Literature Review

      Economic and Environmental impacts of Fast Fashion

                                       (Daniella Matiashvili)


Introduction:

 In recent years “fast fashion” has become new trend that changed the picture and prospective of
the understanding of fashion. Fast Fashion has a wide spread in the market which bringing upon fact
that industry has huge influence on economy as well as on environment. Main goal of the paper is to
show the importance of role and impact that Fast Fashion has in economy, environment and customer
behavior, as well as to examine the ways to overcome undesirable consequences that Fast fashion
brings in our everyday life.

Literature review:

The changing dynamics of fashion industry such as fading of mass production, modified structural
characteristics in the supply chain or increase the number of fashion seasons forced customers to
demand low cost and flexibility in design and marketing. All the above-mentioned are the main
sources of competitiveness in fashion industry that can lead to chaos. Taking into consideration
all factors, paper will discuss three main questions: What is Fast Fashion? What is economic role
of fast fashion? What impact does Fast Fashion has in environment?

Fast Fashion

“Fast fashion” is readily available, inexpensively made part of fashion industry.  “Fast” word
describe how quickly retailer can move design as well as how short is the life cycle of the
product. Relatively lower prices attract younger age group of customers who do not hesitate to buy
fashionable products that further promote impulsive shopping (Ľubica, 2018). Each year 80 bill new
clothing are purchased for global fashion industry. Majority of them produced in China or
Bangladesh, but among statistics of consumption USA is the leader (Rachel, Erika and Christie,
2018).

Economic impact of “Fast Fashion”

Today Fast Fashion is an unsustainable process which everyday coming up with new challenges and
experiments. Supply chain and sustainability that are unreplaceable part of economy have been
directly influenced by fashion industry in recent years.  One of the most important steps that
helped to grow sustainable practices in fashion industry has been globalization of both sourcing
and distributing (MacCarthy, 2010). Globalization influenced industry in two different ways. First,
the relocation of manufacturing sites had negative affect on traditional European industries
resulting in unemployment for European textiles industry workers. The second impact is the heavy
environmental burden, which exacerbated by time pressure on fast fashion industry. In diversity of
economic aspects, each company has their own competition policies.  The only way to make policy
work for profit is to set up own priorities and values about clients and environment.


Environmental impact of Fast Fashion

Fashion production comprises 10% of total global carbon emission that dries up water sources,
pollutes rivers as well as 85% of all textiles go to dump each year. The production of textile is
energy- intensive process that requires petroleum as well as release hydrogen chloride. One of the
most toxic processes in supply chain is tanning because the chemicals used to tan leather include
mineral salts, coal-tar derivatives as well as various oils (Quantis, 2018). Making one pair of
jeans produces as much greenhouse gases as driving a car more than 80 miles. Making one cotton
shirt takes 2,700 liters of water. To overcome all the above-mentioned destructions environmental
justice set up strategies to keep nature and industrial balance (Hall, 2017). Strategies mainly
focus on sustainable fibers, corporate sustainability, trade policy, the role of the customer.
International organizations are concerned from fact that fashion industry has completely
non-ecofriendly priorities and production style.

Conclusion:

Fast fashion business model became scale of standards for big name fashion brands that caused
economic and environmental degradation. This paper created to inform about all possible obstacles
that made from wrong product consumption. Awareness plays key role in right distributions of values
to review decision-making principles.


 References

1.MacCarthy, B., & Jayarathne, P. G. S. A. (2009). Fast Fashion: Achieving Global Quick Response
(GQR) in the Internationally Dispersed Clothing Industry. SSRN Electronic Journal.
https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1360684

2. Bick, R., Halsey, E., & Ekenga, C. C. (2018, December). The global environmental injustice of
fast fashion. Environmental Health, 17(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12940-018-0433-7

3. Knošková, U., & Garasová, P. (2019, June 1). The Economic Impact of Consumer Purchases in Fast
Fashion Stores. Studia Commercialia Bratislavensia, 12(41), 58–70.
https://doi.org/10.2478/stcb-2019-0006

4. Luo, Y., Song, K., Ding, X., & Wu, X. (2021, January). Environmental sustainability of textiles
and apparel: A review of evaluation methods. Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 86, 106497.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eiar.2020.106497

5. Nikolic, D., & Kostic-Stankovic, M. (2022, April 14). Improving the Economic Sustainability of
the Fashion Industry: A Conceptual Model Proposal. Sustainability, 14(8), 4726.
https://doi.org/10.3390/su14084726

6. Hall, J. (2017, April 27). Digital Kimono: Fast Fashion, Slow Fashion? Fashion Theory, 22(3),
283–307. https://doi.org/10.1080/1362704x.2017.1319175