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One day last summer, the sailboat American Promise set off from a dock near the Brooklyn Bridge in search of unusual prey in the Hudson River: tiny pieces of plastic, much thinner than a strand of hair.

These microfibers are shed by every garment that is made with synthetic materials and has been put through a washing machine. When the water is expelled from the machine, it goes into wastewater systems and eventually into rivers and oceans, where it has become a major source of concern to environmentalists and marine-life researchers.

"I surveyed thousands and thousands of kilometers of ocean. We found microfibers in nearly 90 percent of the samples, and in every sample we found fibers, they were the majority of particles we identified," said Amy Lusher, a British-based microplastics researcher and a co-author of a 2014 study of microplastic pollution in the Northeast Atlantic Ocean.

[Photos: The plastic-laden stomachs of Midway Island's albatrosses]

Microfibers are part of the larger problem of microplastic pollution, which has gained attention in recent years as tiny pieces of plastic - usually defined as smaller than five millimeters, or about the size of a single piece of short-grain rice - accumulate in surface waters around the globe. Microplastics generally refer to small fragments of plastic that result from the microbeads used in such items as cosmetics and toothpaste - the latter burnish teeth to make them whiter - and from the breakdown of bags, bottles and other plastics that make their way into our waterways.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a giant, soupy collection of marine debris, is the most famous manifestation of the problem, but tiny plastics are turning up just about everywhere scientists look, including the Great Lakes and Antarctica.

Looking at the food chain

What the enormous stream of microfibers means for the health of the world's waterways - and for the marine animals living in them - remains unclear. The limited research on the topic suggests that marine organisms - with smaller animals being the most vulnerable - are ingesting the fibers, which leads them to eat less food, potentially harming their growth prospects and survival rates.

"If you've got plastics in your stomach and you can't get rid of them, you eat less," said Andrew Watts, a scientist at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, who published a study last year suggesting that microfibers reduce the growth - and possibly the survival - of crabs essentially by interfering with their consumption of real food. "We saw that in the worms, crabs; we've seen it in the langoustines study as well."

[As the climate changes, risks to human health will accelerate, White House warns]

Watts said it's possible that the fibers also pick up and transport chemicals with them, and once animals eat the fibers, they are vulnerable to the effects of any chemicals they've also ingested.

Researchers are still trying to determine whether these effects climb up the food chain and reach humans who eat seafood. They also want to know what plastic fibers mean for drinking water and larger marine animals.

"As a research community, we're still in the really early stages of figuring out what the effects of microplastics are on organisms in the environment," Watts said.

Only in recent years have researchers realized that synthetic clothing - including yoga pants, fleece jackets and some dress suits - was also a major contributor to the microplastics problem. A 2011 study looking at the composition of microplastics found on shorelines around the world first raised the alarm, saying that microfibers dominated the plastic debris they found and seemed to be coming from clothing being washed.

In response, Patagonia, which produces hugely popular fleece and other outerwear using synthetics, commissioned another study to better understand the problem.

"We were faced with this issue, and we wanted to try to understand from scientists what exactly our contribution was to the problem," said Jill Dumain, director of environmental strategy at Patagonia.

The research, published in June, found that a single synthetic fleece jacket released as much as 250,000 microfibers, or 2.7 grams - about the weight of a Ping-Pong ball - when washed in a machine. The study also found that top-loading washing machines cause more shedding than front-loaders, that older garments shed more than new ones and that higher-quality garments shed less than lower-quality ones.

A more recent study found that acrylic garments in particular may release more than 700,000 microfibers each.

What drives these variations is still unclear and is part of what Patagonia plans to continue studying. In the meantime, the company is looking for solutions that could mitigate the problem, including product redesign to reduce fabric degradation and discussions with the appliance industry to incorporate some kind of apparatus into laundry equipment - possibly like the lint catchers that are built into dryers - that would keep fibers from being discharged into wastewater. "We're open to any and all solutions to this problem," Dumain said.

[Can the 'largest cleanup in history' save the ocean?]

"A plastic world"

The American Promise's Hudson River trip was part of an effort by the nonprofit Rozalia Project to see how pervasive microfibers have become in U.S. waterways.

The researchers were collecting water samples every three miles along the river to document the types and concentrations of microfibers. They were hoping as well to figure out how the fibers might be entering and moving along the river - looking to see whether there were concentrations, for example, near population clusters or near wastewater treatment plants.

Abby Barrows, a microplastics researcher for the nonprofit Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation who is analyzing the American Promise water samples, said microfibers were turning up in most of the samples she'd processed so far.

She's not surprised: "We live in a plastic world."

Josh Kogan said the Hudson River effort, like other citizen scientist projects, is collecting data that may help fill in some research gaps - and thinks it may also help the public see a connection between human activities and this type of pollution. "It helps to tell the larger story about plastics in our surface waters, how they get there and how citizens are directly involved in this particular issue," said Kogan, the Trash Free Waters program coordinator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Region 2, which includes New York, New Jersey and Puerto Rico. "No matter what you wash, you are going to discharge fibers."

[More than half the world's sea turtles have eaten plastic, new study claims]

The Rozalia Project is working to develop a "microfiber catcher" that consumers will be able to throw into their washing machines, trapping the fibers inside the appliance rather than sending them out to sea in wastewater, said Rachael Miller, a co-founder of the group.

"We see [microfibers, unlike microplastics from soda bottles, bags, cosmetics and the like] as something that can't be regulated away," Miller said. "Synthetic fibers have allowed us to love winter and skiing."

As the sailboat sets out from Brooklyn, Miller holds up a prototype of the catcher. It looks like a hollowed-out version of the dryer ball designed to keep clothes wrinkle-free, but with little plastic teeth running across the middle. She said preliminary testing of an early design showed that it reduces the microfibers discharged from each laundry load by about 30 percent, but there's still a lot of product refining and testing to do. Miller hopes to have the ball available by spring.

Unfortunately, Barrows said, the microfiber catcher is not going to completely solve the problem, even if it does help somewhat.

"Working in this field of research, it can be really depressing," she said. "I open up a box of water - it's from some beautiful place in Palau, and it's just full of plastics. Or it's from Antarctica, and I think there's definitely not going to be anything in here. And it's just full of fragments. I haven't seen a sample that doesn't contain an alarming amount of plastic."

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Are synthetic fleece and other types of clothing harming our water?

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One day last summer, the sailboat American Promise set off from a dock near the Brooklyn Bridge in search of unusual prey in the Hudson River: tiny pieces of plastic, much thinner than a strand of hair. These microfibers are shed by every garment that is made with synthetic materials and has been put through a washing machine.

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The idea of pumping out trends, and widely distributing cheap and affordable looks

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In the clothing industry, fast fashion is the business model of replicating recent catwalk trends and high-fashion designs, mass-producing them at a low cost, and bringing them to retail stores quickly, while demand is at its highest. The term fast fashion is also used generically to describe the products of the fast fashion business model.

Fast fashion grew during the late 20th century as manufacturing of clothing became less expensive - the result of more efficient supply chains and new quick response manufacturing methods and greater reliance on low-cost labor from the apparel manufacturing industries of South, Southeast, and East Asia, where women make up 85-90% of the garment workforce. Labor practices of fast fashion are often exploitative, and due to the gender concentration of the garment industry, women are more vulnerable. Retailers who employ the fast fashion strategy include Primark, H&M, Shein, and Zara, all of which have become large multinationals by driving high turnover of inexpensive seasonal and trendy clothing that appeals to fashion-conscious consumers.

The global fashion industry is responsible for ~8-10% of global carbon emissions per year, to which fast fashion is a large contributor. The low cost of production favoring synthetic materials, chemicals, and minimal pollution abatement measures have led to excess waste.

Before the 1800s, fashion was a laborious, time-consuming process that required sourcing materials like wool, cotton, or leather, treating and preparing the materials by hand, then weaving or fashioning them into functional garments, also by hand. However, the Industrial Revolution forever changed the world of fashion by introducing new technology like the sewing machine and textile machines, which led to ready-made clothes and mass production factories.

As a result, clothes became cheaper to make and buy, and easier and quicker to make. Meanwhile, localized dressmaking businesses emerged, catering to the middle classes, and employing workroom employees along with garment workers, who worked from home for meager wages. These dress shops were early prototypes of the so-called 'sweatshops' that would become the foundation for twenty-first century clothing production. During World War II, the trend of more functional styles and fabric restrictions led to the standardized production of clothes. Once middle-class consumers grew accustomed to it, they became increasingly receptive to the idea of mass-produced clothing.

The fashion industry produced and ran clothes for four seasons a year until the mid-twentieth century, with designers working many months in advance to predict what the customers would want. In the 1960s and 1970s, this method changed drastically as the younger generations started to create new trends. There was still a clear distinction between high-end and high street fashion. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, fast fashion became a booming industry in America with people enthusiastically partaking in consumerism. Fast fashion retailers such as Zara, H&M, Topshop, and Primark took over high street fashion. Initially starting as small stores located in Europe, they were able to infiltrate and gain prominence in the American market by examining and replicating the looks and design elements from runway shows and top fashion houses and quickly reproducing them, but at a fraction of the cost.

When it comes to the question of who was the pioneer of the "fast fashion" phenomenon, it is difficult to pinpoint one particular brand or company. Nevertheless, there is some evidence that suggests the popular fashion brands that helped start the phenomenon. Amancio Ortega, founder of Zara, founded his clothing company in 1963 in Galicia and it featured products that were affordable replications of popular higher-end clothing fashions in addition to producing its own unique designs. Later on, in 1975, Ortega opened the first retail outlet in Europe in order to sell his collections in the short run and also to integrate production and distribution in the long run. He eventually was able to move to New York in the early 1990s where the New York Times first coined the term "fast fashion" to describe the mission of his store, which said that "it would only take 15 days for a garment to go from a designer's brain to being sold on the racks".

In the 2008 article "Fast Fashion Lessons" Donald Sull and Stefano Turconi studied how Zara pioneered an approach to navigate the volatile world of the fast fashion industry. According to Sull and Turconi, one of the reasons for Zara's success was that it built a supply chain and production network where they maintained complicated and capital-intensive operations (like computer-guided fabric cutting) in-house, while it outsourced labour-intensive operations (like garment sewing) to a network of local subcontractors and seamstress operatives based in Galicia, Spain.

Thus, with shorter lead times the company was able to respond very quickly when the sale of their products exceeded their expectations and also cut off production for items that didn't have very high demands. They create a sense of urgency for consumers to purchase clothing because they are constantly changing their layout and stock, so it may not be in store the next time they visit. The clothing is then only worn a few times before it is no longer in style. This creates the need to constantly be buying new items at a cheap cost. Unlike many fashion companies, Zara hardly invests in television or press promotional campaigns and instead relies on store windows to convey the brand image, the spread of word-of-mouth and locating their shops strategically in areas with high consumer traffic.

The origin story of H&M shares common threads with Zara; technically it is the world's longest-running retailer. In 1946, Erling Persson, a Swedish entrepreneur, traveled to New York City, USA, where he was greatly intrigued and impressed by the high-volume fashion production he witnessed. The following year, Persson established a women's wear store called Hennes & Mauritz (or H&M) in Västerås, Sweden. Between 1960 and 1979, the company rapidly expanded, with 42 stores across Europe, and began producing clothing not just for women, but men and children as well.

The foundation for expansion into the global market was laid in the 1980s when H&M acquired Rowells, a Swedish mail order company, and used its networks to sell fast fashion by catalogue and mail order. In the 1990s, H&M invested in large city billboard advertising, featuring famous celebrities and supermodels. H&M opened its flagship USA store on Fifth Avenue in New York City in 2000, marking the commencement of its expansion outside of Europe.

Zaw Thiha Tun, a Vancouver, CA-based investment advisor, examined the secret of H&M's success as a company and notes that the business model of H&M is unlike other fast fashion companies, such as Zara, as H&M does not manufacture any products in-house. Rather, they outsource production to more than 900 independent suppliers mainly located in Europe and Asia, which are in turn managed by 30 strategically-located oversight offices. They also depend on state-of-the-art IT infrastructure and networks to connect the central national office and the production offices. This method has been crucial to H&M's success: they don't have the overhead from owning factories, or need to secure fabrics in advance, and they have been able to reduce their lead times through continuous developments in the buying process.

Fast fashion brands produce pieces to get the newest style on the market as soon as possible. They emphasize optimizing certain aspects of the supply chain for the trends to be designed and manufactured quickly and inexpensively and allow the mainstream consumer to buy current clothing styles at a lower price. This philosophy of quick manufacturing at an affordable price is used in large retailers such as SHEIN, H&M, Zara, C&A, Peacocks, Primark, ASOS, Forever 21, and Uniqlo.

These retailers produce and sell products in small batches, keep surplus manufacturing capacity on hand, and frequently induce items to be out of stock. This is designed to give retailers the ability to make substantial and immediate adjustments to manufacturing. For example, up to 85% of Zara's merchandise can be changed in the middle of the season. This is because a fast fashion system like Zara's can quickly update designs, resulting in short product cycles where a garment does not sit on the stores shelf for long periods of time, giving the store a sense of exclusivity and raising the attractiveness of an item.

It particularly came to the fore during the vogue for " boho chic" in the mid-2000s. According to the UK Environmental Audit Committee's report "Fixing Fashion," fast fashion "involves increased numbers of new fashion collections every year, quick turnarounds and often lower prices. Reacting rapidly to offer new products to meet consumer demand is crucial to this business model."

Fast fashion has developed from a product-driven concept based on a manufacturing model referred to as " quick response" developed in the U.S. in the 1980s and moved to a market-based model of "fast fashion" in the late 1990s and first part of the 21st century. The Zara brand name has become almost synonymous with the term, but other retailers worked with the concept before the label was applied, such as Benetton. Fast fashion has also become associated with disposable fashion because it has delivered designer product to a mass market at relatively low prices.

