Slow Fashion vs Fast Fashion

What is "Slow" and "Fast" fashion?

Fast Fashion is the term for mass manufactured fashion that has been produced fast, that moves fast through trends and that moves fast through the stores. In other words, it sells fast and is quickly replaced by new products. Fast fashion also moves fast through your closet. This menas that it wears and tears faster and therefore gets replaced faster. These are most often cheap garments where the decision to make a purchase doesn't way that heavy on your wallet. This type of fashion is commonly found in larger chain stores with big turn arounds driven by constant updates in trends and change of collections. Many of these chains release as many as 11 collections per year, that is almost 1 collection each month. This so called "wear and tear" fashion is not meant to last season after season neither in quality nor in trend. It is meant to follow the current trend and to be replaced by the next trend. This is what we call fast fashion. Clothing that moves fast from design through production into the wastebin.

Slow Fashion is about slowing down the speed in the fashion industry, slowing down the shopping speed and getting you as a customer to think through every purchase. It is about slowing down the tempo of how fast a garment tears and threby increasing its lifespan. It is also about slowing down the speed of trends. Which means to slow down the process of how fast a garment or trend becomes outdated and instead prioritize more timeless design. As you can see, the slow fashion movement is a concept which must be embraced throughout the design process, choice of material, production process, sales and wear and care process.  

'We as fashion brands need to educate our customers to make you more aware of the impact that the fashion industry has on the environment and the people involved in the production'

 

The idea of the Slow Fashion movement is to get companies to rethink their productions and sales and to get customers to rethink their consumer values and patterns. Why do we want to do this? What is the goal? Simply put, we want the fashion industry to have a smaller environmental and human impact than it has today. For us businesses this means to produce with bigger consideration for the environment, to value solid, sustainable craftsmanship, to prioritize quality over quantity and not to be tempted by the "fast money" that fast fashion can generate.

Something that a lot of people aren't aware of is the amount of hand craftsmanship that goes into the making of our everyday garments. There are many parts of garment production that cannot be done by machine and that requires an experienced hand. This is one of many reasons why education is such an important part of the Slow Fashion movement. We as fashion brands need to educate our customers to make you more aware of the impact that the fashion industry has on the environment and the people involved in the production. This way customers can make more conscious and informed decisions, reprioritize their consumer patterns by purchasing fewer but more sustainably produced garments and not be tempted by low prices and fast shipping.    

Short and sweet, slow fashion is about quality over quantity.