Fast Fashion | Junk or not?

Nuovi Ragazzi Italiani, April 6, 2011

The fast fashion phenomenon seems to be the new revolution in the couture, comparable to the introduction of the boutique collections in the 70’s, currently known as prêt-à-porter.

The nice-price fashion is becoming bigger day by day; brands as Zara, H&M or Top Shop are now big names in the fashion industry with a huge market movement. These fashion houses have an unstoppable spread of their shops, a constant output of collections, huge teams of fashion designer capable to catch all the market needs and an offer of more available clothes keeping the lines of that clothing which before them was prohibitive for their costs.

Underlined by the detractors of this phenomenon is that more often people starts to buy for the market news and not only because they can’t afford the higher range ones, but in the other side for the people who can’t spend as much as boutique clothes requires, these brands provide to wear good pieces and express themselves.

Calling it fast fashion, with this negative acceptation remembering fast food, is reductive also for the numerous new capsule collections of rookie designers, or little extra collections made by big names of the fashion designing, that permit to these brand to tilt more often to creative and original works, hushing the accuse of only coping and producing with a lower quality.

In my opinion the phenomenon is unstoppable, its power is easily visible in fact it’s changing the fashion industry, this democratization of a world that before was closed to a strict minority is now opening  to a wider range of people, maybe dangerous for the artists of the cloth but logical for the huge market demand.

Certainly this nice-price fashion won’t ever replace the prêt-à-porter collections, one comes from the need of making haute couture wearable the other comes from a market need, but the occasion of making this art affordable is fantastic.

By Paolo.