Discarded clothing left behind by climbers litters Mt. Everest.
Social media and fast fashion have a symbiotic relationship: For many users, it is impossible to scroll the timeline without being sold cheap, trendy clothes. The division between household names and fast fashion brands has faded. Now, names like Missguided, Fashion Nova, and SHEIN are ubiquitous, and perhaps even more recognizable to young people than the mall standards, like Wet Seal and Forever 21, of yesteryear.
Fast fashion is defined by its hasty production cycle. Traditionally, mainstream clothing brands would follow the four fashion seasons. This allowed for designs to be developed over months, and made it more practical to use higher-quality fibers like wool and linen. Just over two decades ago, newcomers on the market boasted lower prices and “newer” styles—designs that had been pulled fresh from the runways, mass-produced, and sold just weeks after they debuted.
In a report on fast fashion behemoth Zara, a report by MIT’s Sloan Management School found that in 2005, “[w]hen most retailers were taking nine months to get a clothing item from the drafting table to the store, Zara was figuring out how to slash that time to a mere 15 days.” Brands like Zara weren’t being particularly innovative—they were using the cheapest factories they could find in Asia and Latin America and using an abundance of cheap, synthetic materials like polyester and rayon.
By producing massive volumes of trendy, up-to-the-minute styles, fast fashion brands could compete at a large scale with department stores and even big box retailers like Walmart. So $20 jeans from Target were no longer the best bargain on the market—$6 jeans at Forever 21 were. Fast fashion quickly reset shoppers’ hunger for constant updates that follow social media’s insatiable cycle of microtrends, which can last a month or less. Platforms like TikTok have made it possible for a look to go “out of style” just as quickly as it arrived on the scene, feeding the seemingly never-ending cycle.
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