Victorian Fast Fashion? The Truth About the History of Disposable Clothing

Hello everyone and welcome back. We are tackling a pretty big modern topic today, but it does actually have a lot of history behind it as well. Not surprisingly. The term fast fashion is incredibly popular in modern day. It's something that we are talking about all the time whenever fashion as an industry or practice or an idea of consumerism comes up. So what exactly is fast fashion? What does the term mean? How far back does it go? And how far back does the practice of fast fashion actually go? Where does it originate? Because when you look this up online, most of the things are going to say that fast fashion is something that popped up in the 1990s or the early 2000s. That it is this thing that just exploded onto the scene and changed our entire method of how fashion works at that time. Some things do admit it goes back a little bit further, but usually it's considered a fairly modern practice. What fast fashion is by the modern definition tends to be that it is very trendy fashion. It is very quick in and quick back out again. Usually it is produced by companies that are intending their clothing to be sold pretty cheaply. They produce stuff that is inexpensive to make, and inexpensive in its quality as well, and they get it to the customers very quickly. So that way it can be worn immediately, pretty much right off the runway in many ways, and is worn for a brief amount of time before the fashion is out and the garment is discarded. Whether it's thrown away or donated or literally falls apart. Because a lot of these things being made very inexpensively out of cheap textiles and with very cheap, quick labor means that they're not meant to last a lifetime. So these are pieces that are usually very rapidly consumed and tossed in one format or another. And fast fashion today has a lot of connotations that come along with it, a lot of negative connotations that come along with it. But as we're going to get into the actual term and the practice, has not always been viewed the way that we view it today. It has gone through many different changes and many different variations over the decades and centuries. But in many ways I found the practice stretches far further back than I expected. So I want to take a look at not only the term fast fashion, but the concept of very quickly consuming fashion and getting rid of it. And this is something that I think that it's important to differentiate from inexpensive fashions that are consumed because people can't necessarily afford the more expensive things. They can't afford higher quality, longer lasting things, so they buy cheaper. And that is very different from those that are knowingly going out and purchasing these things with the understanding that they are going to go out of style very quickly. With the purpose of only wearing them for a short while. And it doesn't matter if they're good quality or not, because they're not going to be worn for more than a season or a few weeks or once or twice. So there is a dramatic difference between inexpensive clothing and fast fashion, which also happens to usually be very cheap. There is an intention that is understood by the customer. So since this is claimed to be a rather modern issue, I'm not going to take us all the way back in history and go back thousands and thousands of years to talk about it. I think all we really need to do is go back a few hundred years and realize that even by the 18th century, the concept of quickly consuming fashion, things that were meant to come into style and go out of style and be thrown away, is well established. Now this is not the case for all clothing in this era, and our relationship with clothing is dramatically different in that time. That's because it's produced in a very different way. There is mass production as of the 18th century. It just tends to be when it comes to clothing for accessories. So things like caps and hats, stockings and kerchiefs, aprons and ruffles, basic undergarments like shirts and shifts, things that are not fitted to the body, things that do not need to come necessarily in very distinct customizable size ranges. There are sizes to shirts, but it's sort of like modern t-shirts. They don't need to fit perfectly. And that is the stuff that is being mass produced. Some of it is changing very rapidly in style. One of my favorite phrases that comes out of the late 18th century is that the style of caps changes with the moon, meaning that it is constantly ever-changing, that what is in fashion this week is not going to be in fashion in a few weeks. And that makes perfect sense when you think of something like caps, something that is very small. It doesn't take a lot of effort. It doesn't take a lot of product, textiles and ribbons and things that go into it. So it is very cheap to make. It is cheap to produce. And therefore, it is cheap for the customers. And they might as well have a fast turnover on that. You can change an entire outfit by changing the accessories. If you needed a more dramatic shift in your fashions, you can have things remade. The fabric that goes into 18th century gowns is not always cut up into small pieces. What goes into the skirts, what goes into the petticoats can be just large panels. So you have a lot of fabric to work with. You can change a lot of your look without