The advancement of technology has allowed fast fashion to gain popularity over the last decade. Technology has allowed designers to create specifically what their consumers want according to what is "in" at the given moment. Every month there are new things trending and new things being displayed in stores to market towards the youth. Technology has the power to change all the issues within the fast fashion industry. Brands such as Zara have been listening to its consumers and thinking green to improve their environmental impact. As Nina Davis states, "[Companies] are also adopting advanced technologies to improve supply chain efficiency and reduce their carbon footprint."

The slow fashion or conscious fashion movement has risen in opposition to fast fashion, naming responsibility for pollution (both in the production of clothes and in the decay of synthetic fabrics), poor workmanship, and emphasizing very brief trends over classic style. Elizabeth L. Cline's 2012 book Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion was one of the first investigations into the human and environmental toll of fast fashion. Fast fashion has also come under criticism for contributing to poor working conditions in developing countries. The 2013 Dhaka garment factory collapse in Bangladesh, the deadliest garment-related accident in world history, brought more attention to the safety impact of the fast fashion industry.

In the rise of slow fashion, emphasis has been given to quality, considerate clothing. In recent Spring/Summer Fashion Show 2020, high end designers are leading the movement of slow fashion by creating pieces that develop environmental friendly practices in the industry. Stella McCartney is one luxury designer who focuses on sustainable and ethical practices, and has done so since the nineties. British Vogue explains that the process of designing and creating clothing in slow fashion involves consciousness of materials, consumers demand, and the climate impact.

In her 2016 article titled "Doing Good and Looking Good: Women in 'Fast Fashion' Activism", Rimi Khan criticizes the slow fashion movement, particularly the work of high-profile designers and slow fashion advocates Stella McCartney and Vivienne Westwood, as well as other well known industry professionals such as Livia Firth, for creating slow fashion products which cater to a mostly western, wealthy, and female demographic. Khan points out that because most slow fashion products are significantly more expensive than fast fashion items, consumers are required to have a certain amount of disposable income in order to participate in the movement.

Khan argues that by proposing a solution to fast-fashion that is largely inaccessible to many consumers, they are positioning wealthier women as "agents of change" in the movement against fast fashion, whereas the shopping habits of lower income women and people of other genders are often considered "problematic". Andrea Chang provides a similar critique of the slow fashion movement in her article "The Impact of Fast Fashion on Women". Chang argues that the slow fashion and ethical fashion movements place too much responsibility on the consumers of fast fashion clothing, most of whom are women, to influence the industry through their consumption.

Chang suggests that because most consumers are limited in their ability to choose where and how they purchase clothing, largely due to financial factors, anti-fast fashion activists should target lawmakers, manufacturers, and investors with a stake in the fast fashion industry rather than create an alternative industry that is only accessible to some.

Fast fashion has an ongoing trend of being successful economically within the retail industry worldwide. The fast-fashion market in 2020 globally produced $25.1 billion. It was expected to increase at an annual compound growth rate ( CAGR) of 21.9%, resulting in the global market increase to $31 billion in 2021. By 2030, the fast fashion industry will bring a revenue of $192 billion to the world's global economy.

This economic growth from fast fashion is demonstrated through how the fast fashion industries like H&M or Shein strategize in manufacturing. Most fast fashion clothes exporters are from developing countries across Asia, such as India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, China, Indonesia, Cambodia, etc. Developing countries' economy relies on fast fashion consumption as most of their export earnings profit from ready-made clothes. China, for example, has gained a yearly profit of $158.4 billion from exporting ready-made clothes. Additionally, the hazardous working circumstances that these employees endure have an adverse effect on their health, increasing the risk of illness and accidents among their coworkers and having a negative effect on the labor force around the world.

The economic decision for the fast fashion industry to thrive is by producing high revenue through low production costs within their manufacturers in Asia. One low production cost in the fast fashion retail is the investment cost of materials to make a garment. Fast fashion invests in polyester and cotton fabric because they are inexpensive and durable materials. In 2020, polyester's global price per metric ton was $725 (or 32.9 cents per pound), and the global price for cotton in 2021 was 126 cents per pound.

According to these statistics, polyester fabric is more affordable than cotton, but both are relativity cheaper than higher quality fabric such as silk or wool. One basic T-shirt would require .5 Ibs of cotton material, resulting in less than $1 of cotton fabric used. Inexpensive materials allow the fast fashion industry to produce a high volume of affordable clothes at a low production cost. Therefore, retailers profit from selling high volumes of affordable designer clothes by its increased markup price from the material cost.

The fast fashion industry faces criticism for hiring garments workers from developing countries for their low wages. There are more than 60 million workers that produce garments for the fast fashion retail, and 80% of those workers are women. MVO Netherlands researched in 2019 that workers' monthly wages in Ethiopia that manufacture for H&M, Gap, and JCPenney begins at $32, while an experienced worker is $122 a month. In other words, the lowest hourly wage for workers in developing countries is less than .50 cents.[clarification needed ] In developed countries like the United States, the average garment worker in Los Angeles, reported by the Garment Worker Center (GWC), is about $5.15 per hour despite the federal minimum wage being $7.25 per hour in 2016.

Hence, their monthly income would be about $858 (if they worked 40 hours a week), which is a much higher salary than in developing countries but still lower than the United States standard of living in income conditions. To reach the target goal of consumer demands from the U.S. and Europe, garment laborers in developing countries, on average, are expected to work 11 hours a day. Thus fast fashion retailers face economic criticism for paying garment laborers from developing and developed countries unlivable wages while imposing long work hours to meet consumer demands.

Fashion is updated frequently to meet peoples demand of aestheticism wearing the newest and latest clothing style and it is done in a mannerly fast process. This efficiency is achieved through the retailers' understanding of the target market's wants, which is a high fashion-looking garment at a price at the lower end of the clothing sector. One of the largest causes of the high demand for fashion is the short trend cycles. The more an audience is exposed to new trends, the higher the demand grows. Primarily, the concept of category management has been used to align the retail buyer and the manufacturer in a more collaborative relationship.

Quick Response (QR) was developed to improve manufacturing processes in the textile industry with the aim of removing time from the production system. The U.S. Apparel Manufacturing Association initiated the project in the early 1980s to address a competitive threat to its own textile manufactures from imported textiles in low labor cost countries. During the project lead times in the manufacturing process were halved; the U.S. industry became more competitive for a time, and imports were lowered as a result. The QR initiative was viewed by many as a protection mechanism for the American textile industry with the aim of improving manufacturing efficiencies.

The concept of quick response (QR) is now used to support "fast fashion," creating new, fresh products while also drawing consumers back to the retail experience for consecutive visits. Quick response also makes it possible for new technologies to increase production and efficiency, typified by the introduction of the complementary concept of Fast Fit. The Spanish mega chain Zara, owned by Inditex, has become the global model for how to decrease the time between design and production. This production short cut enables Zara to manufacture over 30,000 units of product every year to nearly 1,600 stores in 58 countries.

New items are delivered twice a week to the stores, reducing the time between initial sale and replenishment. As a result, the shortened time period improves consumer's garment choices and product availability while significantly increasing the number of per customer visits per annum. In the case of Renner, a Brazilian chain, a new mini-collection is released every two months.

Fast Fashion typically offers buyers quick shipping, meaning their delivery can be same day or only take a few days.Due to the trends constantly evolving, buyers need to have their item before it is no longer in style. Oftentimes, these Fast Fashion brands will offer the buyer deals, where they can spend a certain amount of money to get free shipping.This creates a lot of impulse buying, resulting in the items being returned. However, Fast Fashion returns do not always get sold again. It is likely that the company will throw the item out because it is no longer in style.

Marketing is the key driver of fast fashion. Marketing creates the desire for consumption of new designs as close as possible to the point of creation. Marketing closes the gap between creation and consumption by promoting this as something fast, low priced, and disposable. The continuous release of new products essentially makes the garments a highly cost effective marketing tool that drives consumer visits, increases brand awareness, and results in higher rates of consumer purchases. Fast fashion companies have also enjoyed higher profit margins in that their markdown percentage is only 15% compared to competitors' 30% plus. The fast fashion business model is based on reducing the time cycles from production to consumption such that consumers engage in more cycles in any time period. Not only is fast fashion based on reducing cycles but it is also based on trends that change throughout the seasons to stimulate sales. For example, the traditional fashion seasons followed the annual cycle of summer, autumn, winter and spring, but in fast fashion cycles have compressed into shorter periods of 4-6 weeks and in some cases less than this. Marketers have thus created more buying seasons in the same time-space.

Two approaches are currently being used by companies as market strategies; the difference is the amount of financial capital spent on advertisements. While some companies invest in advertising, fast fashion mega firm Primark operates with no advertising. Primark instead invests in store layout, shop-fit and visual merchandising to create an instant hook. The instant hook creates an enjoyable shopping experience, resulting in the continuous return of customers. Research shows that 75 percent of consumers' decisions are made in front of the fixture within three seconds. The alternative spending of Primark also "allows the retailer to pass the benefits of a cost saving back to the consumer and maintain the company's price structure of producing garments at a lower cost".

In recent years, fast fashion retailers have taken on a new approach to reach their consumers. Initially, social media's sole purpose was to act as a platform that allowed people to connect with other users around the world. However, people started to realize that there is more to social media than just sharing pictures with your family and friends. Social media has become a way for retailers to promote their products and impact consumer behavior. Now, consumers are able to look at products and businesses on social media before heading to a store or going online to make a purchase. Additionally, consumers can read real customer reviews on different social media accounts in order to get a better idea of the quality of the products as well as how the customer service is. Once people started to pick up on the marketing potential that social media has, fast fashion retailers were quick to jump on the trend. Fast fashion retailers like Boohoo.com realized that social media advertisements could be a great way to reach their target audience, young girls. These users were swarmed with fast fashion advertisements each time they opened up Instagram. Companies like Boohoo hoped that the constant exposure to their products would influence users to not only visit their website, but also to buy clothing from them.

Instead of just posting pre-made ads on their accounts, fast fashion retailers realized that an effective way to advertise their clothing could be to join forces with social media influencers. Social media influencers can be defined as "regular" individuals who have accrued a large number of followers across multiple social media platforms as a result of the content they post. For the most part, social media influencers focus their content on one subject area, like food or fashion. Social media influencers have become their own kind of " internet celebrities" and their followers value and trust their opinions. As a result, when social media influencers post content wearing an outfit from Shein, their followers may feel compelled to purchase clothing from that retailer as well. Studies have shown that there is a correlation between following social media influencers and shopping more frequently. Even though some fast fashion retailers still have "celebrity ambassadors", many retailers have turned to social media influencers to promote their clothing.

The world saw a surge in these social media marketing practices after the coronavirus pandemic hit. Fast fashion retailer Shein quickly took center stage across numerous social media platforms. Social media users, specifically young women, could not go online without seeing something from this fast fashion website. "Shein hauls" became one of the most popular trends on TikTok, with 4.7 billion #sheinhaul views as of March 2022. Haul videos consist of individuals recording themselves showing items they purchased (typically a large quantity) and posting the video on platforms like YouTube or TikTok. In the midst of a global pandemic, these billions of views allowed Shein to bring in about $10 billion in revenue in 2020.

"Supermarket" market

The consumer in the fast fashion market thrives on constant change and the frequent availability of new products. Fast fashion is considered to be a " supermarket" segment within the larger sense of the fashion market. This term refers to fast fashion's nature to "race to make apparel an even smarter and quicker cash generator". Three crucial differentiating model factors exist within fast fashion consumption: market timing, cost, and the buying cycle. Timing's objective is to create the shortest production time possible. The quick turnover has increased the demand for the number of seasons presented in the stores. This demand also increases shipping and restocking time periods. Cost is still the consumer's primary buying decision. Costs are largely reduced by taking advantage of lower prices in markets in developing countries. In 2004 developing countries accounted for nearly seventy five percent of all clothing exports and the removal of several import quotas has allowed companies to take advantage of the even lower cost of resources. The buying cycle is the final factor that affects the consumer. Traditionally, fashion buying cycles are based around long term forecasts that occur one year to six months before the season.

Supply chain, vendor relationships and internal relationships

Supply chains are central to the creation of fast fashion. Supply chain systems are designed to add value and reduce cost in the process of moving goods from design concept to retail stores and finally through to consumption. Efficient supply chains are critical to delivering the retail customer promise of fast fashion. The selection of a merchandising vendor is a key part in the process. Inefficiency primarily occurs when suppliers can't respond quickly enough, and clothing ends up bottlenecked and in back stock. Two kinds of supply chains exist, agile and lean. In an agile supply chain the principal characteristics include the sharing of information and technology. The collaboration results in the reduction in the amount of stock in megastores. A lean supply chain is characterized as the correct appropriation of the commodity for the product.

The companies in the fast fashion market also utilize a range of relationships with the suppliers. The product is first classified as "core" or "fashion".

Productive internal relationships within the fast fashion companies are as important as the company's relationships with external suppliers, especially when it comes to the company's buyers. Traditionally with a "supermarket" market the buying is divided into multi-functional departments. The buying team uses the bottom-up approach when trend information is involved, meaning the information is only shared with the company's fifteen top suppliers. On the other hand, information about future aims, and strategies of production are shared downward within the buyer hierarchy so the team can consider lower cost production options.

