Black Designers vs. Fast-Fashion

You see it in television commercials, YouTube video reviews, billboards, entering a Zara store in the nearest high-end mall, and as you scroll through your Instagram feed. Fast fashion is accessible to the average consumer everywhere. Here is how it works: one day a dress from a smaller Black fashion designer might be on your Instagram then that dress gets mass-produced by a fast-fashion company and sold for a cheaper price.

Fast fashion has been moving, well, fast for years. The business model that produces clothing and adapts new designs at a remarkable pace disrupted the fashion industry so completely that fast fashion doubled in size in the first 14 years of this century. By 2021, analysts suspect that when the final numbers come in, industrial clothing makers will have generated $31 billion around the world; a 22-percent increase from the previous year, according to Research and Markets. While they may be winning with their disruptive business model, there are many losers — including some smaller Black fashion designers.

Fast-fashion companies have been accused of copying many Black designers in recent years. Black fashion designers are considered a rarity in the industry yet they have so much influence on major fast-fashion brands. Smaller fashion companies don’t have the means to handle losing revenue to companies that have been accused of being industrial imitators.

Popular Black designers from Fisayo Longe to YE, formerly known as Kanye West, say they have been “mimicked” by fast-fashion retailers for years, while smaller designers say they wrestle with the copycat clothing industry, but they are more vulnerable to the economic effects.

Bronte Laurent is a 29-year-old Black female designer who was born in Hartford, Connecticut. She spent most of her life in Richmond, Virginia but started and launched her online fashion clothing line in Brooklyn. Laurent is a young Black entrepreneur on the rise, stepping into the fashion scene with simplistic earth tone silk material designs.

“It's not cool to take anything from someone and not give them credit. Or try to, you know, partner with them to make sure they're getting paid as much as you because we're a small brand. We're struggling, right. While you're making all the riches,” says Laurent.

When did you first fall in love with fashion and why?

Can you explain what it's like being a Black business owner in such a very competive industry?

What was the inspration behind your clothing line?

What is your take on fast-fashion brands mimicking Black clothing creators?

Fast fashion has for years acted as an economic obstacle for designers and clothing companies, but Black creatives, in particular, appear to be disproportionately affected. “Black entrepreneurs in the U.S. have a capital of only about $35,000, on average, compared with $107,000 for white entrepreneurs,” according to the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company.

After multiple attempts to reach out to the H&M and Zara media relations and press teams, both companies declined to comment.

Fast-fashion manufacturers produce far quicker than traditional clothing makers by streamlining production, tweaking styles with remarkable efficiency, and delivering the clothes faster than was once imaginable. This allows them to produce cheaper clothing and often beat traditional clothing makers into stores.

They also benefit from the vast scale of their work. Sometimes they sell directly to customers in ways that small-scale artisans and high-end luxury brands never could. And they tend to do all of this at a lower cost.

But that ever-changing clothing production means finding inspiration, and they often get that from other fashion companies’ designs, which they can find on fashion runways or on Instagram. Critics say fast fashion often steals the ideas of others. Pop culture and fashion expert, Ryan Patterson says, “It's making everybody have to work a little harder and faster.”

How is fast fashion affecting Black designers?

Some Black fashion creators are designing and creating clothing that is seeing major success in the market, but very few designers make it to the top tier. That’s large because they face many hurdles along the way from not getting approved for a loan to the lack of partners and investors.

Black designers “are the influence,” says Laurent. Her clothing line consists of silk material dresses and recycled materials that originate from Ghana. Laurent asserts that her brand was copied repeatedly by major fast fashion brands that sell a fraction of her prices.

“There's taking away from us it's just like so many people stealing Black culture and not paying homage to us,” Laurent says.

Fast fashion brands should instead collaborate with Black designers like when Gap partnered with Kanye West’s Yeezy brand (to design everyday clothing like hoodies and t-shirts.), she said.

The birth of Fast-fashion

It wasn’t always like this. In the mid-twentieth century, the fashion industry ran on a rigid calendar. The four seasons, Fall, Winter, Spring, and Summer guided creation and production. Designers based new clothing lines on what they thought was right for the moment.

In the 1960s, the “wild paper clothing trend” emerged in which women would wear paper shift mid-length dresses that became a major trend — proving customers were open to faster alterations in the fashion industry and those faster production methods. The industry at that time was shifting towards mass producing different garments of clothes.

This industry is one of the leading causes of both water pollution and carbon emissions, according to the world economic forum. Workers are paid unlivable wages without benefits and are exposed to many hazardous environments.

Gen Z's contribution to Black fashion designers

In middle schools and high school hallways all across the country, kids get teased for wearing fake clothes in school. “Look-alikes” may be a low-cost alternative for people who can’t afford originals, but they undermine the business model for designers of the originals.Some young people go above and beyond to get the real thing.“I will never wear a pair of fake shoes but I can get a ‘dupe,’ — a duplicate or look-alike — “on a dress that is high-end. I would do that,” says Amari Hanberry, 23, who developed a sneaker collector when she was 10-years old. At one point, she bought the same pair of Nike Blazer sneakers in 10 different colors. She said growing up in Boston, she sometimes felt pressure to wear the latest clothes and shoes to fit in with the cool kids in her neighborhood. Her love for sneakers led her to become a “sneakerhead,” she spent most of her money on the latest sneakers she didn't feel the need to spend a lot on clothes. So while her shoes are vintage, she’s fine with wearing knock-offs — if they are from fast fashion labels like Shein and Zara.

Generation Z (born after 1995) shoppers like Hanberry make up a huge market. The management and consulting firm Mckinsey & Company concluded that Black brands encounter outsized challenges when it comes to scaling up and meeting the rising demand for [black-owned brands]. “Just 4 percent of Black-owned businesses are still in operation after three and a half years, compared with an average of 55.5 percent for all businesses.” says, the management and consulting firm Mckinsey & Company

The harms of fast-fashion

Fast fashion companies use cheap materials from countries that require lots of labor, like China, India, Turkey, and Indonesia to produce clothing that often entertains popular trends. Cheaper clothes mean that consumers can look like they are wearing trendy clothes, but they have the choice to move on to other affordable trendy fashion at a low cost, that imitates what is on fashion runways soon after.

While this can bring profits to fast fashion companies, and less expensive clothing to consumers –the negative effects of fast fashion run from the environmental impact to the harm it causes to smaller designers and many traditional fashion companies.