FAST FASHION : THE EDIT CURATED BY FREYA TOVEY
NET - A -PORTER
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CHEAP ? SOMEONE ELSE IS PAYING FOR IT SOMEWHERE ...
Have you ever wondered how our fast fashion brands such as boohoo can sell t-shirts for as cheap as £4.50? This is because someone else is paying the FULL price somewhere else. Did you know that 80% of garment workers are women? or that 60% of slave labourers in India and Bangladesh have experienced harassment, verbal abuse or physical abuse? You may be made up with your £4.50 t-shirt but there are workers across the world suffering to create these knock off garments. And if that isn’t enough, a survey of 219 fashion brands found that only 12% could demonstrate any action at all towards paying wages to garment workers, above the legal minimum. Left image: Large Boohoo long line puffer with faux fur hood trim in black, £35 Right image: Large Canada Goose chelsea parka with fur trim in black, £825
QUALITY OR QUANTITY
FAST can be defined as cheap, trendy clothing, that samples ideas from the catwalk or celebrity culture and turns them into garments in high street stores at breakneck speed... Boohoo is among those who hadn’t signed up to targets set by the Sustainable Clothing Action Plan (SCAP) to reduce their carbon, water and waste footprint.
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LARGE LONGLINE PUFFER WITH FAUX FUR HOOD TRIM IN BLACK £35
LARGE CANADA GOOSE CHELSEA PARKA WITH FUR TRIM IN BLACK £825
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THE FUTURE OF FASHION | ‘Consumers of today are going to choose for themselves, creating and designing their own wardrobes’. This is the statement from Fashion forecaster, Lidewij Edelkoort’s manifesto. In this day and age, it has become so easy for consumers to buy knock off designer garments and style these with hand me down dresses or with trainers that Instagram bloggers deem trendy. This essentially means the consumer has no need to follow designer catwalk trends due to the online/social media easy accessibility of such a wide range of design options and cheap clothes/styles. Consumers have free reign and are arguably influenced to go ahead and express themselves by building their own wardrobes and no longer having to follow the trends set by our leading designers. Fast fashion seems to play a big role in the up and coming trend of anti-fashion with youth consumers buying their clothes from cheap online brands such as prettylittlething. com or boohoo. com. This allows consumers of anti-fashion to afford knock-off Burberry clothes at the price of high street fashion to complete their free style look. Individuals such as @Avanope encourage this surge of fast-fashion as she draws inspiration from fake high-end pieces and replicates them. Fashion bloggers are one of the newest players in the fashion industry, thriving off social media platforms such as Instagram and twitter. According to a bazaarvoice’s study, millennial consumers seem to be progressively less interested in the ‘proper’ fashion blogs – understood as individual websites that “report extensive brand and product experiences including self-fashioning through outfits, PAGE 130
information sharing and tips about fashion”. It is said that consumers favour fashion bootleggers over designer fashion blogs due to the publics need for real life (peer), honest and reliable opinions on products before they purchase products online. These become easily available sources of fashion as a result of the accessibility of online platforms such as Instagram. The journal of fashion marketing and management used this information and carried out a quantitative study to investigate the fashion blogs’ influence on Spanish Millennials’ buying behaviour. The results of their study showed that millennials have the most trust in fashion bloggers who continually update their blogs, make good suggestions of products and have a unique style. Fashion bloggers are paid by fast fashion brands to advertise their products, giving you daily updates on their Boohoo outfits and even more discount on their already cheap products by typing in their ‘promo codes’ at the checkout. Fast fashion brands make their brands to look glamorous but Fast Fashion isn’t the future , in fact it is killing fashion’s future with the tons of waste it is producing every year. So how does this not raise the question of why are fashion bloggers encouraging these brands to thrive and for what cost? Big brands are starting to take notice: Nike, H&M, Burberry, and Gap have all recently signed up to the Make Fashion Circular initiative. It aims to improve the industry’s record on sustainability and reduce global waste from fashion by recycling raw materials and products. Fast Fashion brands need to follow this movement instead of producing cheaper versions of products made by our big brands.
BURBERRY OR BOOHOO
BURBERRY NICO BAG, ONE SIZE, BLACK, £379.99
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