Fast Fashion and Sustainable Consumption

Abstract

Summer dresses in January and winter coats in July, fast fashion have never been so fast! A world globalization trend to ever changing the fashion industry, it made global brands to adopt a seasonless cycle of designing clothes and relocating manufacturing activities at underdeveloped countries in a way to support the cost of mass production, but the transition went with ignoring the working conditions and the environmental costs. Fast fashion led to several disasters that have had a huge impact on planet earth and the overall humanity, it also led to a massive consumption along with unsustainable demand, this is not the extraordinary consumption of ordinary people but rather the ordinary and fast consumption of ordinary people if we want to divert the quote of Bernard Dubois, professor at HEC, in “The Art of Marketing”. Fast fashion is today subject to unsustainable progress that is frustrating an entire economy with a big shift in consumers’ behavior, and this fact raised the debate around the problem of sustainability in the apparel industry. So, it is interesting to see how sustainability may generate a new perspective to the fashion industry, by bringing not only the most innovative strategies and technologies into the production process, but also the most genuine ideas to satisfy the need of fashionable customers, that are not interested anymore in only acquiring the latest trends, but also involved in promoting a more sustainable fashion to a point of spreading a new mindset for pushing consumption toward consciousness, and especially to forge an ethical appeal for brands, it goes to say that the problems behind sustainability brought a radical change to the fashion industry and it may play to its advantage for having different concepts and resourceful solutions. So, can fast fashion be sustainable?

In Memoriam to our friends, students and much more, our beloved Cédric Laguerre and Keryan Grimault.