Fast fashion is bad for people and the planet. This is one of the many baseline assumptions that keep the sustainable fashion movement ticking — and are the focus of recent policies pushing for progress. The European Union (EU) has said it wants to stamp out fast fashion. French policymakers are hoping to ban fast fashion advertising, and recently began fining fast fashion brands for failing to curb their environmental impacts. Luxury resale platform Vestiaire Collective has exiled fast fashion brands from its site. But at each juncture, the people denouncing fast fashion have faced the same question: what exactly is it?
In France, the law proposed by the National Assembly (the lower house of the French Parliament) has seen its scope narrowed by the Senate (the upper house) to distinguish between ‘classic’ and ‘ultra’ fast fashion, with the latter facing the brunt of penalties. By the law’s definition, classic fast fashion companies release around 1,000 new products per day, while ultra-fast fashion companies veer closer to 12,000. Classic fast fashion also tends to have a slightly slower time to market, and many of these brands have already begun reducing their reliance on airfreight, explains Anne-Cécile Violland, a member of the French National Assembly and part of the Senate’s Sustainable Development and Regional Planning Commission.
The proposal leaves experts with more questions than answers.
“The proposed law uses a legal definition,” Violland says. “Fast fashion is a commercial practice based on the very rapid renewal of collections, with a large number of new items offered over a short period. It is accompanied by a limited sales period, encouraging frequent purchases of clothing that is not designed to last. It’s a business model based on low prices and intensive, intrusive advertising.”
This boundary was drawn partly to protect local businesses. “Ultra-fast fashion generally has no local outlets in France, and sells mainly online via foreign platforms,” she continues. “In contrast, classic fast fashion stores operate physical networks established in situ.”
The stakes are high: once the law has been through the next round of negotiations and a compromise is reached between the version developed by the National Assembly and Senate’s version, the French government will be able to penalise fast fashion brands up to 50 per cent of each product’s price, excluding tax, should they fail to meet the environmental criteria.
The pushback
Within sustainability circles, this distinction has received mixed reviews. “The key to differentiating between the two business models lies in the degree of social and environmental impact that each one causes. Policies to curb these effects must be stricter with companies that cause the most damage, but ‘classic’ fast fashion companies also have a sustainability problem that public authorities must address,” says José Antonio Miranda Encarnación, professor of economic history and institutions at the University of Alicante, who has carried out extensive research on fast fashion business models. “Fast fashion has been such a successful business model that even luxury brands have imitated it. For example, by breaking with traditional seasons and introducing products throughout the year, producing very quickly to meet demand, or moving production to countries with low labour costs.”
In Europe and the US, the push towards nearshoring and onshoring, amplified by President Trump’s tariffs, is aiming to redefine ‘fast’ fashion for a changing world. When countries with higher labour costs attempt to compete on fashion production, the time it takes to produce inevitably becomes critical to their success. In the British city of Leicester, factory owners argue that the shorter lead times and small-batch, on-demand manufacturing enabled by local production could reduce waste.
But local production isn’t free from the other hallmarks of fast fashion models: in the past 18 months, luxury brands including Dior, Armani, Valentino and Loro Piana have been placed under judicial administration by Italian courts due to alleged worker exploitation in their supply chains, showing just how rife the challenges faced by fast fashion brands have become across the industry. (All of the brands that have commented on being placed under judicial administration in Italy said they were not aware that their suppliers were subcontracting to factories with below-par conditions. Dior and Armani’s administrations have been lifted, while Loro Piana and Valentino’s remain.)
Activists argue that the legal definition of fast fashion should be expanded to account for this. In Ghana’s Kantamanto Market — believed to be among the world’s largest secondhand clothing markets — traders don’t define fast fashion by particular brands, or even by production volumes, despite calling on brands to disclose and reduce them. Instead, their definition hinders on quality.
