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

Examples of fast fashion in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

When fast fashion is enticing consumers to pay less, getting consumers to pay more is challenging when there’s less room to demonstrate creativity in fashion. —Richard Kestenbaum, Forbes, 4 Nov. 2024

And because there’s so much fast fashion out there now. —Duante Beddingfield, Detroit Free Press, 16 Oct. 2024

Worldwide criticism of fast fashion’s waste, labor abuses and carbon emissions has done little to slow down the industry. —Stephanie Yang, Los Angeles Times, 12 Sep. 2024

In an industry characterized by transient fads (including the worrisome trend of ‘fast fashion'), her commitment to sustainability promotes the notion that true innovation is both powerful and permanent. —Dan Pontefract, Forbes, 28 Oct. 2024

Word History

First Known Use

1975, in the meaning defined above