According to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, the fast fashion system provides opportunities for economic growth but the entire fashion industry hinders sustainability efforts by contributing to 20% of wastewater. In addition, fast fashion is responsible for nearly 10 percent of global gas emissions. Providing insight, the Ellen Macarthur Foundation released study results on fashion and suggests a new circular system. A singular t-shirt requires over 2,000 liters of water to make. Clothing is not utilized to its full potential, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation explains that linear systems are contributing to unsustainable behavior and the future of fashion may need to transition towards a circular system of production and consumer behavior.[citation needed ]

Journalist Elizabeth L. Cline, author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion and one of the earliest critics of fast fashion, notes in her article Where Does Discarded Clothing Go? that Americans are purchasing five times the amount of clothing than they did in 1980. Due to this rise in consumption, developed countries are producing more and more garments each season. The United States imports more than 1 billion garments annually from China alone. United Kingdom textile consumption surged by 37% from 2001 to 2005. The Global Fashion Business Journal reported that in 2018, the global fiber production has reached the highest all-time, 107 million metric tons.

The average American household produces 70 pounds (32 kg) of textile waste every year. The residents of New York City discard around 193,000 tons of clothing and textiles, which equates to 6% of all the city's garbage. In comparison, the European Union generates a total of 5.8 million tons of textiles each year. As a whole, the textile industry occupies roughly 5% of all landfill space. This means that the clothing industry produces about 92 million tons of textile waste annually, much of which is burned or goes into a landfill and less than 1% of used clothing is recycled into new garments. The clothing that is discarded into landfills is often made from non-biodegradable synthetic materials.

Greenhouse gases and various pesticides and dyes are released into the environment by fashion-related operations. The United Nations estimated that the business of what we wear, including its long supply chains, is responsible for 10 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions heating our planet. The growing demand for quick fashion continuously adds effluent release from the textile factories, containing both dyes and caustic solutions. In comparison, greenhouse gas emissions from textile production companies is more than international flights and maritime shipping combined annually. The materials used not only affect the environment in textile product, but also the workers and the people who wear the clothes. The hazardous substances affect all aspects of life and release into the environments around them. Optoro estimates that 5 billion pounds of waste is generated through returns each year, contributing 15 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Fast fashion production has doubled since 2000, with brands such as Zara producing 24 collections a year and H&M producing about 12 to 16 collections a year.

Due to the amount of pollution and waste caused by the fashion industry, for-profit groups, like Viletex, and retailers, such as H&M, are working to decrease the industry's environmental footprint and adopt sustainable technologies. Both companies have created programs that encourage recycling from the general public. These programs provide consumers with bins that allow them to dispose of their unwanted garments that will ultimately be transformed into insulation and carpet padding, as well as being used to produce other garments.

Advances in technologies have offered new methods of using dyes, producing fibers, and reducing the use of natural resources. To decrease the consumption of traditional textiles, Anke Domaske has produced "QMilch," an eco-milk fiber; Virus has produced high-tech sportswear from recycled coffee beans; and Suzanne Lee has created vegetable leather from fermented tea. Many companies have also created various ways to reduce the amount of dyes emitted into the world's waterways as well as the level of water consumption. For example, AirDye saves between 7 and 75 gallons of water per pound of textiles produced while digital printing reduces water usage by 95 percent.

Other retailers, like Patagonia, encourage their customers to mend their clothes as they wear over time instead of disposing of the garments when they become worn out.

Design strategies & techniques

According to FutureLearn,[better source needed ] the following design strategies and techniques can be applied to make fast fashion more sustainable:

Zero Waste Pattern Cutting: This technique eliminates potential textile waste right at the design stage, where the pattern pieces are strategically laid like a jigsaw puzzle onto a precisely measured piece of fabric.

Minimal Seam Construction: This technique allows faster manufacturing time by lessening the number of seams that are necessary to stitch a garment.

Design for Disassembly (DfD): The main intention of this strategy involves designing a product in such a way that it can be easily taken apart at the end of its lifespan and this allows the use of fewer materials.

Craft preservation: This technique combines and incorporates ancestral craft techniques into modern designs and in a way it ensures preservation of traditional craftsmanship through innovation.

Transformational/Multifunctional: This strategy can be used to design products or garments that could be worn in numerous ways and can even have elements that are reversible. The best real-life example is the Carry on Closet fashion line created and developed by Antithesis.[better source needed ]

Pull Factor Framework: Brands such as L.L Bean and Harvey Nichols implemented a "Pull Factor Framework" which is a new methodology that strives to make sustainable innovation more enticing for consumers and producers alike.[better source needed ]

Fast fashion brands like ASOS.com, Levi's, Macy's, North Face have turned to sizing technology that use algorithms to solve sizing issues, and give accurate size recommendations on their website to reduce environmental impact on returns. H&M's design team is implementing 3D design, 3D sampling and 3D prototyping to help cut waste, while artificial intelligence can be used to produce small garment runs for specific stores.

Companies are helping support the circular system in fashion production and consumer behavior by renting out clothes to customers with recycled or reuse items. New York & Company Closet and American Eagle Style Drop are examples of rental services that can be offered to customers when subscribed to the program. Tulerie, a smartphone application offers borrowing, renting, or sharing of clothes in local communities across the globe; users have the opportunity to profit by renting clothes as well.

In contrast to modern overconsumption, fast fashion traces its roots to World War II austerity, where high design was merged with utilitarian materials. The business model of fast fashion is based on consumers' desire for new clothing to wear. In order to fulfill consumers' demand, fast fashion brands provide affordable prices and a wide range of clothing that reflects the latest trends. This ends up persuading consumers to buy more items which leads to the issue of overconsumption. Dana Thomas, author of Fashionopolis, stated that Americans spent 340 billion dollars on clothing in 2012, the same year of the Rana Plaza collapse.

Planned obsolescence plays a key role in overconsumption. Based on the study of planned obsolescence in The Economist, fashion is deeply committed to planned obsolescence. Last year's skirts; for example, are designed to be replaced by this year's new models. In this case, fashion goods are purchased even when the old ones are still wearable. The quick response model and new supply chain practices of fast fashion even accelerate the speed of it. In recent years, the fashion cycle has steadily decreased as fast fashion retailers sell clothing that is expected to be disposed of after being worn only a few times.

A 2014 article about fast fashion in Huffington Post pointed out that in order to make the fast moving trend affordable, fast-fashion merchandise is typically priced much lower than the competition, operating on a business model of low quality and high volume. Low quality goods make overconsumption more severe since those products have a shorter life span and would need to be replaced much more often. Furthermore, as both industry and consumers continue to embrace fast fashion, the volume of goods to be disposed of or recycled has increased substantially. However, most fast-fashion goods do not have the inherent quality to be considered as collectables for vintage or historic collections.

The fashion industry is known as the most labor dependent industry, as one in every six people works in acquiring raw materials and manufacturing clothing. There is an increasing concern for sweastshops as more fast fashion stores are lowering their prices and trends are fluctuating more frequently. Brands and store companies that use sweatshops are GAP, H&M, Zara, Abercrombie and Fitch and plenty of others.[citation needed ]

In particular H&M faced controversial issues and backlash regarding their sweatshops in Asian countries. H&M is the largest producer of clothing in under-developed South Asian and Southeast Asian countries such as India, Bangladesh and Cambodia. 500 employees in Indonesia left their work and protested for higher pay that was below the minimum wage for their country. Once a strike evolved, the factory removed their access to the building and paid men to harass the workers.[citation needed ]

Nike has received backlash over its use of sweatshops. Bangladesh - a country known for its cheap labor, is home to four million garment production workers in over 5000 factories, out of which 85% are women. Many of these factories do not have proper working conditions for essential workers. In 2013 a group of garment workers protested in Bangladesh for the poor quality of the building. A horrific tragedy took place in Rana Plaza factory, the building collapsed and killed over 1,000 workers. Not only did these workers have a badly manufactured building, were overworked,Bangladesh is considered to have the lowest minimum wage from all the countries that export apparel.

The International Labour Organization defines export processing zones as "industrial zones with special incentives set up to attract foreign investors, in which imported materials undergo some degree of processing before being re-exported". These zones have been used by developing countries to bolster foreign investment, and produce consumer goods that are labour-intensive, like clothing. Many export processing zones have been criticized for their substandard working conditions, low wages, and suspension of international and domestic labour laws. Women account for 70-90% of the working population in some export processing zones, such as in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and the Philippines. Despite their overrepresentation in export processing zone informal sector ( informal economy) employment, women are still likely to earn less than men. Mainly, this discrepancy is due to employer's preferring to hire men in technical and managerial positions and women in lower-skilled production work. Moreover, employers tend to prefer hiring women for production jobs because they are seen as more compliant and less likely to join labour unions. In addition, a report that interviewed Sri Lankan women working in export processing zones found that gender-based violence "emerged as a dominant theme in their narratives". For example, 38% of women reported seeing or experiencing sexual harassment within their workplace. However, proponents of textile and garment production as a means for economic upgrading in developing countries ( global value chain) have pointed out that clothing production work tends to have higher wages than other available jobs, such as agriculture or domestic service work, and therefore provides women with a larger degree of financial autonomy.

As of 2007, Forever 21, one of the larger fast fashion retailers, was involved in several lawsuits over alleged violations of intellectual property rights. The lawsuits contended that certain pieces of merchandise at the retailer can effectively be considered infringements of designs from Diane von Furstenberg, Anna Sui and Gwen Stefani's Harajuku Lovers line as well as many other well-known designers. Forever 21 has not commented on the state of the litigation but initially said it was "taking steps to organize itself to prevent intellectual property violations".

H.R. 5055, or Design Piracy Prohibition Act, was a bill proposed to protect the copyright of fashion designers in the United States. The bill was introduced into the United States House of Representatives on March 30, 2006. Under the bill designers would submit fashion sketches and/or photos to the U.S. Copyright Office within three months of the products' "publication". This publication includes everything from magazine advertisements to the garment's first public runway appearances. The bill as a result, would protect the designs for three years after the initial publication. If infringement of copyright was to occur the infringer would be fined $250,000, or $5 per copy, whichever is a larger lump sum.

The Design Piracy Prohibition Act was reintroduced as H.R. 2033 during the first session of the 110th Congress on April 25, 2007. It had goals similar to H.R. 5055, as the bill proposed to protect certain types of apparel design through copyright protection of fashion design. The bill would grant fashion designs a three-year term of protection, based on registration with the U.S. Copyright Office. The fines of copyright infringement would continue to be $250,000 total or $5 per copied merchandise.

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In the clothing industry, fast fashion is the business model of replicating recent catwalk trends and high-fashion designs, mass-producing them at a low cost, and bringing them to retail stores quickly, while demand is at its highest. The term fast fashion is also used generically to describe the products of the fast fashion business model.

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One of the biggest contributers of Fast Fashion 

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One of the biggest contributers of Fast Fashion 

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Amancio Ortega Gaona ( Spanish pronunciation: [aˈmanθjo oɾˈteɣa ɣaˈona]; born 28 March 1936) is a Spanish billionaire businessman. He is the founder and former chairman of Inditex fashion group, best known for its chain of Zara and Bershka clothing and accessories shops. As of November 2022, Ortega had a net worth of $62.9 billion, making him the third-wealthiest person in Europe after Bernard Arnault and Francoise Bettencourt Meyers, and the 18th-wealthiest in the world. For a brief period of time in 2015, he was the richest man in the world, surpassing Bill Gates when his net worth peaked to $80 billion as Zara's parent company, Inditex's, stock peaked.

He is the head of the Ortega family and the second wealthiest retailer in the world.

The youngest of four children, Ortega was born in Busdongo de Arbas, León, Spain, to Antonio Ortega Rodríguez and Josefa Gaona Hernández from the province of Valladolid, and spent his childhood in Tolosa, Gipuzkoa.

He left school and moved to A Coruña at the age of 14, due to the job of his father, a railway worker. Shortly after, he found a job as a shop hand for a local shirtmaker called Gala, which still sits on the same corner in downtown A Coruña, and learned to make clothes by hand.

In 1963, he founded Confecciones Goa to sell quilted bathrobes.

In 1975, he opened his first Zara store with his wife Rosalía Mera.

In 2009, Zara was part of the Inditex group (Industrias de Diseño Textil Sociedad Anónima), of which Ortega owned 59.29%, and aside from over 6,000 stores included the brands Zara, Massimo Dutti, Oysho, Zara Home, Kiddy's Class, Tempe, Stradivarius, Pull and Bear, Bershka and has more than 92,000 employees.

His public appearance in 2000, as part of the warm-up prior to his company's initial public offering on the stock market in 2001, made headlines in the Spanish financial press. However, he has only ever granted interviews to three journalists.

In 2011, Ortega announced his imminent retirement from Inditex, parent company of the Zara chain, stating that he would ask Inditex vice-president and CEO Pablo Isla to take his place as head. In 2012 Ortega donated about €20 million to Caritas Internationalis, a Roman Catholic relief organisation.

He purchased the Torre Picasso skyscraper in Madrid. He also purchased the Epic Residences and Hotel in Miami, Florida.

In July 2017, for its second edition of the AEF awards, the Spanish Association of Foundations awarded Amancio Ortega in the 2017 Philanthropic Initiative category. He also donated 300 million euros to fight cancer across Spain, which were invested in the purchase of 440 machines to detect the disease. As a result of this, the number of Spanish public hospitals equipped with stereotactic radiotherapy machines has risen from 20 to 70. However, these decisions were not unanimously welcomed and were criticized by some political parties like Podemos. Recently, news indicate that he has bought the Troy Block complex, known to the public as one of the buildings where Amazon Seattle has its headquarters.

It was revealed in July 2020 that Ortega's property holdings, through his investment company Pontegadea, were worth $17.2 billion. Ortega is the executive chairman of Pontegadea, and real estate assets in his portfolio include Manhattan's Haughwout Building and Southeast Financial Center. In 2019, the company completed a $72.5 million deal for a downtown Chicago hotel, which followed purchases of a building in Washington's central business district and two Seattle office buildings.

Ortega was reported to have lost $10 billion as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

Ortega is very private about his personal life, and as of 2012 he has only given three interviews to journalists. Ortega is very reclusive and keeps a very low profile. Until 1999, no photograph of Ortega had ever been published.

