The age of fast fashion: how consumer behaviour has changed and how it’s impacting the companies

Consumer trends are constantly evolving, nowadays choosing a garment could have significant environmental and social impacts. Therefore, to understand if consumers make informed choices, fast fashion companies were analyzed in the first part of the thesis. Through the research, I found that the business model of these companies focuses on a quick response to the growth in demand, which constantly requires the production of a new selection of clothes but low prices. Unfortunately to do this, companies produce abroad by exploiting workers and polluting the surrounding environment. From here I tried to analyze if there could be solutions to this situation, one of these is the introduction of sustainability within fast fashion companies. How? through the implementation of CSR and Green standards and labels. With this new information, consumers are able to recognize companies that are committed to being more transparent, so as to guarantee them a more conscious choice. In fact, the sustainable options on the market are various, from vintage to slow fashion. Other consumers, on the other hand, prefer not to give up on trendy products at low prices. This, as we will see, is due to the fact that some are simply not interested in purchasing products with a lower environmental and social impact, but in other cases they are simply not informed enough to understand what other options are available, or they are deceived by misleading words that convince to buy sustainable products, as in the case of the strategies used by H&M