“Fast fashion is no longer about the art of fashion; it is about the market of fashion”
Victoria Ledezma from Wilfrid Laurier University
Globalization has developed countless businesses around the world, but that is the problem. Countless. About 30 years ago, globalization was seen as a way to interconnect the world and make it an interdependent place. Some still see it that way today. However, the business world nowadays doesn’t utilize globalization as those words describe it to have been created. Businesses being businesses have the goal of building a company to sell as much as possible for the highest logical price but at the lowest cost of production. That’s a known fact. But as I mentioned earlier, there are countless of them, as countless as fast fashion markets distributing “goods” all over the world. According to an article, “clothing sales doubled from 100 to 200 billion units a year, while the average number of times an item was worn decreased by 36% overall” (earth.org). You might ask yourself, but how does this affect the small designers’ business? Let’s start with the well-known fact that the fast fashion industry sells at more affordable prices to the average consumer. Emerging fashion designers and small designers, cannot afford financially and time-wise to lower their prices. Everything is handmade to the last detail usually just with a home machine and an overlock, vs actual big businesses that are able to afford industrial machines. Small designers end up also being everything at once since they have little or no team. They pattern-make, design, market themselves, create a website, and everything you can imagine that goes into building a company. therefore their prices are fair to the work they personally put it. dont forget alos that emerging designer are authentic to what they creat and how they creat it compare to companies that sell to sell, just trendy peices that will be worn three times max and then be forgotten in a closet.
In addition, one of the most present problems is copycats. Big fast fashion companies like Shein for example, release a crazy amount of styles per day. naturally, they cannot be inventing this many pieces. As Time magazine highlights, “Shein added anywhere between 2,000 and 10,000 individual styles to its app each day “. Since it’s a fast fashion business they want to be trendy and copy the paste of what they find to be trending at the moment. Many times it happens to be small designers that create and market their pieces so well that Shein decides to steal them and reproduce them for ten times cheaper.
Bibliography
“Globalization (Article) | 1990s America.” Khan Academy, Khan Academy, https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/modern-us/1990s-america/a/globalization.
Globalization and Fashion: Too Fast, Too Furious – Laurier. https://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=luja.
Mulhern, Owen. “The 10 Essential Fast Fashion Statistics.” Earth.Org, Earth.Org, 28 July 2022, https://earth.org/fast-fashion-statistics/.
Rajvanshi, Astha, et al. “Shein’s Fast Fashion Domination Comes at a High Cost.” Time, Time, 17 Jan. 2023, https://time.com/6247732/shein-climate-change-labor-fashion/.
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