He likes to dress simply, refuses to wear a tie, and typically prefers to wear a simple uniform of a blue blazer, white shirt, and gray trousers, none of which are Zara products.

He married Rosalía Mera Goyenechea in 1966, they had two children, Marcos and Sandra Ortega Mera, the couple divorced in 1986. Mera died in August 2013 at the age of 69. He married his second wife Flora Pérez Marcote in 2001, with whom he had a daughter, Marta Ortega Pérez, in 1984 . As of 2017, despite owning a huge real estate portfolio he mostly lives with his wife in his apartment in A Coruña, Spain.

He is mostly spotted being driven around in a black Mercedes-Benz S-Class (W221) and a black Mercedes-Benz GL-Class (X166). He owns two yachts "Drizzle" and "Valoria B" as well as Gulfstream G650 and Bombardier Global Express private jets.

Blanco, Xabier; Salgado, Jesús (2004). Amancio Ortega, de cero a Zara: El primer libro de investigación sobre el imperio Inditex. Esfera de los Libros. p. 271. ISBN 978-8-497-34167-7.

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Amancio Ortega Gaona ( Spanish pronunciation: [aˈmanθjo oɾˈteɣa ɣaˈona]; born 28 March 1936) is a Spanish billionaire businessman. He is the founder and former chairman of Inditex fashion group, best known for its chain of Zara and Bershka clothing and accessories shops.

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Exposure and sharing of fashion trends and practices

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Fashion journalism is a component of fashion media, with a focus on writing and photojournalism. Fashion journalists write about and critique fashion events and trends as well as cultivate and maintain relationships with stylists and designers. Fashion journalists are either employed full-time by a publication, or they submit articles on a freelance basis. Fashion photography, which supplanted fashion illustration in the 1900s, is a type of photojournalism used in fashion journalism. The Internet has given rise to a number of outlets for amateur fashion journalism, such as blogs and vlogs.

An example of a fashion plate (1844)

Fashion journalism developed during the 18th century, when the fashion dolls - dolls designed to display relevant fashion ensembles - were replaced by fashion magazines, notably the Cabinet des Modes, which is recognized to be the first true fashion magazine. This Partisan publication had illustrated fashion plates that "...fed the increasing appetite for French fashion, which was growing in tandem with the expanding urban population's desire to separate itself from the way of life plotted out and decreed by the French Court". It was followed abroad by Journal des Luxus und der Moden (1786-1827) in Germany, Giornale delle Dame e delle Mode di Francia (1786-1794) in Milan, and Gallery of Fashion (1794-1803) in Britain.

During the 19th century, numerous fashion magazines were published, employing fashion journalists reporting on the latest trends from Paris. Among the earliest in Great Britain were Ann Margaret Lanchester, who published her own fashion paper, the Le Miroir de la Mode, and Mary Ann Bell, writing for the La Belle Assemblée in the early 19th-century.

A 21st century fashion magazine cover

Fashion magazines of the 20th century include and .

Digital fashion journalism

As society increases its dependence on the internet, the journalism industry is becoming far more fluid. Print, being more costly and less convenient, many publications (such as Nylon magazine) have opted to focus on a digital publication. Digital journalism gives the writer unlimited space (rather than forcing an article to fit in a magazine or newspaper layout), allows for links to external resources, and a number of images. Another major advantage of digital media is real-time updates/corrections to misinformation.

Major fashion magazines such as , , Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, and Paper Magazine have altered their business models due to the onset of the digital age, creating an online component in addition to print. Social media has also contributed to the rise in these digital magazine platforms, allowing them to be far more interactive than they have been in the past.

Amateur fashion journalism

The Internet has given rise to a number of outlets for amateur fashion journalism, such as blogs and vlogs.

Journalism is a general liberal arts major that can be studied at many universities. A concentration in fashion journalism is specific to a number of fashion schools. Generally, a fashion journalist needs at least a BA in fields such as journalism, communications, fashion or other related areas. A strong portfolio and experience in reporting on fashion is key to being hired as a fashion journalist post-grad.

Vanessa Friedman is the chief fashion director and fashion critic for The New York Times. Before joining the team at the Times, Friedman was the first fashion editor at the Financial Times, alongside her job editing the pages of Luxury360 vertical. Previously, she was the features editor for InStyle UK . She was the 2012 recipient of the Front Page Award for fashion writing and the 2013 Fashion Monitor Journalist of the Year award.

Robin Givhan is the first and only fashion journalist to win The Pulitzer Prize for Criticism as of 2006. She drew attention to her work after criticizing former US Vice President Dick Cheney for wearing casual attire (a ski cap and parka) to a ceremony commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In this piece, Givhan stressed the importance of how political leaders choose to present themselves.

Cathy Horyn is the critic-at-large for New York Magazine's The Cut since 2015, having spent 15 years as the former chief critic of The New York Times with roles at The Washington Post and Vanity Fair. In 2001, she was awarded the Eugenia Sheppard Award for fashion writing by the Council of Fashion Designers of America.

Sarah Mower MBE is a chief critic and columnist for American She is also an advocate for young designers as the Ambassador for Emerging talent at the British Fashion Council since 2009. Mower received the MBE in 2011 in recognition of her contributions to fashion.

Suzy Menkes OBE is a veteran fashion journalist who was most recently the Editor of Vogue International, departing in October 2020. She also helmed The New York Times International Edition back when it was the International Herald Tribune as its fashion critic for 25 years, ultimately departing for Condé Nast International in 2014. She now produces a podcast "Creative Conversations With Suzy Menkes" and contributes to Air Mail, a mobile-first digital weekly created by Graydon Carter.

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Fashion journalism is a component of fashion media, with a focus on writing and photojournalism. Fashion journalists write about and critique fashion events and trends as well as cultivate and maintain relationships with stylists and designers. Fashion journalists are either employed full-time by a publication, or they submit articles on a freelance basis.

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Very Basic Idea

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"Swinging London": Young adults in London's Carnaby Street.

Fashion is a term used interchangeably to describe the creation of clothing, footwear, accessories, cosmetics, and jewellery of different cultural aesthetics and their mix and match into outfits that depict distinctive ways of dressing ( styles and trends) as signifiers of social status, self-expression, and group belonging. As a multifaceted term, fashion describes an industry, styles, aesthetics, and trends.

The term 'fashion' originates from the Latin word 'Facere,' which means 'to make,' and describes the manufacturing, mixing, and wearing of outfits adorned with specific cultural aesthetics, patterns, motifs, shapes, and cuts, allowing people to showcase their group belonging, values, meanings, beliefs, and ways of life. Given the rise in mass production of commodities and clothing at lower prices and global reach, reducing fashion's environmental impact and improving sustainability has become an urgent issue among politicians, brands, and consumers.

Definitions

The French word mode, meaning "fashion", dates as far back as 1482, while the English word denoting something "in style" dates only to the 16th century. Other words exist related to concepts of style and appeal that precede mode. In the 12th and 13th century Old French the concept of elegance begins to appear in the context of aristocratic preferences to enhance beauty and display refinement, and cointerie, the idea of making oneself more attractive to others by style or artifice in grooming and dress, appears in a 13th-century poem by Guillaume de Lorris advising men that "handsome clothes and handsome accessories improve a man a great deal".

Woman's Bicycling Ensemble, 1898, LACMA

Fashion scholar Susan B. Kaiser states that everyone is "forced to appear", unmediated before others. Everyone is evaluated by their attire, and evaluation includes the consideration of colors, materials, silhouette, and how garments appear on the body. Garments identical in style and material also appear different depending on the wearer's body shape, or whether the garment has been washed, folded, mended, or is new.

Fashion is defined in a number of different ways, and its application can be sometimes unclear. Though the term fashion connotes difference, as in "the new fashions of the season", it can also connote sameness, for example in reference to "the fashions of the 1960s", implying a general uniformity. Fashion can signify the latest trends, but may often reference fashions of a previous era, leading to the reappearance of fashions from a different time period. While what is fashionable can be defined by a relatively insular, esteemed and often rich aesthetic elite who make a look exclusive, such as fashion houses and haute couturiers, this 'look' is often designed by pulling references from subcultures and social groups who are not considered elite, and are thus excluded from making the distinction of what is fashion themselves.

Whereas a trend often connotes a peculiar aesthetic expression, often lasting shorter than a season and being identifiable by visual extremes, fashion is a distinctive and industry-supported expression traditionally tied to the fashion season and collections. Style is an expression that lasts over many seasons and is often connected to cultural movements and social markers, symbols, class, and culture (such as Baroque and Rococo). According to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, fashion connotes "the latest difference."

Bella Hadid at the Cannes Film Festival

Even though the terms fashion, clothing and costume are often used together, fashion differs from both. Clothing describes the material and the technical garment, devoid of any social meaning or connections; costume has come to mean fancy dress or masquerade wear. Fashion, by contrast, describes the social and temporal system that influences and "activates" dress as a social signifier in a certain time and context. Philosopher Giorgio Agamben connects fashion to the qualitative Ancient Greek concept of kairos, meaning "the right, critical, or opportune moment", and clothing to the quantitative concept of chronos, the personification of chronological or sequential time.

While some exclusive brands may claim the label haute couture, in France, the term is technically limited to members of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture in Paris. Haute couture is more aspirational; inspired by art and culture, and in most cases, reserved for the economic elite. However, New York's fashion calendar hosts Couture Fashion Week, which strives for a more equitable and inclusive mission.

Fashion is also a source of art, allowing people to display their unique tastes, sensibilities, and styles. Different fashion designers are influenced by outside stimuli and reflect this inspiration in their work. For example, Gucci's 'stained green' jeans may look like a grass stain, but to others, they display purity, freshness, and summer.

Fashion is unique, self-fulfilling and may be a key part of someone's identity. Similarly to art, the aims of a person's choices in fashion are not necessarily to be liked by everyone, but instead to be an expression of personal taste. A person's personal style functions as a "societal formation always combining two opposite principles. It is a socially acceptable and secure way to distinguish oneself from others and, at the same time, it satisfies the individual's need for social adaptation and imitation." While philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that fashion "has nothing to do with genuine judgements of taste", and was instead "a case of unreflected and 'blind' imitation", sociologist Georg Simmel thought of fashion as something that "helped overcome the distance between an individual and his society".

History of fashion

Changes in clothing often took place at times of economic or social change, as occurred in ancient Rome and the medieval Caliphate, followed by a long period without significant changes. In eighth-century Moorish Spain, the musician Ziryab introduced to Córdoba[unreliable source ] sophisticated clothing styles based on seasonal and daily fashions from his native Baghdad, modified by his inspiration. Similar changes in fashion occurred in the 11th century in the Middle East following the arrival of the Turks, who introduced clothing styles from Central Asia and the Far East.

Alleged Western distinctiveness

Gensei Kajin Shu by Yoshu Chikanobu, 1890. Various styles of traditional Japanese clothing and Western styles.

Early Western travellers who visited India, Persia, Turkey, or China, would frequently remark on the absence of change in fashion in those countries. In 1609, the secretary of the Japanese shōgun bragged inaccurately to a Spanish visitor that Japanese clothing had not changed in over a thousand years. However, these conceptions of non-Western clothing undergoing little, if any, evolution are generally held to be untrue; for instance, there is considerable evidence in Ming China of rapidly changing fashions in Chinese clothing. In imperial China, clothing were not only an embodiment of freedom and comfort or used to cover the body or protect against the cold or used for decorative purposes; it was also regulated by strong sumptuary laws which was based on strict social hierarchy system and the ritual system of the Chinese society. It was expected for people to be dressed accordingly to their gender, social status and occupation; the Chinese clothing system had cleared evolution and varied in appearance in each period of history. However, ancient Chinese fashion, like in other cultures, was an indicator of the socioeconomic conditions of its population; for Confucian scholars, however, changing fashion was often associated with social disorder which was brought by rapid commercialization. Clothing which experienced fast changing fashion in ancient China was recorded in ancient Chinese texts, where it was sometimes referred as shiyang, "contemporary-styles", and was associated with the concept of fuyao, "outrageous dress", which typically holds a negative connotation. Similar changes in clothing can be seen in Japanese clothing between the Genroku period and the later centuries of the Edo period (1603-1867), during which a time clothing trends switched from flashy and expensive displays of wealth to subdued and subverted ones.

The myth on the lack of fashion in what was considered the Orient was related to Western Imperialism also often accompanied Orientalism, and European imperialism was especially at its highest in the 19th century. In the 19th century time, Europeans described China in binary opposition to Europe, describing China as "lacking in fashion" among many other things, while Europeans deliberately placed themselves in a superior position when they would compare themselves to the Chinese as well as to other countries in Asia:

Latent orientalism is an unconscious, untouchable certainty about what the Orient is, static and unanimous, separate, eccentric, backward, silently different, sensual, and passive. It has a tendency towards despotism and away from progress. [...] Its progress and value are judged in comparison to the West, so it is the Other. Many rigorous scholars [...] saw the Orient as a locale requiring Western attention, reconstruction, even redemption.

-  Laura Fantone quoted Said (1979), Local Invisibility, Postcolonial Feminisms Asian American Contemporary Artists in California, page 166

Similar ideas were also applied to other countries in the East Asia, in India, and Middle East, where the perceived lack of fashion were associated with offensive remarks on the Asian social and political systems:

I confess that the unchanging fashions of the Turks and other Eastern peoples do not attract me. It seems that their fashions tend to preserve their stupid despotism.

Additionally, there is a long history of fashion in West Africa. Cloth was used as a form of currency in trade with the Portuguese and Dutch as early as the 16th century, and locally produced cloth and cheaper European imports were assembled into new styles to accommodate the growing elite class of West Africans and resident gold and slave traders. There was an exceptionally strong tradition of weaving in the Oyo Empire, and the areas inhabited by the Igbo people.

