How to avoid fast fashion

The stores have the bulk of their stock on Mondays: your chances of buying high-quality and cheap clothes are higher at the beginning of the week. The lowest prices for Zara clothes are in Spain and Portugal (a significant part of the clothes are made here).

H&M Group, the Swedish company that pioneered fast fashion, is partly to blame for this waste. It currently churns out 3 billion garments a year and, as of 2019, was sitting on $4.1 billion worth of unsold clothes, some of which are used as fuel for a power plant in Sweden.

The quality from H&M products is awful – they aren’t meant to be worn for more than one season unless they’re basics like shirts. Certain pieces, particularly footwear, fall apart super easily and destroy your feet. The culture of throwing out so much clothing is environmentally destructive.

Inditex is one of the largest fast fashion companies in the world, with new styles are prototyped in just five days, and the entire design process taking as little as 15 days in total. Inditex often chooses to use local labour (in Spain, Portugal, Turkey and Morocco) to increase the speed of production further.

The name is changed to Hennes & Mauritz when Erling Persson buys the hunting and fishing store Mauritz Widforss in Stockholm, including a stock of men’s clothing. This is the start of sales of men’s and children’s clothing. 1974. H&M is listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange.

American entertainer Madonna has produced five fashion brands, beginning with a clothing range for fashion store H&M in March 2007.

Two brands are the leaders in the fast fashion market: H&M and Zara, an Inditex brand. H&M operates 536 stores in the U.S., while Zara operates about 300 stores here out of some 800 Inditex brand stores in the Americas.

Shipping costs isn’t the reason why it’s expensive in Asia, in fact, H&M is selling at a cheaper price in Malaysia and Singapore because most of the garments are made in Asian countries like Cambodia, so the shipping costs to Southeast Asian countries is in fact cheaper!