What is fast fashion? For the Oxford English Dictionary, it’s “inexpensive clothing produced rapidly by mass-market retailers in response to the latest trends”. To many others, it means some of the worst excesses of our rampant, rapacious consumer culture. Pesticides. Toxic chemicals. Air and water pollution. Plastic microfibres. Exploited workers. Child labour. All so that we can buy unfathomably cheap products and throw them away as soon as they go out of style or we get bored, if they don’t fall apart before then.

But what does fast fashion really signify? Is it as catastrophic for people and planet as it sounds? And will the current, dizzyingly swift system of oversupply stimulating endless demand soon come off the rails? FashionBeans unpicks the threads with the help of some world-renowned experts.

Just how fast is fast fashion?

“When I first started in the industry, we used to work on two seasons: spring/summer and autumn/winter,” says Dr Mark Sumner, a lecturer on sustainability, fashion and retail at the University of Leeds who gave evidence to the UK government’s Environmental Audit Committee on the rag trade’s impact. “Now you have four seasons and each of those is broken down into phases.”

New products hit stores more frequently, and the design process of those products has also been compressed: online retailer Boohoo can dream up a pair of joggers and have them on sale in as little as two weeks. True, the raw materials – the cotton or polyester, the yarns they’re spun into, the fabrics they’re woven or knitted into – will have already been produced, but the final design and shipping is fine-tuned global commerce at its most efficient.

A fast turnaround doesn’t necessarily mean bad practices however, nor slow good. “Most of the sustainability of the product is locked in at the raw materials and processing stage,” says Dr Sumner. So if a brand hasn’t committed to using, say, sustainable cotton, speed is irrelevant, the same as if it doesn’t support ethical labour (more on that later).