Fashion in the Western world

Marie Antoinette, wife of Louis XVI, was a leader of fashion. Her choices, such as this 1783 white muslin dress called a chemise a la Reine, were highly influential and widely worn.[26]

The beginning in Europe of continual and accelerating change in clothing styles can be fairly reliably dated to late medieval times. Historians, including James Laver and Fernand Braudel, date the start of Western fashion in clothing to the middle of the 14th century, though they tend to rely heavily on contemporary imagery, as illuminated manuscripts were not common before the 14th century. The most dramatic early change in fashion was a sudden drastic shortening and tightening of the male over-garment from calf-length to barely covering the buttocks, sometimes accompanied with stuffing in the chest to make it look bigger. This created the distinctive Western outline of a tailored top worn over leggings or trousers.

The pace of change accelerated considerably in the following century, and women's and men's fashion, especially in the dressing and adorning of the hair, became equally complex. Art historians are, therefore, able to use fashion with confidence and precision to date images, often to within five years, particularly in the case of images from the 15th century. Initially, changes in fashion led to a fragmentation across the upper classes of Europe of what had previously been a very similar style of dressing and the subsequent development of distinctive national styles. These national styles remained very different until a counter-movement in the 17th to 18th centuries imposed similar styles once again, mostly originating from Ancien Régime France. Though the rich usually led fashion, the increasing affluence of early modern Europe led to the bourgeoisie and even peasants following trends at a distance, but still uncomfortably close for the elites - a factor that Fernand Braudel regards as one of the main motors of changing fashion.

Albrecht Dürer's drawing contrasts a well-turned out bourgeoise from Nuremberg (left) with her counterpart from Venice. The Venetian lady's high chopines make her look taller.

In the 16th century, national differences were at their most pronounced. Ten 16th century portraits of German or Italian gentlemen may show ten entirely different hats. Albrecht Dürer illustrated the differences in his actual (or composite) contrast of Nuremberg and Venetian fashions at the close of the 15th century (illustration, right). The "Spanish style" of the late 16th century began the move back to synchronicity among upper-class Europeans, and after a struggle in the mid-17th century, French styles decisively took over leadership, a process completed in the 18th century.

Though different textile colors and patterns changed from year to year, the cut of a gentleman's coat and the length of his waistcoat, or the pattern to which a lady's dress was cut, changed more slowly. Men's fashions were primarily derived from military models, and changes in a European male silhouette were galvanized in theaters of European war where gentleman officers had opportunities to make notes of different styles such as the "Steinkirk" cravat or necktie. Both parties wore shirts under their clothing, the cut and style of which had little cause to change over a number of centuries.

Though there had been distribution of dressed dolls from France since the 16th century and Abraham Bosse had produced engravings of fashion in the 1620s, the pace of change picked up in the 1780s with increased publication of French engravings illustrating the latest Paris styles. By 1800, all Western Europeans were dressing alike (or thought they were); local variation became first a sign of provincial culture and later a badge of the conservative peasant.

Although tailors and dressmakers were no doubt responsible for many innovations, and the textile industry indeed led many trends, the history of fashion design is generally understood to date from 1858 when the English-born Charles Frederick Worth opened the first authentic haute couture house in Paris. The Haute house was the name established by the government for the fashion houses that met the standards of the industry. These fashion houses continue to adhere to standards such as keeping at least twenty employees engaged in making the clothes, showing two collections per year at fashion shows, and presenting a certain number of patterns to costumers. Since then, the idea of the fashion designer as a celebrity in their own right has become increasingly dominant.

Although fashion can be feminine or masculine, additional trends are androgynous. The idea of unisex dressing originated in the 1960s, when designers such as Pierre Cardin and Rudi Gernreich created garments, such as stretch jersey tunics or leggings, meant to be worn by both males and females. The impact of unisex wearability expanded more broadly to encompass various themes in fashion, including androgyny, mass-market retail, and conceptual clothing. The fashion trends of the 1970s, such as sheepskin jackets, flight jackets, duffel coats, and unstructured clothing, influenced men to attend social gatherings without a dinner jacket and to accessorize in new ways. Some men's styles blended the sensuality and expressiveness, and the growing gay-rights movement and an emphasis on youth allowed for a new freedom to experiment with style and with fabrics such as wool crepe, which had previously been associated with women's attire.

Cover of Marcus Clarks' spring and summer catalogue 1926-27

The four major current fashion capitals are acknowledged to be New York City ( Manhattan), Paris, Milan, and London, which are all headquarters to the most significant fashion companies and are renowned for their major influence on global fashion. Fashion weeks are held in these cities, where designers exhibit their new clothing collections to audiences. A study demonstrated that general proximity to New York's Garment District was important to participate in the American fashion ecosystem. Haute couture has now largely been subsidized by the sale of ready-to-wear collections and perfume using the same branding.

Modern Westerners have a vast number of choices in the selection of their clothes. What a person chooses to wear can reflect their personality or interests. When people who have high cultural status start to wear new or different styles, they may inspire a new fashion trend. People who like or respect these people are influenced by their style and begin wearing similarly styled clothes.

Fashions may vary considerably within a society according to age, social class, generation, occupation, and geography, and may also vary over time. The terms fashionista and fashion victim refer to someone who slavishly follows current fashions.

Liu Wen, supermodel, walks the runway modeling fashions by designer Diane von Fürstenberg at New York Fashion Week 2013.

In the early 2000s, Asian fashion influences became increasingly significant in local and global markets. Countries such as China, Japan, India, and Pakistan have traditionally had large textile industries with a number of rich traditions; though these were often drawn upon by Western designers, Asian clothing styles gained considerable influence in the early- to mid-2000s.

China

Chinese fashion remained constantly changing over the centuries. In China, throughout the Tang Dynasty (618-907), women wore extravagant attire to demonstrate prosperity. Mongol men of the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368) wore loose robes; horsemen sported shorter robes, trousers, and boots to provide ease when horseback riding. The leaders of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) maintained Manchu dress, while establishing new garments for officials; while foot binding -originally introduced in the 10th century-was not preserved, women of this era were expected to wear particular heels that pushed them to take on a ladylike walk.

Then, in the 1920s, qipao was in vogue and the style consisted of stand collars, trumpet sleeves, straight silhouettes and short side slits. Since then, designers started to move into Western fashion like fur coats and cloaks and body-hugging dresses with long side slits as qipao became more popular. In the 1950s and 60s, 'Lenin coats' with double lines of buttons, slanting pockets and a belt came into vogue among Chinese men.

India

In India, it has been common for followers of different religions to wear corresponding pieces of clothing. During the 15th century, Muslim and Hindu women wore notably different articles of clothing. This is also seen in many other Eastern world countries.

In the Victorian era, most women did not wear blouses under their saris, which did not suit the Victorian society; however, British and Indian fashion would be influenced by each other in following decades. In the 1920s, the nationalists adopted Khadi cloth as a symbol of resistance; here, Gandhi became the face of the resistance which made people spin, weave, and wear their Khadi. Today, the salwaar-kameez is recognized as the national dress of India.

Japan

For Japan, the people during the Meiji period (1868-1912) widely incorporated Western styles into Japanese fashion, which is considered to be a remarkable transformation for the Japanese vogue. They extensively adopted the style and practices of Western cultures.The upper classes wore more extravagant pieces of clothing like luxurious patterned silks and adorned themselves with fancy sashes. Women also started wearing Western dresses in public instead of their traditional Kimono. Most of the officials were also required to wear Western suits. In this way, the Japanese slowly adopted into Western fashion. Moreover, like India, different Japanese religions wear different pieces of clothing.

Fashion industry

Model with a modern dress reflecting the current fashion trend at a fashion show, Paris, 2011

Kaia Gerber at the 2019 Max Mara Fashion Week in Milan

In its most common use, the term fashion refers to the current expressions on sale through the fashion industry. The global fashion industry is a product of the modern age. In the Western world, tailoring has since medieval times been controlled by guilds, but with the emergence of industrialism, the power of the guilds was undermined. Before the mid-19th century, most clothing was custom-made. It was handmade for individuals, either as home production or on order from dressmakers and tailors. By the beginning of the 20th century, with the rise of new technologies such as the sewing machine, the rise of global trade, the development of the factory system of production, and the proliferation of retail outlets such as department stores, clothing became increasingly mass-produced in standard sizes and sold at fixed prices.

Although the fashion industry developed first in Europe and America, as of 2017, it is an international and highly globalized industry, with clothing often designed in one country, manufactured in another, and sold worldwide. For example, an American fashion company might source fabric in China and have the clothes manufactured in Vietnam, finished in Italy, and shipped to a warehouse in the United States for distribution to retail outlets internationally.

The fashion industry has for a long time been one of the largest employers in the United States, and it remains so in the 21st century. However, U.S. employment in fashion began to decline considerably as production increasingly moved overseas, especially to China. Because data regarding the fashion industry typically are reported for national economies and expressed in terms of the industry's many separate sectors, aggregate figures for the world production of textiles and clothing are difficult to obtain. However, by any measure, the clothing industry accounts for a significant share of world economic output. The fashion industry consists of four levels:

1. The production of raw materials, principally fiber, and textiles but also leather and fur.

2. The production of fashion goods by designers, manufacturers, contractors, and others.

3. Retail sales.

4. Various forms of advertising and promotion.

The levels of focus in the fashion industry consist of many separate but interdependent sectors. These sectors include textile design and production, fashion design and manufacturing, fashion retailing, marketing and merchandising, fashion shows, and media and marketing. Each sector is devoted to the goal of satisfying consumer demand for apparel under conditions that enable participants in the industry to operate at a profit.

Fashion trends

A fashion trend signifies a specific look or expression that is spread across a population at a specific time and place. A trend is considered a more ephemeral look, not defined by the seasons when collections are released by the fashion industry. A trend can thus emerge from street style, across cultures, and from influencers and other celebrities.

Fashion trends are influenced by several factors, including cinema, celebrities, climate, creative explorations, innovations, designs, political, economic, social, and technological. Examining these factors is called a PEST analysis. Fashion forecasters can use this information to help determine the growth or decline of a particular trend.

People's minds as well as their perceptions and consciousness are constantly changing. Fads are inherently social, are constantly evolving in a contradiction between the old and the new, and are in a sense easily influenced by those around them, and therefore also begin to imitate constantly.

Timberland boots are an everyday shoe in streetwear.

Continuing on from the maximalist and 1980s influences of the early 2020s, vibrant coloured clothing had made a comeback for women in America, France, China, Korea, and the Ukraine by the spring of 2023. This style, sometimes referred to as " dopamine dressing", featured long skirts and belted maxi dresses with thigh splits, lots of gold and pearl jewelry, oversized striped cardigan sweaters, multicoloured silk skirts with seashell or floral print, strappy sandals, pants with a contrasting stripe down the leg, ugg boots, floral print maxi skirts, Y2K inspired platform shoes, chunky red rain boots, shimmery jumpsuits, knitted dresses, leather pilot jackets with faux fur collars, skirts with bold contrasting vertical stripes, trouser suits with bootcut legs, jeans with glittery heart or star-shaped details, chunky white or black sandals, and zebra print tote bags.

Big, oversized garments were often made from translucent materials and featured cutouts intended to expose the wearer's bare shoulder, thigh, or midriff, such as low-cut waists on the pants or tops with strappy necklines intended to be worn braless. Desirable colours included neon green, watermelon green, coral pink, orange, salmon pink, magenta, gold, electric blue, aquamarine, cyan, turquoise, and royal blue.

In 2023, the predominant colours in Britain, France and America were red, white and blue. As in the mid to late 1970s, Western shirts with pearl snaps in denim or bright madras plaid made a comeback, and sometimes featured contrasting yokes and cuffs with intricate embroidery. Moccasins, stonewash denim waistcoats with decorative fringes, preppy loafers, navy blue suits and sportcoats, straight leg jeans instead of the skinny jeans fashionable from the late 2000s until the early 2020s, stetsons, white baseball jerseys with bold red or blue pinstripes, striped blue neckties, baggy white pants, Union Jack motifs, flared jeans, duster coats as worn in the Yellowstone TV series, preppy style college sweaters, retro blue and white striped football shirts, chelsea boots with cowboy boot styling, two-button blazers with red and blue boating stripes, V-neck sweater vests, royal blue baseball jackets with white sleeves, Howler Brothers gilets, shirts and suits worn open to expose the chest, and boxy leather reefer jackets were popular on both sides of the Atlantic.

Social influences

Fashion is inherently a social phenomenon. A person cannot have a fashion by oneself, but for something to be defined as fashion, there needs to be dissemination and followers. This dissemination can take several forms; from the top-down ("trickle-down") to bottom-up ("bubble up/trickle-up"), or transversally across cultures and through viral memes and media ("trickle-across").

Fashion relates to the social and cultural context of an environment. According to Matika, "Elements of popular culture become fused when a person's trend is associated with a preference for a genre of music [...] like music, news, or literature, fashion has been fused into everyday lives." Fashion is not only seen as purely aesthetic; fashion is also a medium for people to create an overall effect and express their opinions and overall art.

This mirrors what performers frequently accomplish through music videos. In the music video 'Formation' by Beyoncé, according to Carlos, The annual or seasonal runway show is a reflection of fashion trends and a designer's inspirations. For designers like Vivienne Westwood, runway shows are a platform for her voice on politics and current events. For her AW15 menswear show, according to Water, "where models with severely bruised faces channeled eco-warriors on a mission to save the planet." Another recent example is a staged feminist protest march for Chanel's SS15 show, rioting models chanting words of empowerment using signs like "Feminist but feminine" and "Ladies first." According to Water, "The show tapped into Chanel's long history of championing female independence: founder Coco Chanel was a trailblazer for liberating the female body in the post-WWI era, introducing silhouettes that countered the restrictive corsets then in favour."

