Daniel Felipe Blanco Gavilan

Strategic Management
Universidad de la Sabana
The ethical and environmental issues of “Fast Fashion”
During the last decades the pattern of fashion consumption have change, challenging the
apparel brands on how they perform their supply chain model, therefore brands such as:
Pull & Bear, H&M, Urban Outfitters, Forever21, Zara and Charlotte Russe reinvented the
way they produce and sell their products. “Fast fashion” arose as a business strategy in
which brands responds quickly to the latest fashion trends by frequently updating their lower-
priced clothing products available in their stores, nowadays those companies went from
managing 4 seasons to 52 seasons.
Consumerism, materialism trends and globalisation impulse “Fast fashion” by re-designing
the supply chain in order to adopt low-cost production techniques, thus western enterprises
began to look forward on how to reduce cost of raw material, workforce and logistics,
formulating the following solutions which provoked social, moral and environmental issues
1. Outsourcing their production plants in overseas markets (less developed countries), as
Bangladesh, Pakistan, Cambodia, Burma and Nepal where people are poorly skilled with
lower education degree. Thus, the labour conditions were affected, the pressure exerted
by International brands over local textile industries concerning delivery time, quality and
prices forced the companies and the governments to forget about working conditions,
so, ethical issues as: forced labour, child labour and low wages for women appeared,
those women are mainly 80% of the fashion workforce, all of them are aged between 16
to 25. It should be noted the lack of ethics by the capitalism over the underrated workforce
have not boundaries, the most known case is the Bangladesh Rana Plaza garment
factory collapse that killed more than 1000 people on 8th May 2013 due to infrastructural
problems with the production plants that were omitted by the CEO’s.
2. As said before, Fast fashion demands short term delivery time with low costs in order to
constantly launch new collections, for that reason textile industry have developed new
procedures that involves modification of DNA and the use of fertilizers on inputs mainly
in cotton farms that impact the society welfare, serious birth defects in Indian cotton
farmers’ children and development of brain tumours in elders are examples on how
chemicals through the water pollution are affecting the society. In the other hand, it can
be said that overproduction is another environmental issue, people are constantly
changing outfits, therefore clothes has short lifetime, becoming trash rapidly that ends in
countries as Haiti, but what happened with the merchandise that even is not bought?,
according to the BBC news companies as Burberry burned almost $40M of unsold stock,
instead of selling it cheaply, in order to protect brand’s exclusivity, helping to raise the air
pollution volumes.
Clearly, we are living in a Capitalist society that with the help of consumerism makes the
world worst, human behaviour tends to satisfy their needs and wants, but we are siege, raw
materials are not infinity, we are wasting our most important resources in products that has
short life time. Brands are not worrying anymore about ethical issues of their employees, on
the contrary now they think more on how to make more profitable their business model
through the value and supply chain, hence marketing and social responsibility has not weight
in the fashion industry. It is indispensable to create a new thinking in which society and
environmental welfare have to be more important than consumerism culture, brands must
have to evaluate different ways to produce profitable clothes without violating human rights.