How We Put The Fast In Fashion
Hi Strawberry Mountaineers! My name is Mason, and I’m Strawberry Mountain’s newest employee. I’ve been working in the buy-sell-trade world since 2018, and graduated in 2020 with degrees in environmental science and cognitive science. As you might be able to guess, I am super passionate about sustainable fashion and educating the public on the harms of traditional fashion and the benefits of slow fashion. In this vein, I’m excited to start a series on the intersection of fashion, sustainability, psychology, and social justice. Jump in with me, starting with a brief history of “fast fashion” as we know it.
Imagine it’s December of 1989 – the Berlin Wall has fallen and the Soviet Union is quickly approaching collapse; Taylor Swift has been born somewhere in Pennsylvania; and the New York Times becomes the first publication to use what is now an all-too-common phrase: fast fashion. In a piece published on the eve of the 90s, journalist Anne-Marie Schiro wrote about the rise of two new fashion boutiques heralding in an era of “fast fashion,” namely Express and Zara. Describing how these businesses appeal to a rising young generation with more spending power and free time than ever before, Schiro notes that these stores have accelerated fashion production to offer new products almost weekly to their consumers.
Schiro’s original piece in the New York Times, calling out Zara and Express for their new “fast” fashion business model.
To the contemporary fashionista, this may not be strange – in 2024, stores are often operating on a 52-season schedule, meaning 52 drops a year, or a new batch of clothing options every week. Some retailers, like Shein or Cider, add thousands of options a day (McKinsey & Company, 2023) . In fact, global production of textiles per capita increased from about 13 pounds per year in 1975 to just under 29 pounds per year – a 220% increase (Niinimäki, 2020)! Our grandparents and their parents were certainly not used to the options we have today, so where did fast fashion come from?
The rise of mass consumption of clothes came, in part, as a result of the Civil War. While conscripting soldiers for the War, the military would take their measurements for uniforms, creating a huge database of clothing measurements, from which the first set of “standard sizes” was born (Thanhauser, 2022). Standard sizing allowed factories to produce clothing at a way faster rate – after all, tailors no longer had to measure and make each piece to order. America’s textile industry also expanded as a result of the War, producing uniforms for both sides. After the victory of the Union, these factories transitioned to clothing for men and women going into the 20th century.
The rapidly changing socioeconomic conditions in America at the turn of the century also led to the adoption of fast(er) fashion on the part of the public. Dressing in mass-produced clothing helped immigrants to “Americanize” their appearance and helped lower income people achieve a visual social status of sorts, regardless of their real standing. The slow but steady march of industrialization in people’s day-to-day working lives led to less ownership of work, less fulfillment, and more dissociation between one’s work and the actual work product. And unfulfilled people often get fulfillment from material goods! More sinister still is the dawn of the advertising industry in the 1920s, which took unarticulated thoughts about life improvement through material avenues and made them tangible. Thus, we became hungry for the next “big trend”, overworking and overspending to fill our under-fulfilled souls.
So, the demand was there, and America had her own homegrown textile industry to meet that demand. However, if you look at the tag of the pants you’re currently wearing, the odds that they were made in the USA are low. Most of our textiles and clothing are produced in low income countries, like Bangladesh or Thailand. After the Second World War, the US attempted to protect our domestic fashion industry through what was called the Multi Fiber Agreement (MFA).
The long and short of the MFA was that it limited the amount of clothing Western countries (America, Canada, and the EU) could import from lower income countries per year (MacDonald, 2006). While this helped to protect mom-and-pop clothing producers in the US to an extent, it mostly led to the expansion of the textile industry into new low income countries. After all, what do you do when you hit your import quota from China? You go over and start importing clothes from Korea. So, the MFA widened the number of countries competing for a spot in the global textile industry. But these low-income countries have a large labor advantage over the US – namely, they don’t have the labor protections that higher income countries do that increase the cost of our labor.
Naturally, clothing manufacturers want to take advantage of cheap labor to provide a cheaper end product to the consumer – and the MFA essentially limited how much cheap labor companies could use. Both this pressure from manufacturers and the creation of the World Trade Organization prompted the MFA to be phased out over a period of 10 years, ending in 2005 (World Trade Organization, n.d.). Finally, manufacturers could utilize the now-global network of textile producers and laborers, and the cost (and quality) of our clothes started to drop.
And now, here we are. The purchasing power of young Americans and Westerners in general has steadily increased for decades, the internet constantly shows us the newest & hottest trends, and our dissatisfaction with our daily lives prompts us to seek happiness in the anesthetic halls of our local malls. We buy more than ever, and get rid of it more than ever – in the US, the average person buys a new clothing item every 5.5 days; the average wear time of our garments has decreased 36% since 2005 (when the MFA ended!); and we each throw away 80 pounds of textiles per year, on average (Niinimäki, 2020, Bick et al., 2018).
As you can see, the story of fast fashion is one of psychology as much as it is one of capitalist profit-chasing. Next time, we’ll dive deeper into the psychology of fashion – particularly, the role fashion plays as a social signifier and how the advent of marketing taught us to fill the capitalist-induced hole in our lives with STUFF! Can’t wait to see you then!
Works Cited
Bick, R.; Halsey, E.; & Ekenga, C.C. (2018). The global environmental injustice of fast fashion. Environmental Health, 17(92). Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1186/s12940-018-0433-7.
MacDonald, S. (2006, February 1). The World Bids Farewell to the Multifiber Agreement. Amber Waves, US Department of Agriculture. Retrieved from https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2006/february/the-world-bids-farewell-to-the-multifiber-arrangement/.
McKinsey & Company. (2023). What is fast fashion? Retrieved from https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-explainers/what-is-fast-fashion.
Niinimäki, K.; Peters, G.; Dahlbo, H.; Perry, P.; Rissanen, T.; & Gwilt, A. (2020). The Environmental Price of Fast Fashion. Nature Reviews: Earth & Environment, 1, 189-200. Retrieved from DOI: 10.1038/s43017-020-0039-9.
Schiro, A.M. (1989, December 31). Fashion; Two New Stores That Cruise Fashion’s Fast Lane. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/31/style/fashion-two-new-stores-that-cruise-fashion-s-fast-lane.html.
Thanhauser, S. (2022, January 27). A Brief History of Mass-Manufactured Clothing. Literary Hub. Retrieved from https://lithub.com/a-brief-history-of-mass-manufactured-clothing/.
World Trade Organization. (n.d.). Textiles: Back in the Mainstream. Retrieved from https://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/whatis_e/tif_e/agrm5_e.htm.