The annual Met Gala ceremony in Manhattan is the premier venue where fashion designers and their creations are celebrated. Social media is also a place where fashion is presented most often. Some influencers are paid huge amounts of money to promote a product or clothing item, where the business hopes many viewers will buy the product off the back of the advertisement. Instagram is the most popular platform for advertising, but Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and other platforms are also used. In New York, the LGBT fashion design community contributes very significantly to promulgating fashion trends, and drag celebrities have developed a profound influence upon New York Fashion Week.

Market research

Consumers of different groups have varying needs and demands. Factors taken into consideration when analyzing consumers' needs include key demographics. To understand consumers' needs and predict fashion trends, fashion companies have to do market research There are two research methods: primary and secondary. Secondary methods are taking other information that has already been collected, for example using a book or an article for research. Primary research is collecting data through surveys, interviews, observation, and/or focus groups. Primary research often focuses on large sample sizes to determine customer's motivations to shop.

The benefits of primary research are specific information about a fashion brand's consumer is explored. Surveys are helpful tools; questions can be open-ended or closed-ended. Negative factor surveys and interviews present is that the answers can be biased, due to wording in the survey or on face-to-face interactions. Focus groups, about 8 to 12 people, can be beneficial because several points can be addressed in depth. However, there are drawbacks to this tactic, too. With such a small sample size, it is hard to know if the greater public would react the same way as the focus group. Observation can really help a company gain insight on what a consumer truly wants. There is less of a bias because consumers are just performing their daily tasks, not necessarily realizing they are being observed. For example, observing the public by taking street style photos of people, the consumer did not get dressed in the morning knowing that would have their photo taken necessarily. They just wear what they would normally wear. Through observation patterns can be seen, helping trend forecasters know what their target market needs and wants.

Knowing the needs of consumers will increase fashion companies' sales and profits. Through research and studying the consumers' lives the needs of the customer can be obtained and help fashion brands know what trends the consumers are ready for.

Symbolic consumption

Consumption is driven not only by need, the symbolic meaning for consumers is also a factor. Consumers engaging in symbolic consumption may develop a sense of self over an extended period of time as various objects are collected as part of the process of establishing their identity and, when the symbolic meaning is shared in a social group, to communicate their identity to others. For teenagers, consumption plays a role in distinguishing the child self from the adult. Researchers have found that the fashion choices of teenagers are used for self-expression and also to recognize other teens who wear similar clothes. The symbolic association of clothing items can link individuals' personality and interests, with music as a prominent factor influencing fashion decisions.

Political influences

Political figures have played a central role in the development of fashion, at least since the time of French king Louis XIV. For example, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy was a fashion icon of the early 1960s. Wearing Chanel suits, structural Givenchy shift dresses, and soft color Cassini coats with large buttons, she inspired trends of both elegant formal dressing and classic feminine style.

Cultural upheavals have also had an impact on fashion trends. For example, during the 1960s, the U.S. economy was robust, the divorce rate was increasing, and the government approved the birth control pill. These factors inspired the younger generation to rebel against entrenched social norms. The civil rights movement, a struggle for social justice and equal opportunity for Blacks, and the women's liberation movement, seeking equal rights and opportunities and greater personal freedom for women, were in full bloom. In 1964, the leg-baring mini-skirt was introduced and became a white-hot trend. Fashion designers then began to experiment with the shapes of garments: loose sleeveless dresses, micro-minis, flared skirts, and trumpet sleeves. Fluorescent colors, print patterns, bell-bottom jeans, fringed vests, and skirts became de rigueur outfits of the 1960s.

Concern and protest over U.S. involvement in the failing Vietnam War also influenced fashion. Camouflage patterns in military clothing, developed to help military personnel be less visible to enemy forces, seeped into streetwear designs in the 1960s. Camouflage trends have disappeared and resurfaced several times since then, appearing in high fashion iterations in the 1990s. Designers such as Valentino, Dior, and Dolce & Gabbana combined camouflage into their runway and ready-to-wear collections. Today, variations of camouflage, including pastel shades, in every article of clothing or accessory, continue to enjoy popularity.

Technology influences

A see-through top worn along with pasties by a model at a fashion show in US, 2017. Such fashion trends get popularised through media.

Today, technology plays a sizable role in society, and technological influences are correspondingly increasing within the realm of fashion. Wearable technology has become incorporated; for example, clothing constructed with solar panels that charge devices and smart fabrics that enhance wearer comfort by changing color or texture based on environmental changes. 3D printing technology has influenced designers such as Iris van Herpen and Kimberly Ovitz. As the technology evolves, 3D printers will become more accessible to designers and eventually, consumers - these could potentially reshape design and production in the fashion industry entirely.

Internet technology, enabling the far reaches of online retailers and social media platforms, has created previously unimaginable ways for trends to be identified, marketed, and sold immediately. Trend-setting styles are easily displayed and communicated online to attract customers. Posts on Instagram or Facebook can quickly increase awareness about new trends in fashion, which subsequently may create high demand for specific items or brands, new "buy now button" technology can link these styles with direct sales.

Machine vision technology has been developed to track how fashions spread through society. The industry can now see the direct correlation on how fashion shows influence street-chic outfits. Effects such as these can now be quantified and provide valuable feedback to fashion houses, designers, and consumers regarding trends.

Environmental impact

Production of cotton requires a large amount of water, and also produces wastewater.

Latin dancers in their costumes. The woman is wearing backless dress with deep slits on its lower portion, while the man is wearing a shirt with top buttons open.

The media plays a significant role when it comes to fashion. For instance, an important part of fashion is fashion journalism. Editorial critique, guidelines, and commentary can be found on television and in magazines, newspapers, fashion websites, social networks, and fashion blogs. In recent years, fashion blogging and YouTube videos have become a major outlet for spreading trends and fashion tips, creating an online culture of sharing one's style on a website or social media accounts (i.e. Instagram, TikTok, or Twitter). Through these media outlets, readers and viewers all over the world can learn about fashion, making it very accessible. In addition to fashion journalism, another media platform that is important in fashion industry is advertisement. Advertisements provide information to audiences and promote the sales of products and services. The fashion industry uses advertisements to attract consumers and promote its products to generate sales. A few decades ago when technology was still underdeveloped, advertisements heavily relied on radio, magazines, billboards, and newspapers. These days, there are more various ways in advertisements such as television ads, online-based ads using internet websites, and posts, videos, and live streaming in social media platforms.

Fashion in printed media

This 1921 clipping from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, with story and drawings by Marguerite Martyn, represents the saturation newspaper coverage given to society women at a fashionable dance.

There are two subsets of print styling: editorial and lifestyle. Editorial styling is the high-fashion styling seen in fashion magazines, and this tends to be more artistic and fashion-forward. Lifestyle styling focuses on a more overtly commercial goal, like a department store advertisement, a website, or an advertisement where fashion is not what's being sold but the models are hired to promote the product in the photo.

The dressing practices of the powerful have traditionally been mediated through art and the practices of the courts. The looks of the French court were disseminated through prints from the 16th century on, but gained cohesive design with the development of a centralized court under King Louis XIV, which produced an identifiable style that took his name. At the beginning of the 20th century, fashion magazines began to include photographs of various fashion designs and became even more influential than in the past. In cities throughout the world these magazines were greatly sought after and had a profound effect on public taste in clothing. Talented illustrators drew exquisite fashion plates for the publications which covered the most recent developments in fashion and beauty. Perhaps the most famous of these magazines was La Gazette du Bon Ton, which was founded in 1912 by Lucien Vogel and regularly published until 1925 (with the exception of the war years).

Vogue, founded in Manhattan in 1892, has been the longest-lasting and most successful of the hundreds of fashion magazines that have come and gone. Increasing affluence after World War II and, most importantly, the advent of cheap color printing in the 1960s, led to a huge boost in its sales and heavy coverage of fashion in mainstream women's magazines, followed by men's magazines in the 1990s. One such example of Vogue's popularity is the younger version, , which covers clothing and trends that are targeted more toward the "fashionista on a budget". Haute couture designers followed the trend by starting ready-to-wear and perfume lines which are heavily advertised in the magazines and now dwarf their original couture businesses. A recent development within fashion print media is the rise of text-based and critical magazines which aim to prove that fashion is not superficial, by creating a dialogue between fashion academia and the industry. Examples of this development are: Fashion Theory (1997), Fashion Practice: The Journal of Design, Creative Process & the Fashion Industry (2008), and (2009).

Fashion in television

Television coverage began in the 1950s with small fashion features. In the 1960s and 1970s, fashion segments on various entertainment shows became more frequent, and by the 1980s, dedicated fashion shows such as Fashion Television started to appear. was the pioneer in this undertaking and has since grown to become the leader in both Fashion Television and new media channels. The Fashion Industry is beginning to promote their styles through Bloggers on social media's. Vogue specified Chiara Ferragni as "blogger of the moment" due to the rises of followers through her Fashion Blog, that became popular.

A few days after the 2010 Fall Fashion Week in New York City came to a close, The New Islander's Fashion Editor, Genevieve Tax, criticized the fashion industry for running on a seasonal schedule of its own, largely at the expense of real-world consumers. "Because designers release their fall collections in the spring and their spring collections in the fall, fashion magazines such as Vogue always and only look forward to the upcoming season, promoting parkas come September while issuing reviews on shorts in January", she writes. "Savvy shoppers, consequently, have been conditioned to be extremely, perhaps impractically, farsighted with their buying."

The fashion industry has been the subject of numerous films and television shows, including the reality show Project Runway and the drama series . Specific fashion brands have been featured in film, not only as product placement opportunities, but as bespoke items that have subsequently led to trends in fashion.

Videos in general have been very useful in promoting the fashion industry. This is evident not only from television shows directly spotlighting the fashion industry, but also movies, events and music videos which showcase fashion statements as well as promote specific brands through product placements.

Controversial advertisements in fashion industry

Racism in fashion advertisements

Some fashion advertisements have been accused of racism and led to boycotts from customers. Globally known Swedish fashion brand H&M faced this issue with one of its children's wear advertisements in 2018. A Black child wearing a hoodie with the slogan "coolest monkey in the jungle" was featured in the ad. This immediately led to controversy, as "monkey" is commonly used as slur against Black people, and caused many customers to boycott the brand. Many people, including celebrities, posted on social media about their resentments towards H&M and refusal to work with and buy its products. H&M issued a statement saying "we apologise to anyone this may have offended", though this too received some criticism for appearing insincere.

Another fashion advertisement seen as racist was from GAP, an American worldwide clothing brand. GAP collaborated with Ellen DeGeneres in 2016 for the advertisement. It features four playful young girls, with a tall White girl leaning with her arm on a shorter Black girl's head. Upon release, some viewers harshly criticized it, claiming it shows an underlying passive racism. A representative from commented that the ad portrays the message that Black people are undervalued and seen as props for White people to look better. Others saw little issue with the ad, and that the controversy was the result of people being oversensitive. GAP replaced the image in the ad and apologized to critics.

Sexism in fashion advertisements

Many fashion brands have published ads that were provocative and sexy to attract customers' attention. British high fashion brand, Jimmy Choo, was blamed for having sexism in its ad which featured a female British model wearing the brand's boots. In this two-minute ad, men whistle at a model, walking on the street with red, sleeveless mini dress. This ad gained much backlash and criticism by the viewers, as it was seen as promoting sexual harassment and other misconduct. Many people showed their dismay through social media posts, leading Jimmy Choo to pull down the ad from social media platforms.

French luxury fashion brand Yves Saint Laurent also faced this issue with its print ad shown in Paris in 2017. The ad depicted a female model wearing fishnet tights with roller-skate stilettos reclining with her legs opened in front of the camera. This advertisement brought harsh comments from both viewers and French advertising organization directors for going against the advertising codes related to "respect for decency, dignity and those prohibiting submission, violence or dependence, as well as the use of stereotypes." and additionally said that this ad was causing "mental harm to adolescents." Due to the negative public reaction, the poster was removed from the city.

Public relations and social media

Fashion public relations involves being in touch with a company's audiences and creating strong relationships with them, reaching out to media, and initiating messages that project positive images of the company. Social media plays an important role in modern-day fashion public relations; enabling practitioners to reach a wide range of consumers through various platforms.

Building brand awareness and credibility is a key implication of good public relations. In some cases, the hype is built about new designers' collections before they are released into the market, due to the immense exposure generated by practitioners. Social media, such as blogs, microblogs, podcasts, photo and video sharing sites have all become increasingly important to fashion public relations. The interactive nature of these platforms allows practitioners to engage and communicate with the public in real-time, and tailor their clients' brand or campaign messages to the target audience. With blogging platforms such as Instagram, Tumblr, WordPress, Squarespace, and other sharing sites, bloggers have emerged as expert fashion commentators, shaping brands and having a great impact on what is 'on trend'. Women in the fashion public relations industry such as Sweaty Betty PR founder Roxy Jacenko and Oscar de la Renta's PR girl Erika Bearman, have acquired copious followers on their social media sites, by providing a brand identity and a behind the scenes look into the companies they work for.

Social media is changing the way practitioners deliver messages, as they are concerned with the media, and also customer relationship building. PR practitioners must provide effective communication among all platforms, in order to engage the fashion public in an industry socially connected via online shopping. Consumers have the ability to share their purchases on their personal social media pages (such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.), and if practitioners deliver the brand message effectively and meet the needs of its public, word-of-mouth publicity will be generated and potentially provide a wide reach for the designer and their products.

Fashion and political activism

As fashion concerns people, and signifies social hierarchies, fashion intersects with politics and the social organization of societies. Whereas haute couture and business suits are associated by people in power, also groups aiming to challenge the political order also use clothes to signal their position. The explicit use of fashion as a form of activism, is usually referred to as " fashion activism."