having to buy all new fabric. And really, that's the expensive part, not the labor to change it up. So you can go to a local place to have things remade and changed up. You can order things from around the world to have fashions brought to your doorstep. There is a global economy happening, and it is just constantly pushing new fashions at everyone. There are lots of ways of keeping up with that that don't require you to throw larger things away. The smaller things, the things that can't be remade or reworked into other things that tend to get tossed. As we move into the 19th century, things start to change because we hit the apex of the industrial revolution. And how we interact with our clothing, how it is made, how it is worn, and how we communicate fashion to each other changes dramatically. It speeds up. So we can get word of what fashion is across the ocean rather than a couple of months to a couple of weeks. We have steam-powered machinery that can make these things even faster. There are still hands working on them. There are still people involved in the entire process, but they are aided by machines to make their process faster. So you can churn out new things at amazing speeds and ship them around the world at even faster speeds. So fashion, not surprisingly, is picking up and moving at just amazing rates. Quite honestly, by the time we reach the end of the 19th century, fashion is changing far more rapidly then than it is today. The change from year to year can be absolutely mind-blowingly dramatic. And more and more, the clothing is not able to adapt to the next season, the next year. You can sometimes remove all the trimming and start over again. You can get some fabric out of it, but you stop seeing garments being taken apart and remade in the same way that you do. You see a lot of 18th century gowns that were remade in the 1830s, the 1850s, that were completely taken apart and made into new garments. You don't see that as often as the century continues because the fabric that's in an 1880s gown doesn't provide you as many large, giant panels. So you're more commonly going to see the lining of that skirt being remade and reused for lining of another skirt in years to come, but the actual silk and wool and different textiles are less easily used. So we are quickly moving into a period that fashion is changing rapidly, but you have to keep up with it on a more dramatic level. You can't just change a few accessories. You can't just change the trim on your gown or have it recut slightly differently. When we look at things from, say, 1869, traveling through 1871, 1873, 1876, the dramatic difference between each one of those sections of just a couple of years is really apparent. And you look at the difference between the seven years of 1869 to 1876, oh, that is a big difference. It requires not only a different gown and different accessories, but an entirely different understructure as well, a different bustle, different petticoats, possibly a different corset. So everything is dramatic. So it's not surprising that by this point, we start to find articles talking about the issues of this, talking about the fact that fashion changing so quickly means that people are specifically choosing to buy cheap, trendy, novel things, wear them for a season, and then wear them out. They expect them to fall apart. They expect to then go back and buy a new thing because it is more obvious to be out of fashion than it is to be wearing something that is less expensive. There are so many alternatives to the expensive options that are out there. There are cottons that are mimicking expensive silks in terms of the patterns and designs on them in their printing and their colors. There are less expensive silks. This is the era when weighted silks come in. I did an entire video on weighted silks and the fact that they allowed people to make incredibly luxurious, heavy-looking, expensive-seeming silks for very cheap. Those things fell apart, though, possibly in a few months or a few years. Some of them have lasted decades, but they fall apart, disintegrate into nothingness. And it's because they were made to be cheaper. And we're constantly updating how textiles are made, dyed, finished, shipped, and it's making it faster and cheaper and easier to obtain. So more and more people are able to dress with what looks like the most up-to-date fashion possible while still doing it on a budget. They just expect their clothing to literally fall apart. And it's no surprise when you look at that transition that's occurring in the 1870s, when this thing was written in 1874, no wonder with how fast fashion is changing, you either were completely keeping up or you were just so far behind it was obvious to everyone. This of course is not something everyone is fond of. A lot of people are wary of spending money on goods that are possibly going to be novelties, possibly going to go out of fashion incredibly quickly. So they're more likely to be okay with spending very small amounts on cheap versions of it until they're sure it's going to stick around. And in order to produce all these cheap goods, we not only need those cheaper textiles, but we also need cheaper labor. And the 19th century is an era where cheap labor is a major issue. We come up with the term sweatshops in the late 19th century for very valid reasons. This concept of working people