Fast Fashion Is Dying - But Sustainability Isn’t the Reason

Last year when I attended the Circularity Conference last here in Denver, I met a lot of sustainability leaders that worked in apparel. It was interesting and I learned a lot, but I was left a little disappointed with how accepting many of them were of fast fashion. Admittedly, it was a begrudging acceptance, one where they felt a little defeated about human nature and that what now exists will always exist.

To a certain extent - human nature is what it is. But it kind of blew me away how the elegantly dressed people I spoke with, exhibiting more timeless fashion tastes, were telling me about how that isn’t how people shop.

It also was a little bewildering, because fast fashion has been facing growing headwinds for the last decade. ASOS has seen its value collapse. So has Boohoo. Even some giants in the space - like Shein  & H&M - have seen their valuations suffer pretty heavily. It’s not all bad news for fast fashion - the space appears to still be growing and Zara/Inditex seems to be doing well -  but acting like the three things we can count on are death, taxes, and destructive fast fashion is pretty defeatist.

So what caused people in apparel to accept fast fashion as inevitable?

I don’t think that they fully appreciated that fast fashion was born from a fading, never-again gap in international trade and supply chain regulations that created financial opportunities at the expense of human and environmental well-being.

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The opening of the gap was the introduction of hyper-globalization. Beginning in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union and accelerating in 2001 with China joining the World Trade Organization, world trade exploded. As a student at the U.S. Naval Academy around 2000, I was first introduced to the effect of global trade with a map illustrating all of the ships at sea in the absence of any map. I could clearly see the boundaries of the world’s continents and it highlighted how important global trade was to the economy and to our future.