Sell Cheap…Wear…Dispose…Repeat: Fast Fashion’s Race to the Bottom!

“Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.” ~ Epictetus, Greek philosopher.

We know from the DNA of human-dwelling fleas that we've been wearing clothes since the latter part of the Palaeolithic period, 100,000 to 30,000yrs ago. There is nothing new about the idea of ‘fashion’. The Roman poet Ovid wrote in 8 AD, ‘I cannot keep track of all the vagaries of fashion, every day, so it seems, brings in a new style.’

In 1714, philosopher Bernard Mandeville argued, “What use was a rich man if he did not lavishly spend his wealth and stimulate the economy thru employment and consumption.” By 1776 Adam Smith could state almost without challenge that “consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer”.

The emergence of “fast fashion” represented a turning point; appealing today, unwanted tomorrow. It dealt not with utility or the artistry and quality of goods, but with their fleeting appeal. Never before had things been made with planned obsolescence in mind, a fixed shelf life post which the item, delightfully crafted and still perfectly usable, would be replaced. The world and its resources seemed vast and limitless.

Originally the phrase ‘fast fashion’ was coined for the speed with which the bigger brands could get a product to market, how quickly they could see a garment on a catwalk or worn by a celebrity, and turn a copy round and have it on sale. It was an NYT journalist who first coined the phrase, in 1989, referencing Zara’s boast that it took them just 15 days from first having an idea to getting it into their stores. Now the time taken to get to shops is irrelevant, it’s the churn which is fast.

It was easy to set up an online fast fashion brand. You needed a website, some product from a factory somewhere, a few models, a camera and a group of influencers. And you have the likes of Boohoo, Pretty Little Things, Nasty Gal, and Missguided. Welcome to shopping as entertainment and addiction! You watch the show, pay a few quid, get some stuff, wear it once, throw it away. The clothes are as disposable as the factories and the people that produce them. Sample some alarming facts:

• Zara began by selling low-priced knock-offs of popular designer fashions, spotting trends and quickly copying them. They deny copying but a quick scroll thru Diet Prada, the Instagram-based IP police of the fashion world, reveals many examples. By 2022 their global sales topped €23bn. In 2023 H&M turned over $22bn despite being accused repeatedly of greenwashing and poor ethics.
• And then we have Primark. Amazingly, it didn’t bother with online sales until the pandemic, nor even with marketing; their model was low cost, no frills. Their mostly 100% plastic clothes are made in countries with low wages and poor labour laws.
• In 2000 a new breed of fast fashion brands entered that had none of the physical-world baggage of Topshop, Zara and H&M. By 2018, just 18years after its foundation, ASOS was selling $2.4bn worth of clothing to 18m customers in 238 markets, and at ￡9bn was valued at more than M&S. Boohoo sells dresses from ￡4, claiming they go from design to website in just 48hours, using garment factories with terrible ethical norms, where workers reportedly earn less than half the minimum wage. In <15 years its sales grew to ￡1.2bn and was valued at ￡3.5bn— more than M&S.
• Fast fashion then got a whole lot worse in 2015 when Shein was founded. Their strategy is simple: show every possible thing that the AI tools can think of, spam the world with a tidal wave of this product. (A) In Nov 2023 Reuters reported that in the most recent year H&M had launched an incredible 23,000 new products in the US, whilst Zara launched 40,000. Shein launched 1.5m! We use our phones on avg 3:15hrs a day; for every minute we're online, Shein launch 21 new products. That's one every 3secs! And it’s dirt cheap. (B) In Jan 2024 there were 3 garments for sale at under ￡3, and 170 at under ￡4. Its website at one time had a ‘99p and under’ section. The ethics are shocking. In 2022 a Channel 4 investigation found that workers supplying Shein were paid as little as 3p per garment. (C) Shein sold $23bn worth of clothes in 2022 and overtook Amazon as the most downloaded app in the US. They have 65m app users in Europe, and as of Dec 2023 it was the world’s biggest fast fashion retailer with 18% of the global market, bigger than H&M, Primark, ASOS, Boohoo and Forever 21 combined! (D) Shein had a simple blueprint: make a huge quantity of incredibly low-quality stuff, sell it cheaply, aggressively gain buyers, swamp the competition. But the problem with that kind of plan is that if they’ve got enough cash, anyone can make a lot of cheap crap and spend billions marketing it. (E) Enter Temu.
• In just 6mths, Temu has gone from nothing to half a billion in sales…with no real strategy except to sell stuff cheap, and to gamify the experience by offering big referral incentives to get new app users signed up. And it’s working!
• Temu is spending close to $2bn a year on digital ads, 4 times its turnover. By both the ratio and the sheer scale it is a crazy number. But it is working. A June 2023 report suggested that 30% of all small packages coming into the US at that time were from Shein and Temu.
• Meanwhile, a third of its reviews on Trustpilot are the worst they can be. Sample some: “even at such low prices this crap isn’t worth it.” The Temu bots cheerfully respond to the thousands of negative reviews they receive: ‘So disappointed with quality’ (how much quality were you expecting in a ￡4 tent?); ‘fabric like plastic’ (it is plastic); ‘offers cheap rubbish’ (actually, the price isn’t cheap for how rubbish it is).

Clothes have power. They remain part of our memory of life events. We become so closely connected with good-quality clothes over the many years we wear them, and in recent past we believed that some of our soul would pass into them. It’s probably for this reason that people would place an old shoe into a wall or under a floor of a newly built house becoz they believed that our spirit, held within the shoe, would bring the house good luck.

If your entire business model is built on churn, low prices, discounts and influencers, there will always be someone who is faster and cheaper than you are, and the influencers who sold your stuff yesterday will happily sell someone else’s tomorrow. Topshop enjoyed a 45yr run, then ASOS killed Topshop. It took Boohoo and Missguided 10years to kill ASOS. Shein killed Boohoo in six. These are fashion houses built on sand.

In 2023 over 100bn garments were produced globally. The fashion industry consumes 350m barrels of oil annually and produces 282bn kgs of greenhouse gas, equating to 10% of all global emissions. It accounts for 22% of global insecticide use. Its production systems release carcinogens, neurotoxins, heavy metals, phenols, phthalates, hexavalent chrome, formaldehyde and carbon disulphide, leading to eutrophication, acidification, and toxicity in the air, water and soil. The industry pays poverty wages and operates under terrible working conditions. And when wages rise, it simply moves elsewhere.

Our clothes may be cheap but they come with a HUGE cost. Greed and Envy are looked down upon in almost all world religions, except the religion of Capitalism.????