in unpleasant and sometimes dangerous situations for very little to almost no pay and causing all sorts of physical and mental health issues is something that is constantly discussed throughout the 19th century. It just happens that the term sweatshop wasn't really popularized until the 1890s, but it certainly was around before that. So all of the parts are in play here for what we consider fast fashion that goes much further back than the early 2000s or 1990s, that people are purchasing very cheap clothing, knowing that it is made out of bad quality materials, knowing that it is probably coming from sweatshops, and realizing that it's not going to last long. It's going to fall apart, and it's going to be out of style very rapidly. They do this, and they purchase these things knowing that, accepting that. No different than fast fashion practices today. And throughout the 20th century, this only speeds up because though there's a recognition of all of the bad and damaging things that can go along with fashion changes that are happening so rapidly, there's also a belief that this is a sign of a good economy. It's a sign of a good society, that fashion is changing so rapidly, it is actually propelling the economy forward. Because not surprisingly, it's good for businesses to have turnover at that rate. You are always going to be able to sell someone something when there's always novelties coming out, when there's always brand new things to entice them. So it's good for the economy, and therefore, it's thought to be good for that country. It is a sign to them of a rapidly growing and advancing society. Of course, this idea comes with a lot of racism, and sexism, and all sorts of prejudice and cultural issues, because it is assuming that you have to be moving forward quickly in fashion and visible ways of that sort in order to be considered an industrialized, growing nation, or to be considered a good, growing economy. That any place that holds onto older styles and older fashions who is interested in keeping their past alive is backwards and antiquated and won't be able to keep up with the economy. So that is definitely a large part of that mindset of the encouragement, despite the fact that fashion is usually rather villainized and seen as potentially morally degrading to be too interested in fashion and spend too much money on it. That's for the individual, though. For the economy, for the industry, that is a good thing. And so it is pushed forward. It is encouraged. And as we leap into the 20th century, you start to see all of the different efforts made to speed this up even further, to make it so that fashion can flash around the world in mere weeks or days, because of the communication systems. They are saying in the 1950s that over in America, they're renting the runway samples from France and immediately copying them and getting them out into stores. It only takes a few weeks now in order to go from the highest, most fashionable items to the stores. And with the understanding of the speeding up of communication and the ability to literally jet things around the world, that fashion is becoming more and more disposable. And this is seen as a good thing in many ways, initially. One of my favorite examples of the novelty of this comes out of the 1960s, because we had invented things like paper towels, disposable textile options years prior. They were already incredibly popular and well-established by the mid-20th century. Well, why don't we apply that to clothing? Then you can have the latest fashions, wear them once or twice, throw them away. So paper dresses and suits and even swim trunks, which seems questionable on a lot of levels, came in as a really novel idea. These were super trendy, fun little options, very inexpensive, and a great way to keep up with the fashion without having to invest a lot of money, time, effort, any of that. It was literally disposable. And this was seen as a potential future. This was seen as perhaps the way everything was going to go. Obviously, it did not in the sense of we aren't just wearing a whole bunch of paper clothing that we're meant to throw away after one use. Those disposable fashions existed in a world that was starting to really view fast fashion and the disposability of it as established, as a good thing, as not just something for some people to do, but really the standard of the vast majority of the population. The earliest use of the term fast fashion that I came across, which seemed to refer to the same sort of thing we're talking about, was from 1946. The way that they used it implied that it was not the first use of it. They weren't declaring this as a brand new term. They just simply said that a shoe company was finding themselves much more successful with going with a fast fashion approach rather than a conservative one. But it's clearly implied that that means fashion that is turning over quickly, that doing that instead of the conservative approach, having standard, traditional, very classic looking styles just wasn't selling as well for them. So they understand this from not just a consumer perspective, but also an industrial perspective and a manufacturing and a selling perspective. Everyone gets this thoroughly by that point. And they're starting to even use the term fast fashion by then. And by the 1970s, it is very commonly used to mean trendy, fast