“Kantamanto retailers consider three main factors when deciding if a garment qualifies as fast fashion or not,” explains Liz Ricketts, co-founder of US-Ghanaian non-profit The Or Foundation, which supports Kantamanto upcyclers and resellers. “If products are ‘stretch-to-size’, meaning they have fewer seams and can be made faster, they are considered fast fashion. A garment is considered fast fashion if you see holes when you pull on the seam and hold it up to the light; or when the seam easily breaks; or when there is very little seam allowance; or when the seams are serged instead of being finished with binding, flat felling or French seaming. Retailers also equate fast fashion with polyester.”
Is fast fashion possible to define?
The conversation around synthetic materials points to a broader challenge in defining fast fashion, especially as the industry pushes towards circularity. Polyester’s role in a future circular economy is being muddled, as durability and recyclability become increasingly important factors, notes Ricketts. A recent study by the University of Leeds Institute of Textiles and Colour (LITAC) and global environmental action NGO Wrap found that there was no correlation between the price of a garment and how durable it is. Forty-seven T-shirts spanning from less than £15 to almost £400 were put through 50 wash and tumble dry cycles, then graded for pilling or bobbling, colour fading, shrinkage and general appearance. Among the more durable T-shirts, synthetic fibres including polyester, polyamide and elastane were common. The most expensive T-shirt (which cost £395) ranked 28th, while a £4 T-shirt placed 15th. The most durable cost £28, while the second to least durable cost £29.
“I’m certainly not championing polyester, but a 100 per cent polyester garment has many more end-of-life opportunities, because it’s hard wearing and potentially recyclable if consumers put it in the right place,” says Mark Sumner, Wrap’s programme lead on textiles and a former fabric technologist. Rather than using fabric composition or even business models to define fast fashion, Sumner advocates for assessing the potential lifespan of individual garments. “We have to look at the full lifecycle. If a garment is worn once and disposed of, its impact is much bigger than a garment that’s worn 50 times and then donated for reuse or recycling. And really, the main factor is construction — how are those products engineered for performance and durability? The challenge with using synthetic materials to define fast fashion is that you end up with a definition that won’t get us where we need to be.”
To allow for some flexibility, consumer-facing ranking platform Good on You has come up with a five-pillar points system to define whether or not a brand is perpetrating fast fashion: very low prices relative to peers, frequent and intense discounting, weekly or daily product drops, urgency marketing (encouraging more frequent and less considered purchases), and a large number of SKUs. If a brand hits two of the five pillars, it will be labelled as a fast fashion brand. If it hits three, it’s considered ultra-fast fashion. Both result in the brand receiving a lower ranking on the platform, which many consumers use to guide shopping choices.
“We definitely see these characteristics seep into all kinds of brands from luxury to high street, large to small,” says Good on You co-founder Sandra Capponi. “But we set the threshold at two or more to capture some of the nuances. Some brands have a large amount of SKUs but they aren’t constantly discounting them or pricing them below competitors. If we just home in on the worst offenders, we won’t get to the core of the issue and hold the whole industry accountable.”
That root cause is the purchasing practices of brands, says Thulsi Narayanasamy, director of international advocacy at the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC). “To me, fast fashion is about brands — most frequently in the Global North — having the kind of relationship with their suppliers — most frequently in the Global South — where they have a disproportionate amount of power, enabling them to dictate what suppliers produce, on what timelines and at what costs,” she says. “This in turn dictates wages, working conditions and environmental impact, which are the defining features of fast fashion. So the idea that fast fashion somehow sits in a separate category can be unhelpful, because it obscures the reality that most brands are operating this way within their supply chains.”
Kalpona Akter, founder and executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Worker Solidarity, notes: “While regulation of ultra-fast fashion is welcome, we must not let traditional fast fashion brands off the hook. And despite their different branding, luxury and high-end fashion often share troubling characteristics with their fast counterparts. The entire system needs transformation, not just the fastest players.”
Are you an accidental fast fashion brand?
Clearly, there is no simple definition. So Vogue Business has developed a quick quiz, to help brands figure out where they fall on the fast fashion spectrum. Where do you stand?
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