Fast Fashion Trends Have Led to Throwaway Culture

Luxury brands have little value, despite high consumer demand.

This article from the Australian Fashion Review gives voice to a fact that no fashionistas want to hear:

“The [fashion] industry produces way too much: things we don't need and wouldn't want if we weren't so brainwashed by social media, and advertising and celebrities who never wear the same thing twice.”

For decades, high-fashion companies have been relying on the same strategy of exclusivity to sell their mass-produced shit to the wayward shoppers of the middle class. These people were guided through the peer-reviewed scientific journals of PRADA and Versace to believe that buying a several hundred-dollar purse that was produced for less than twenty defined them as “fashionable.” Now, we don’t claim to know everything (except when we do) but for years there’s been a trend towards the superficial in the world of high-end fashion. Clothing design IS an art; manufacturing that clothing for the masses without care or conscience is not.

Photo via Tim Mitchell, Clothing Recycled, 2005