styles, things that are going in and out of fashion very quickly. And it's not shocking that you see an explosion of that term used in the 1970s, because that's when you also see the explosion of brands that are using that concept. In reality, it's also when you really see an explosion of brands in general. Remember that you go back to the 18th century, brands didn't exist. The 19th century, we start developing them at the very end with Worth and other companies like that. But having a label saying who produced or designed or major clothing is a really novel idea until we get into the 20th century. It's not common. And brand names become important. They become a bragging right. They become a sign of quality or a sign of style. So by the time we reach the 1970s, brands are in full swing. And they come in with a concept in mind where they're going to produce a certain type of clothing, a certain type of fashion, a certain type of consumer that they're aiming for, whether it's the one that's more casual and sporty, or the one that buys the most expensive, fancy dresses, or specifically business suits, whatever it is, they have a customer in mind. And so fast fashion finds a foothold there. This is where so many of the fast fashion company names that we know today originate. Gap is from 1969. H&M was originally 1947, but it really took off on a global scale in the 1970s. Zara was 1975. And even Primark was 1969. So there are dozens, if not hundreds, of major companies exploding onto the scene in the 1970s with fast fashion mindsets. Even if we haven't established fast fashion as an industry term yet, it's there as a concept. And it's occasionally there as a term as well. I found an article from 1985 that labeled someone as a fast fashion designer, specifically. And there are plenty of other times throughout the 1980s where the term fast fashion is used. Whether it's hyphenated or using capital letters, it's clearly meant to be a phrase. Not fashion that is fast, but a phrase of fast fashion. But it's when we reach 1990 that it gets applied as a very specific concept. This is when it starts to be used regularly by the media. So you find it in the New York Times, you find it in Vogue. Gap is one of the big names that takes the title of fast fashion from the beginning. It is a fast fashion brand with a fast fashion concept. And that is the sort of clothing that you're going to be getting out of this sort of store. That was what you saw throughout the 90s and 2000s. That was just a typical fashion. All of those brands are considered fast fashion. This became, at first, a growing issue for the higher fashion. For the couture. For the brand names that were built on luxury. This was a competition that they had not seen on that level before. Because people who had the money to buy the luxury items were going and buying the trendier, more fashionable things because they could get them now. Fashions that we saw on the runway for spring and summer 2022, only a few months ago, are in full swing in production to be available to everyone by spring and summer of 2022. Not just those luxury brands that came up with those styles. It will be there for everybody. And this is well established by the point that we reach the 21st century. And it is major competition for those brands. That was really the only negative press that I was seeing about it to begin with. The idea of fast fashion being both an economic boom, meaning that fashion is changing rapidly, everyone's got to keep buying stuff, that's great for the economy, but also as a danger to industry because its whims can build or destroy a company and an entire industry in mere months, is something that also goes back incredibly far. They talk about that a lot in the 19th century. The fact that suddenly this type of fabric is in and the entire wool industry in this area collapsed. And now all of a sudden that other type is back in and oh no, they have to rebuild really quickly. Oh no. So this is not a novel idea. Either the fact that fast fashion has a lot of power in the industry, but all of that leads us up to the modern day view of fast fashion, which comes with all of the weighty topics of ethics. Is it ethical to produce clothing so cheaply? Because you know that the people that are making clothing are not paid a proper wage. They cannot be working in good conditions, earning that little of money. You know that the quality of goods has to be incredibly poor in order to make it that cheap. And that means that that clothing is going to fall apart and be thrown away. Can't be reused, can't be remade. The fashions are changing so quickly and are so novel and trendy that they're going to suddenly pop and go away. And you're only going to get a few wears out of that garment before it is likely thrown away. There isn't a way out of the environmental and ethical damage of turnover when it comes to clothing. And that's something that has just really grabbed on to fast fashion as a concept in the last few years. And it really is only in the last few years. The first references that I could find in articles talking about ethical issues of fast fashion are in 2005. There may have been things prior to that, but I wasn't finding anything. And even that was only a few small articles, 2005-2006. It didn't really explode as a topic until 2007. And that's when dozens and hundreds of articles going