Impacts of trends

GLOBALISATION

As fashion images in magazines, music videos, films, the Internet and television speed their way around the world, they create a “global style” (Rabine, n.d.) across all borders and cultures. This “global style” is a phenomenon that has only steadily increased as years have gone by and has vastly impacted consumers and the retail industry. Fashion is constantly moving, changing, and being reinvented and reinterpreted by designers from all over the world. According to this, there is a greater demand from consumers to gain access to the newest trends and styles in the fashion world, and with growth of globalization this has become possible. Globalization distributes the institutional features of modernity across all cultures (Tomlinson, 2003, p. 273) and has created an open market and free trade amongst countries to make fashion more readily available between one another. The global apparel market is a consumer driven industry. High-street brands collaborate with well-known global designers this way giving the idea for the retail industry to capitalize on globalization in fashion and appeal to the mass market, which cater to consumers of every age, gender, ethnicity, profession, and subculture.

FAST FASHION

’’Fast fashion is a business strategy which aims to reduce the processes involved in the buying cycle and lead times for getting new fashion product into stores, in order to satisfy consumer demand at its peak. The changing demands of fashion consumers, the need for quick reaction to emerging trends and the move away from planned forecasts has resulted in shift in the apparel buying cycle’’ (Barnes and Lea-Greenwood, 2006). Due to this, fashion retail is moving away from the planned seasonal product creating smaller collections more frequently. Fast fashion uses innovative production and distribution models to shorten fashion cycles, sometimes getting a garment from the designer to the customer in a matter of weeks instead of months. ’’The number of fashion seasons has increased from two a year – Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter – to as many as 50-100 micro-seasons’’ (Drew and Yehounme, 2017). As the world has moved into the twenty-first century, retailers like H&M and Zara have shifted the focus from competition of pricing towards fast response to changing fashion trends and consumer demand. However, a quick change of trends in fashion retail is creating an extreme demand for quick and cheap clothing which is a huge problem that continues to impact the environment causing a very serious harm to the planet. Fast fashion, being a considerably young business, is the second dirtiest industry in the world creating a demand for and then churning out massive amounts of cheap clothing, ultimately accelerating carbon emissions and global warming (Sweeny, 2015).