There is a complex relationship between fashion and feminism. Some feminists have argued that by participating in feminine fashions women are contributing to maintaining the gender differences which are part of women's oppression. Brownmiller felt that women should reject traditionally feminine dress, focusing on comfort and practicality rather than fashion. Others believe that it is the fashion system itself that is repressive in requiring women to seasonally change their clothes to keep up with trends. Greer has advocated this argument that seasonal changes in dress should be ignored; she argues that women can be liberated by replacing the compulsiveness of fashion with enjoyment of rejecting the norm to create their own personal styling. This rejection of seasonal fashion led to many protests in the 1960s alongside rejection of fashion on socialist, racial and environmental grounds. However, Mosmann has pointed out that the relationship between protesting fashion and creating fashion is dynamic because the language and style used in these protests has then become part of fashion itself.

Fashion designers and brands have traditionally kept themselves out of political conflicts, there has been a movement in the industry towards taking more explicit positions across the political spectrum. From maintaining a rather apolitical stance, designers and brands today engage more explicitly in current debates.

Tie dye vendor, July 2013

For example, considering the U.S.'s political climate in the surrounding months of the 2016 presidential election, during 2017 fashion weeks in London, Milan, New York, Paris and São Paulo amongst others, many designers took the opportunity to take political stances leveraging their platforms and influence to reach their customers. This has also led to some controversy over democratic values, as fashion is not always the most inclusive platform for political debate, but a one-way broadcast of top-down messages.

When taking an explicit political stance, designers generally favor issues that can be identified in clear language with virtuous undertones. For example, aiming to "amplify a greater message of unity, inclusion, diversity, and feminism in a fashion space", designer Mara Hoffman invited the founders of the Women's March on Washington to open her show which featured modern silhouettes of utilitarian wear, described by critics as "Made for a modern warrior" and "Clothing for those who still have work to do". Prabal Gurung debuted his collection of T-shirts featuring slogans such as "The Future is Female", "We Will Not Be Silenced", and "Nevertheless She Persisted", with proceeds going to the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and Gurung's own charity, "Shikshya Foundation Nepal". Similarly, The Business of Fashion launched the #TiedTogether movement on Social Media, encouraging member of the industry from editors to models, to wear a white bandana advocating for "unity, solidarity, and inclusiveness during fashion week".

Fashion may be used to promote a cause, such as to promote healthy behavior, to raise money for a cancer cure, or to raise money for local charities such as the Juvenile Protective Association or a children's hospice.

One fashion cause is trashion, which is using trash to make clothes, jewelry, and other fashion items in order to promote awareness of pollution. There are a number of modern trashion artists such as Marina DeBris, Ann Wizer, and Nancy Judd. Other designers have used DIY fashions, in the tradition of the punk movement, to address elitism in the industry to promote more inclusion and diversity.

Anthropological perspective

Indigenous Americas Map Tunic designed in 2018 by Carla Fernández and Pedro Reyes for Taller Flora.

From an academic lens, the sporting of various fashions has been seen as a form of fashion language, a mode of communication that produced various fashion statements, using a grammar of fashion. This is a perspective promoted in the work of influential French philosopher and semiotician Roland Barthes.

Anthropology, the study of culture and of human societies, examines fashion by asking why certain styles are deemed socially appropriate and others are not. From the theory of interactionism, a certain practice or expression is chosen by those in power in a community, and that becomes "the fashion" as defined at a certain time by the people under influence of those in power. If a particular style has a meaning in an already occurring set of beliefs, then that style may have a greater chance of become fashion.

According to cultural theorists Ted Polhemus and Lynn Procter, one can describe fashion as adornment, of which there are two types: fashion and anti-fashion. Through the capitalization and commoditization of clothing, accessories, and shoes, etc., what once constituted anti-fashion becomes part of fashion as the lines between fashion and anti-fashion are blurred, as expressions that were once outside the changes of fashion are swept along with trends to signify new meanings. Examples range from how elements from ethnic dress becomes part of a trend and appear on catwalks or street cultures, for example how tattoos travel from sailors, laborers and criminals to popular culture.

To cultural theorist Malcolm Bernard, fashion and anti-fashion differ as polar opposites. Anti-fashion is fixed and changes little over time, varying depending on the cultural or social group one is associated with or where one lives, but within that group or locality the style changes little. Fashion, in contrast, can change ( evolve) very quickly and is not affiliated with one group or area of the world but spreads throughout the world wherever people can communicate easily with each other. An example of anti-fashion would be ceremonial or otherwise traditional clothing where specific garments and their designs are both reproduced faithfully and with the intent of maintaining a status quo of tradition. This can be seen in the clothing of some kabuki plays, where some character outfits are kept intact from designs of several centuries ago, in some cases retaining the crests of the actors considered to have 'perfected' that role.

Anti-fashion is concerned with maintaining the status quo, while fashion is concerned with social mobility. Time is expressed in terms of continuity in anti-fashion, and in terms of change in fashion; fashion has changing modes of adornment, while anti-fashion has fixed modes of adornment.

From this theoretical lens, change in fashion is part of the larger industrial system and is structured by the powerful actors in this system to be a deliberate change in style, promoted through the channels influenced by the industry (such as paid advertisements).

Intellectual property

Gross sales of goods vs IP laws (US 2007)

In the fashion industry, intellectual property is not enforced as it is within the film industry and music industry. Robert Glariston, an intellectual property expert, mentioned in a fashion seminar held in LA[which? ] that "Copyright law regarding clothing is a current hot-button issue in the industry. We often have to draw the line between designers being inspired by a design and those outright stealing it in different places." To take inspiration from others' designs contributes to the fashion industry's ability to establish clothing trends. For the past few years, WGSN has been a dominant source of fashion news and forecasts in encouraging fashion brands worldwide to be inspired by one another. Enticing consumers to buy clothing by establishing new trends is, some have argued, a key component of the industry's success. Intellectual property rules that interfere with this process of trend-making would, in this view, be counter-productive. On the other hand, it is often argued that the blatant theft of new ideas, unique designs, and design details by larger companies is what often contributes to the failure of many smaller or independent design companies.

Since fakes are distinguishable by their poorer quality, there is still a demand for luxury goods, and as only a trademark or logo can be copyrighted, many fashion brands make this one of the most visible aspects of the garment or accessory. In handbags, especially, the designer's brand may be woven into the fabric (or the lining fabric) from which the bag is made, making the brand an intrinsic element of the bag.

In 2005, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) held a conference calling for stricter intellectual property enforcement within the fashion industry to better protect small and medium businesses and promote competitiveness within the textile and clothing industries.

References

Further reading

Cabrera, Ana, and Lesley Miller. "Genio y Figura. La influencia de la cultura española en la moda." Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture 13.1 (2009): 103-110

Davis, F. (1989). Of maids' uniforms and blue jeans: The drama of status ambivalences in clothing and fashion. Qualitative Sociology, 12(4), 337-355.

Hanifie, Sowaibah (5 August 2020). "Australia's first National Indigenous Fashion Awards winners revealed, signaling hope for a more diverse industry". ABC News. Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Steele, Valerie, Encyclopedia of clothing and fashion, Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2005

Turrell, Claire (2 Mar 2023). "The Asian blouse that tells a tale of many cultures". BBC.

External links

Media related to Fashion at Wikimedia Commons

The dictionary definition of fashion at Wiktionary

Quotations related to Fashion at Wikiquote

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Fashion is a term used interchangeably to describe the creation of clothing, footwear, accessories, cosmetics, and jewellery of different cultural aesthetics and their mix and match into outfits that depict distinctive ways of dressing ( styles and trends) as signifiers of social status, self-expression, and group belonging.

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More people are becoming aware

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First Article to Inform me on the topic of fast fashion 

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First Article to Inform me on the topic of fast fashion 

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The process of making cheaper clothing is very harmful to the earth

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In the Colours of Nature dye house, Vijayakumar Varathan is busy prepping a vat of indigo. At 51, he looks frail, with a tanned body made mostly of bones, but he runs to and fro, setting up an open fire where he'll brew cauldrons of natural colorants made from plants.

He's worked here for 15 years. But until his early 30s, Varathan mixed chemicals in a conventional clothing factory in the same region of southern India. There he developed a disease that caused layers of his skin to peel off. Even today, it is discolored. "It was pretty bad," he says, in his fragmented English. "But I didn't have a choice."

Conventional textile manufacturing is tough on both the people who work in it and their land. Issues arise at almost every stage of the process - the ubiquitous genetically modified seeds that strain farmers' budgets, the pesticides used in cotton fields, the harsh chemicals used in dyes, the toxic waste that pollutes rivers, and the chemically treated clothing that ends up in landfills. The problems are exacerbated in the low-price, quick-turnaround segment of the market known as "fast fashion," which encourages cheap production and a throwaway mind-set.

A new crop of small businesses are investing in organic farming, natural dyes and a transparent supply chain that encourages shoppers to think about the effect of their purchases - and they're selling their products online and in a small but growing number of U.S. stores, from small trendy boutiques to Target.

These include Colorado-based PACT, which makes underwear and loungewear from all-organic cotton; New Jersey-based Boll and Branch, which sells organic-cotton bedsheets, blankets and towels; and two companies based in Los Angeles - Jungmaven, a hemp and organic-cotton T-shirt company, and Industry of All Nations, whose clothes are made with natural dyes and fibers from around the world.

The geographical heartland for most of these sustainable start-ups is India, the second-largest manufacturer of textiles in the world, behind China. Textile manufacturing is a $108 billion-a-year business here, employing more than 35 million people - including Varathan and his fellow workers at Colours of Nature.

'Clean' clothing

The air inside the dye house smells of fermented indigo, oddly similar to the scent of cow dung. Pungent, to say the least. Men squat over indigo vats, dipping in T-shirt after T-shirt - some of them multiple times, to produce a darker, more intense shade. They hand the colored garments to sari-clad women, who throw them onto a clothesline. The T-shirts transform from green to blue as the indigo encounters oxygen. Dozens in varying shades of blue are drying in rows stretched across a sunny field.

"Just think if this is the way all our clothes were made - dip and dry," says Juan Gerscovich, as he watches. "There is no need for chemicals. We just need to look to the Earth for answers."

Gerscovich and his brother Fernando, co-founders of Industry of All Nations, spend several months every year visiting the communities in India, Latin America and sometimes Africa where they source their products, always including a stop here at Colours of Nature in Auroville. The dyeing shop is a key contributor to what the company calls its " Clean Clothes Project " in south India - clothes produced in a way that promotes clean rivers, oceans, soil and air.

Juan, dressed in his company's wares - indigo-dyed chinos and a breezy white organic-cotton shirt - stands over a 250-gallon vat of indigo, set in a hole dug in the ground. There are about two dozen of these big holes; each can dye about 50 pounds of cotton.

He acknowledges that the clothes produced this way aren't cheap - T-shirts from Industry of All Nations, sold online or at their retail store in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles, start at $40. But like other organic manufacturers, he says the high cost of this clothing ideally will translate into consumers giving serious consideration to the impact of their purchases. "Shopping is thought of as fickle, something mindless, but in fact it is one of the most important activities an individual can do," he says. "Shopping is the equivalent of voting."

The Gerscoviches, who created their company in 2010, found common ground and a business partner in Jesus Ciriza Larraona, who founded Colours of Nature here in 1993. Larraona, a Spaniard, lives right next door to his business, and has become a passionate student of the art of natural dyeing.

"This is a practice that has been going on since the Egyptians," he says. "But why had it disappeared?"

The answer isn't hard to understand: Synthetic dyes are quicker and easier to use and they produce more colors. Natural dyes - notably indigo, but also plants such as madder (which produces a red hue), acacia (brown) and myrobalan (yellow), plus resins such as shellac (purple) and minerals including iron (black or gray) - take more time and are labor-intensive.

But chemical dyes take a toll. They can include compounds dangerous to the health of workers, ranging from chlorine bleach to known carcinogens such as arylamines. And if they aren't treated properly, they can pollute the water supply.

That's what propelled Mohan Sundaram Eswaran to change his business model. He ran a company in Tirupur, India's textile manufacturing hub, for 12 years, making clothes for U.S. and European brands; the fabrics were dyed with conventional dyes, and the fabrics were not generally organic. Business was good, he says: "I was selling more than 6,000 pieces a month, and had over 150 employees working for me."

But he was dismayed by what the industry was doing to the Noyyal River, which runs through Tirupur - a green and foamy waterway whose water can no longer be used even for livestock or irrigation. "That river used to be clean, I could play on the banks of it. Now, I cannot even look at it - all for a few dollars we earned," he says. "We cannot do that to a river that's been running for a thousand years."

So six years ago he founded a new company, Knitwin Fashion, which stitches and assembles clothing for Industry of All Nations from organic cotton that is dyed in cooperation with Colours of Nature.

Though doubtful at first about the change, Eswaran says he has found that the smaller quantities with higher profit margins characteristic of the organic industry can be profitable. "Before it was about large quantities, and small margins. Now it's the opposite," he says.

Another businessman making changes is Anbalagan Manikam, chief executive of KMA Exports. Each year his company sells 500 tons of indigo, sourced from more than 100 farms in Tamil Nadu state. Some of them have begun transitioning to organic farming practices. Manikam says he could produce more natural indigo if enough textile and clothing manufacturers sought it out: "We need more demand for indigo. With more demand, we can build more units to process the plant into powder and cakes for dyeing, and move away from chemical dyes."

Raw materials

But dyeing is only one part of the manufacturing process. The clothing material itself, namely cotton, poses a separate threat to farmers. Only a decade ago, Indian farmers planted 80 percent of their crop using seeds saved from cotton grown the year before. But the advent of genetically modified (GMO) seeds drove that tradition out of the market. Farmers were originally attracted to the GMO varieties because they produced bigger yields than natural seeds, and were supposed to be weed-resistant.

