Fast fashion and sustainability: a feasible oxymoron?

Abstract

This final dissertation aims at presenting the global phenomenon of fast fashion and, especially, assessing if its global value chain can become sustainable. Therefore, the phenomenon will be analyzed from the global value chains and globalization’s viewpoint, focusing on their global structure and on mostly involved countries, the governance behind at public and private level, the role of capitalism and labor with its implications. Moreover, the workplan will be developed as an analysis of fast fashion from an economic, social and inevitably cultural point of view, thus considering three elements: development, global value chain and sustainability. These three standpoints will be developed in one chapter per each: after an introduction on what is fast fashion, its origins and what implies today, in the first chapter the focus will be on the economic aspects, together with historical implications, as well as the orthogonality of slow and fast fashion; the second chapter will analyze the social part of fast fashion, which has to be understood as workers’ rights in developing countries and how civil society and institutions have or have not intervened. In addition, in these two chapters two case studies on brands will be presented: Levi’s and Missguided. Lastly, the cultural view will be based on an analysis of data regarding consumers’ consumption habits in the Western world and provide some valid sustainable alternatives to fast fashion.