portable, and holds up at both the Pangaia $150 price point as well as the Hermès $10,000 price point.

In my first installment of The Rhythm Section, I mentioned the impossibility of meeting the expectations of the fashion calendar, and a huge contributing factor to these impossibilities is the increasing speed and agility of Fast Fashion, each year more pernicious. The industry’s effect on all aspects of life on earth, from manufacturing in slave labor settings to massive environmental pollution to the offloading of throw-away garments on post-colonial nations to make room for… more throw-away garments. But the more that brands try to fight this beast by assimilating into its practices, with break neck releases of products produced in black box supply chains from unvetted materials, the worse it will get.

There are only two things for brands to do to contribute to Fast Fashion’s demise. The first, importantly, is to band together, lobby and advocate for producer responsibility in manufacturing, materials, and carbon emissions - these are the voids that allow Fast Fashion brands to cut every penny and still turn a profit on companies that end the year with $4.3 billion in unsold product. 

Imagine how little a life of any form (human or otherwise) means to you if your profit margin allows you to have $4.3 billion in unsold goods at the end of the year and still make (a lot of) money. 

The other imminent, urgent action needed is to invest in operating practices in sustainability and ethical production that allow you the freedom to discuss in depth your company’s pillars: product and story. When you can transparently discuss your investment in creation, and your divestment from the Fast Fashion hamster wheel, these practices allow a customer to invest in you in the long term and understand why they are doing it.

No one is doing this perfectly. But some of the brands of different shapes and sizes who are trying - and, importantly, sharing resources and methodologies to the public while they try - are:

Fashion often suffers from a crab in a barrel mentality, and the catch with improving our practices is that the more secretive we are about it, the slower that change scales to and for our peers. We can strike the balance of sharing the right resources, because when we share those resources, they become less marginal, less niche, and more of a scaled possibility to shape a more equitable future.

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