But once they stopped replanting natural cotton seeds, those varieties disappeared from the local agriculture. Today, more than 90 percent of Indian cotton comes from GMO seeds, which has forced farmers into a cycle of debt, according to Vandana Shiva, an agricultural activist. GMO seeds are expensive, and because most GMO plants don't produce fertile seeds of their own, new seeds have to be bought each season. Furthermore, expensive chemical pesticides are used on the GMO cotton fields.

Since 2004, however, a cooperative that now numbers more than 35,000 organic-cotton and fair-trade Indian farmers is forgoing chemicals, and building a new seed bank of non-GMO cotton seeds. The Chetna Co-op connects these farmers to buyers, trains them with better farming practices and educates them on how to manage their finances. Today it sells its textiles to 16 small to midsize brands, mostly in the United States and in Europe. Denver-based PACT apparel, for instance, makes its T-shirts, underwear and loungewear entirely of the co-op's organic cotton. In May of this year, the label landed in 460 Target stores across the United States.

"We want to challenge . . . Hanes, Fruit of the Loom and Jockey," chief executive Brendan Synnott said in a telephone interview from Colorado. "Because the first thing you do in the morning is put on underwear and it sits on your skin all day long."

Other U.S. and European brands such as Nudie Jeans, houseware start-up Boll and Branch and apparel company Loomstate buy from Chetna, too. Payments are sent to the farmers through a cooperative bank account, says Vipul Kulkarni, marketing head for Chetna. A crucial element is that these brands commit to buying a certain amount of organic cotton from the farmers at the beginning of the season.

"For farmers, their finances are already stretched to the limit by the time they harvest the crop," Kulkarni said, "and they will be ready to sell their organic cotton even at lower conventional rates, as they are desperate for cash by then."

Synnott predicts that movement toward natural, sustainable practices will spread faster in the fashion world than the parallel movement that has made organic produce a staple of Western groceries

"The organic-food movement started around 1980," he says. "It's taken over 30 years. But now we have technology, which means we can get the stories out quicker, and we can sell directly to customers. Fashion is next."

And it doesn't have to be a boutique industry, he says: Big-box retailers are ready.

"I put in one phone call to Target and we were in," he said. "When we make such mass-market moves, that's when we're going to make change happen in fashion."

This reporting was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

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In the Colours of Nature dye house, Vijayakumar Varathan is busy prepping a vat of indigo. At 51, he looks frail, with a tanned body made mostly of bones, but he runs to and fro, setting up an open fire where he'll brew cauldrons of natural colorants made from plants.

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The fashion  industry is built on consumer blindness,  and worker abuse

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Bags full of clothes piled up at the Eileen Fisher warehouse in Irvington, N.Y. The clothes are sorted and then washed before seamstresses find a way to fix or reuse each piece. (Vincent Tullo/For The Washington Post)

It's back-to-school time, which means the advertisements are everywhere: Buy! Buy! Buy! Pencils and gadgets. Backpacks and sneakers. And, yes, heaps and piles of brand-new clothes.

But this year, those ads are running up against another powerful message, resounding from such big brands as Eileen Fisher and Patagonia, along with a growing cadre of smaller thrift and resale shops: Let's make do, reuse, recycle.

Fast-fashion trends, driven by consumer taste and innovations in textile manufacturing, have overstuffed American closets. Clothes shopping has emerged as a weekly habit, and people are constantly clearing out and buying new.

It's a big problem. In 2019, Americans will throw away more than 35 billion pounds of textiles, according to the Council for Textile Recycling. That's nearly double the number from 1999.

It's more important than ever, environmental advocates say, to keep that clothing out of landfills.

"We're trying to take responsibility," said Eileen Fisher, whose eponymous fashion brand buys back its garments from customers at $5 each and reworks the material into new merchandise, under its Renew brand, at factories in Irvington, N.Y., and Seattle. It bought back its millionth garment in May. Fisher lives near the former printing warehouse in Irvington that the company converted into its Renew sewing factory. She walked through its clothing-intake center, wearing a gray and white kimono coat made from patches of Eileen Fisher clothing scraps that were turned into felt.

At an early stage in her 34-year-old company, Fisher said she and her co-workers grew alarmed at the environmental toll of clothing manufacturing - from depleted farm fields to dye pollution in rivers. Her company's reuse efforts have expanded into its Circular by Design mission, in which today's clothes become tomorrow's raw materials.

"We need to move from a use-and-discard economy to a reuse economy," she said. Its remade clothes are specially tagged and sold in Eileen Fisher stores, pop-up shops and on its Renew website. A $250 jacket gets a second life at $90. "As manufacturers, we want to treasure the resources we're using, to make clothing that lasts and can be repurposed. We want customers to value our clothes."

Patagonia, the Ventura, Calif., based outdoor clothier, has for decades been a worldwide leader in this closed-loop system of manufacturing and reuse.

"As individuals, the best thing we can do for the planet is to buy less and keep our stuff in use longer," said Rose Marcario, Patagonia's president and CEO. "The simple act of extending the life of our garments through proper care and repair reduces the need to buy more over time."

It's estimated that the global textile industry uses 98 million tons of resources a year, chiefly water and energy. Fabric dyes have polluted major rivers in India, Bangladesh, China and other countries. The plight of underpaid workers producing fast fashion in unsafe factories has sparked outrage expressed in documentaries and books.

The large and ambitious buyback, repair and repurpose operations signal a fundamental shift in consumers' relationship with clothing.

One vision of the future works like this: Brands manage the products they make after consumers use them. Consumers buy garments with the idea of keeping them as long as possible, and then the brand repairs and resells them. If garments are too damaged to be donated or resold, they will be "upcycled" into new clothing or recycled into fibers. So, for instance, a favorite shirt may one day provide the fiber that insulates a home. Or the fabric of a sofa. A garment might have six or seven life cycles.

Repurposing "can be made into a business that's profitable," Fisher said, noting that her company's Renew operation brings in $3 million of the company's $450 million in annual sales.

To amplify the philosophy that resource stewardship can be profitable, the Eileen Fisher company is an active member of Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy and the American Sustainable Business Council, joining like-minded ventures such as Nike, Seventh Generation and Starbucks. "We don't want sustainability to be our edge," Fisher said. "We want it to be universal."

The art of repair

At its huge service center in Reno, Nev., Patagonia houses a repair facility where 70 full-time employees replace zippers, patch rips and renew and return items that customers may have bought decades before. The company's Worn Wear program, begun in 2005, includes cute clapboarded rigs that make regular tours to U.S. college campuses and ski resorts and to international locations, teaching customers how to repair items. Shoppers can sell used Patagonia items in good condition back to the company and buy "certified, pre-owned" Patagonia gear at discounted prices online.

Inside Patagonia's operation to keep clothes out of landfills

To further the cause, Cynthia Power, facilities manager for Eileen Fisher's Renew, is kept busy showing other clothing manufacturers how its 40 employees mend, overdye, resew or felt (a way of processing fabric) buyback silk, wool, cashmere and cotton.

"This is where our industry is going," Powers said, watching as head designer Carmen Gama pinned a jumpsuit for Renew's fall 2019 line using fabric from five pairs of used black jeans. The recycled textiles also are turned into wall hangings, pillows, coats, vests and kimono jackets.

"Waste can be art," said Sigi Ahl, creative director of DesignWork, the Eileen Fisher felted collection. The pillows are sold at ABC Home stores, and a Paris gallery sells the wall art. Both types of product were displayed in June at the American Institute of Architects' sustainable exhibit at the Javits Center in New York.

The Renew program also studies fiber wear and clothing-construction techniques to generate performance data - such as how well a particular material held up - that it puts on Excel spreadsheets, Fisher said. The information "inspires the main fashion line" to do better, she said.

Todd Copeland, Patagonia's environmental responsibility manager, said the company, a founding member of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, has long turned yarns made from plastic bottles into fleece, for example, and made fabric from plant fibers such as eucalyptus.

He said Patagonia has relationships with at least 85 finished goods factories in 17 countries, at least 150 material suppliers in 25 countries and at least 200 farms, and the company examines them all for business capability, quality, environmental impact and social impact.

He said the efforts help the company: "Customers are looking for a brand with values that resonate with them."

The rise of resale

It's back-to-school time, and Kidding Around, a children's resale shop in Clive, Iowa, has been hopping for weeks. July, August and September are the store's busiest months, and there is brisk turnover of the 18,000 secondhand clothing items for sale.

The 4,000-square-foot store, outside Des Moines, is open seven days a week. A staff of nine keeps up with the flow of garments coming in and going out. Parents drop off lightly worn clothing and never-worn garments - "new with tags" in resale parlance - and receive cash or store credit.

The appeal of resale?

"People have so much stuff it's unbelievable," owner Diane Fitzgerald said. "And they like the concept that they can reuse and recycle their items."

The number of thrift, consignment and resale businesses has exploded in recent years, growing by 7 percent annually, according to trade association figures.

Online, a new crop of resale shops such as ThredUp and Vinted has emerged, as well as Internet-only sales platforms sponsored by traditional thrifts such as Goodwill and the Salvation Army. These time-honored nonprofits face increased competition because of the nationwide expansion of for-profit chains such as Clothes Mentor, Buffalo Exchange and Plato's Closet.

Clothing rental companies such as Rent the Runway, another form of recycling, have also been booming.

Now, one out of six Americans shops for resale clothing. But only about 15 percent of clothing in America is recycled.

The textile summit

At a textiles summit in New York in October, Ben Rose, representing the city's Sanitation Department, disclosed a stunning figure. Each year, on the day of the New York City Marathon, runners shed as much as 100 tons of clothing. His department places collection bins inside apartment buildings. Most of the textile waste it collects goes to salvage and is turned into such products as wiping cloths, auto insulation and carpet padding.

Worldwide, less than 1 percent of the material used to produce clothes is eventually recycled, according to an Ellen MacArthur Foundation report. The waste causes major environmental damage and the annual loss of about $100 billion of potentially useful textiles that are burned or buried in landfills.

Some industries are stepping up. Airlines such as Southwest, Jet Blue, Delta and KLM are recycling uniforms, blankets and cushion fabrics, which are turned into totes, luggage tags and stuffed animals.

Unlike recent changes in the food industry, where restaurants and corporations responded to consumer demands for more healthful food, much of the initiative on combating textile waste is coming from forward-thinking clothing companies and industry associations.

The summit in New York on innovations in textile manufacturing, waste reduction and reuse brought together a large roster of groups working on the problem, including the Product Stewardship Institute, Textile Recovery, the New York State Pollution Prevention Institute and the New York Product Stewardship Council.

College students have been early adopters of the waste-reduction issue. A campus-based nonprofit, the Post-Landfill Action Network, has chapters at about 100 universities across North America. The group promotes plastic-free campuses, food recovery and composing programs, efforts to salvage items students discard when they move out at the end of the year and campus thrift stores.

"It's a young people's movement," said Ahl, the designing artist at Eileen Fisher. "They're rethinking consumerism. Just like in fast food, things must change."

Allison Engel and Margaret Engel, with Reise Moore, are the authors of "ThriftStyle: The Ultimate Bargain Shopper's Guide to Smart Fashion."

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Eileen Fisher wants those clothes back when you're done

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It's back-to-school time, which means the advertisements are everywhere: Buy! Buy! Buy! Pencils and gadgets. Backpacks and sneakers. And, yes, heaps and piles of brand-new clothes. But this year, those ads are running up against another powerful message, resounding from such big brands as Eileen Fisher and Patagonia, along with a growing cadre of smaller thrift and resale shops: Let's make do, reuse, recycle.

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Very Minor Lawsuit

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Boohoo, the online fast fashion giant, is facing a $100m lawsuit in the US over claims it has used “fake promotions” to lure shoppers #fastfashion #boohoo #onlinefashion #ukfashion https://t.co/6RqEalN5Ft

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Boohoo, the online fast fashion giant, is facing a $100m lawsuit in the US over claims it has used “fake promotions” to lure shoppers #fastfashion #boohoo #onlinefashion #ukfashion https://t.co/6RqEalN5Ft https://t.co/Nw7ty94Qs0

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Boohoo, the online fast fashion giant, is facing a $100m lawsuit in the US over claims it has used “fake promotions” to lure shoppers #fastfashion #boohoo #onlinefashion #ukfashion https://t.co/6RqEalN5Ft pic.twitter.com/Nw7ty94Qs0
— TheIndustry.fashion (@theindustryfash) June 1, 2020

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Boohoo, the online fast fashion giant, is facing a $100m lawsuit in the US over claims it has used “fake promotions” to lure shoppers #fastfashion #boohoo #onlinefashion #ukfashion https://t.co/6RqEalN5Ft https://t.co/Nw7ty94Qs0

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
Boohoo, the online fast fashion giant, is facing a $100m lawsuit in the US over claims it has used “fake promotions” to lure shoppers #fastfashion #boohoo #onlinefashion #ukfashion https://t.co/6RqEalN5Ft https://t.co/Nw7ty94Qs0

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
Boohoo, the online fast fashion giant, is facing a $100m lawsuit in the US over claims it has used “fake promotions” to lure shoppers #fastfashion #boohoo #onlinefashion #ukfashion https://t.co/6RqEalN5Ft

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France Vs Fast Fashion Fate of the Fashintes 

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France Vs Fast Fashion Fate of the Fashintes 

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France the country of high fashion strikes down on Fast Fashion

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How would shifting public opnion shape fast fashion, will the same problem rise again

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How Will Fashion's Proposed Disruption Impact the Copycat World of Fast Fashion? - The Fashion Law

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For decades, fast fashion brands have built big businesses by churning out garments and accessories inspired by those on the runway.