fast fashion

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a business model and cultural phenomenon in which clothing retailers rapidly translate current fashion trends into mass-produced, inexpensive garments that are sold at high volume and designed to be worn briefly before being discarded and replaced with the next season's styles; fast fashion emerged in the 1990s and 2000s through retailers such as Zara, H&M, and later ultra-fast online platforms like Shein, which compressed design-to-retail cycles from months to weeks or even days; the model has made fashionable clothing accessible at historically unprecedented low prices while generating severe environmental and social costs, including the production of approximately a hundred billion garments annually, massive textile waste, water pollution from dyeing processes, and widespread exploitation of garment workers in low-wage countries; fast fashion is now a central target of sustainability advocacy and circular economy reform efforts