fast fashion

noun

: an approach to the design, creation, and marketing of clothing fashions that emphasizes making fashion trends quickly and cheaply available to consumers

For many shoppers, Primark has an irresistible offer: trendy clothes at astonishingly low prices. The result is a new and even faster kind of fast fashion, which encourages consumers to buy heaps of items, discard them after a few wears and then come back for another batch of new outfits.

—The Economist

Competition is fierce at every end of the fashion spectrum from luxury to fast fashion.

—Nedra Rhone

In 1985, we bought roughly 31 clothing items per year; now [in 2012] we snap up twice that many thanks to "fast fashion."

—Azeen Ghorayshi

—usually hyphenated when used before another noun

fast-fashion chains/retailers

Example Sentences

Recent Examples on the Web

At the same time, mainstream brands such as Kookai and Naf Naf became the antecedents to fast fashion, while Fiorucci set the stage for collaboration. —Amy Verner, Vogue, 18 Oct. 2022

There are a lot of negatives to fast fashion – waste on a personal and business level, safety conditions for workers (see the Wired story), environmental concerns across the supply chain, considering clothes disposable at all. —oregonlive, 16 Aug. 2022

All of this is reflected in the figures: participation in secondhand shopping is growing rapidly, and expected to be 2X bigger than fast fashion by 2030. —Grace Antino, refinery29.com, 5 Jan. 2023

Chinese online apparel retailer Shein, known for its low-price and trendy clothing and accessories, suggests that rapid sales growth and superfast delivery don’t have to go hand-in-hand, even in fast fashion. —Liz Young, WSJ, 9 Nov. 2022

Shein has been successful in fast fashion but has also drawn criticism for the environmental impact of clothes so cheap as to be almost disposable. —WIRED, 26 Oct. 2022

While fast fashion and even luxury retailers cater to the trends that come and go, vintage designer items seem to never fade. —Greg Emmanuel, Essence, 10 Aug. 2022

At the same time, the country’s appetite for new clothing has expanded rapidly over the past two decades, as clothes have become cheaper, more abundant, and easier than ever to buy, largely thanks to the spread of fast fashion and online shopping. —Amanda Mull, The Atlantic, 3 Aug. 2022

Then there’s Caes, the Amsterdam brand formed by the designer Helen de Kluiver in 2019 in response to her concerns about fast fashion’s environmental impact. —New York Times, 12 May 2022

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Word History

First Known Use

1975, in the meaning defined above