As fashion influencers predict the ominous return of the skinny jeans, which had the 2010s in a chokehold, it is more evident than ever how rapid our fashion trend cycles are continuing to become. The normalisation of hyper consumption is the ultimate culprit but in order to fully understand its complexity, we must delve into the lifecycle of clothing and the fashion industry’s infrastructure as a whole.Â
Even in the conceptual stage of a garment, the drafting of a garment has been accelerated by technologies such as AI and imaging software. These massively aid, if not remove, the creative process that would previously have taken months of innovation. This newly streamlined process minimises the time that businesses devote to a design, thus, reducing it’s intentionality and cost at the process’s earliest stage.Â
Progressing to a garment’s public debut, there have been significant shifts in the long established hierarchy of fashion. Since the early 2000s, both the number of brands mingling in the world of high fashion and the abundance of clothes they present has skyrocketed. For example, fast fashion brand Pretty Little Thing participated in London Fashion Week 2023, an opportunity previously reserved only for the most prestigious fashion houses. Whilst this arguably helps to challenge the elitist mould of the clothing industry, it also promotes an already saturated, unsustainable market.Â
The influx of high street fashion into this space also escalates the speed of translation from runway couture to purchasable goods both for said brands and for their luxury counterparts, under the pressure to keep up. This means that the time between creation and consumption of a garment has been significantly reduced, especially in conjunction with modern infrastructure such as automated machinery, laser cutters and more efficient transport for shipping goods.
This turnaround is also devastatingly accelerated by the fact that, in the post-colonial era, developing countries are exploited through systems such as sweatshops or loopholes in international labour/tax laws. These unethical practices are allowed to remain in place as demand for their product is increasing by the day. This is largely due to the introduction of influencer culture on social media whereby we are exposed to endless imagery of people sporting new clothes, accessories and aesthetics. This bombardment, alongside tailored advertising and commission based storefronts on TikTok and Amazon, normalises mass consumption and makes impulsive, dopamine fuelled shopping all too easy and appealing to engage in.
The use of coined “aesthetics” also entices customers with the promise of an inbuilt identity alongside the mere product itself: a baseless promise that thrives in the time of a loneliness epidemic. Their lack of nuance or individuality eventually fuels our ever shortening trend cycles as people tire from seeing them and suddenly the items that were recently so popular become “cheugy” or basic. The increasing specificity of fashion trends is also complicit in this phenomena as dupe culture enables a much wider range of people at different socio economic stand points to purchase identical looking viral designs. This amplifies their market saturation and inevitably elevates the potency and speed at which fatigue for it sets in.Â
Finally, the way in which we dispose of our clothes solidifies our rapid trend cycles due to planned obsolescence, where clothes are made cheaply to maximise profit and ensure repeat purchases. Our clothes simply don’t have the longevity that they once did, meaning our cost per wear of items has dropped dramatically in the last few decades. So, not only do we want to buy new clothes due to the dissatisfying model of capitalism, but we also somewhat need to as our clothes lack quality and preciousness due to their poor construction and low cost.Â
Ultimately, the unsustainable problem of shortening trend cycles is multifaceted, making it even harder to combat as it’s enabled at every stage of a garment life. To truly see a shift in the fashion industry would require not only stricter legislation of copyright and ethical labour practices, but a societal mindset shift away from the indoctrinating cycle of mass consumption.