and looking at the ethical concerns of the environmental impact, of the labor impact, of the issues with people feeling like they need to constantly buy new clothing all the time because their clothing literally fell apart. Planned obsolescence is not only a thing in electronics, but it is very much a thing in clothing too. Because if your clothing falls apart after only a few washes and wears, you're going to have to buy new things. And that is an issue with fast fashion. And it's going to take us a long time to find alternatives and new options because we can't go back to the way that it was. We can't revert to 18th century or before methods of clothing production. It's not an option the entire economy would need to change in order to make that possible. But we can come up with new things. We can come up with new ways of using our clothing. Because the production process isn't going to just slow down. It doesn't need to slow down. Instead, what needs to happen is that we find the clothing that we want and need and will actually get use out of. That when we purchase things that are good enough quality and good enough styling, that they answer all of our needs for more than just a few months. They continue to be usable for years. Whether that's because the style doesn't go out of style, or because the textiles are good quality and repairable, reusable. Whether that's because things are more easily changed and styled. And there are more and more options out there trying to become what we term slow fashion. Even though they aren't made any slower, they are just consumed slower. And that it is available to the consumer to learn about these things, to know about these things. That the slow fashion brands that have been created only in the last five to ten years, really, are choosing specifically to be transparent. That is a big part of their identity. To be transparent about where their textiles come from, where the clothing is made, the process of getting it there, how much it actually costs, and making sure that people understand these things. That they're gaining knowledge and understanding of it in a way that we lost a very long time ago. So while as we can't go back to the 18th century method of having every single major piece of our clothing custom-made to fit us, we can go back to having a more intimate relationship with the clothing making production process. We can see more of that process, where they can actually get productions made on small scale in an ethical way, when that wasn't possible even 10, 20 years ago. Because manufacturing was built to be bigger and bigger and faster and faster. And manufacturers didn't want to take those small jobs, didn't want to take small, difficult, time-consuming options like that. But now, slow fashion is proper competition because there's money to be made in it. There are people that search for that and spend a lot of money on it. It just simply means that we are trying to find ways as consumers to not buy clothing, barely use it, and dispose of it. But it's something that requires not only our practice of doing that, of making those right choices, but also requires the availability of those things. That we have access to them. They can be affordable to the people that need them. That they can be available to people everywhere. That people can find what they need at the price they can afford in order to make that work. Because slow fashion, while it is a wonderful idea, is still very much something for the privileged group that can afford that. That can choose that option. So that's really the way forward in terms of how fashion is adapting. We've gone through all of these changes and shifts to make clothing more affordable. But in order to make clothing more affordable and still make a profit, they had to make a lot of it. They had to produce it in large quantities and get people to buy a lot more of it. So therefore, lower quality goods, higher fashion goods, things that turn over, that's how the economy and the industry of fashion has been able to survive. At this point, hundreds of years of rapidly advancing fast fashion techniques have brought us to a point where it can't get any faster. Where in order to make it faster, in order to make it more obtainable and disposable, we have to move on to things like digital fashions. We have to move on to literally not even real clothes in order to do that. So we're trying to find alternatives. And it is going to come down to things like smaller companies and small businesses that don't have as much overhead, that don't need as much money. The shopping mall is dying and more and more places are moving to online services as their main outlet or even the entirety of what they do. So suddenly that overhead that was there for all the physical shops is going away. So there are certainly things that we're coming up with in order to change this. But there are things that are exactly the opposite of the way that we used to do things in so many ways. Though we did shop local in the past, we went to a storefront to do so. So it's really interesting to see the reaction and the progress of this. Because fast fashion is a very, very old concept. And our economy and the industry of fashion has run off of it for so long that it's not just going back to the way things were, it's coming up with a whole new future. Caught up in the whim of...