How fast fashion transformed the way consumers shop in the 21st century

There’s no single moment in fashion history when the industry shifted gears, but there is one brand most insiders point to as the starting line: Zara.

The Spanish retailer that first set up shop in 1975 scaled globally between the ’90s and early 2000s and fundamentally restructured how the world came to understand fast fashion.

“Zara is the godfather of all fast fashion,” Michael Prendergast, managing director at Alvarez & Marsal’s consumer and retail group, told Retail Brew.

By refining the model of vertically integrated sourcing and rapid store replenishment, Zara brought designs to shelves within weeks and expanded collections to be year round.

“They were the innovators of sending designers and merchandisers to Paris Fashion Week, taking pictures…going back to their hotel room, uploading it back to headquarters, and then headquarters being able to technically knock that product off within 30–60 days, and get it throughout their global network, onto the floors of their stores,” Prenedergast said.

Kirthi Kalyanam, distinguished professor and executive director of the Retail Management Institute at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University, agreed, adding that what really shook up the prevailing retail industry back then was the way Zara was able to own manufacturing—which was generally not considered a “good thing.”

“Zara comes up with the exact opposite model and says, ‘We are going to own manufacturing and not only are we going to own manufacturing of garments, we have taken a whole factory that produces the threads that go into fabric,’” he said.

Soon, other players like H&M came into the fold, scaling Zara’s operational playbook that prioritized in-house design, tight supplier ties, and rapid logistics. Primark became a staple throughout Europe by the late 2000s, while Forever 21 carved out its empire in the US (before filing for bankruptcy in 2019).

In the background, e-commerce gained momentum with digital-first brands like ASOS and Boohoo pushing the model further with more SKUs, shorter manufacturing timelines, and increasingly narrow delivery windows. ASOS currently has more than 20 million active consumers across 200 markets.

These companies laid the groundwork for the success of today’s ultra-fast fashion players, such as Shein and Temu, with the ability to produce thousands of SKUs on a weekly basis, driving enormous variety at low prices, and creating a perpetual newness loop for consumers. Armed with viral TikTok moments, Shein’s revenue reportedly neared $10 billion in the first quarter of this year prior to tariffs.

“Customers are impatient, and they’re very demanding; they want what they want when they want it at the price they want to pay,” Prendergast said. “If you don’t have it, they have such ubiquitous access now that they don’t have to stay in that store. They can go online. They can buy it from a different competitor. They can go to a TikTok Shop. They can go to Amazon.”

However, speed has always come at a price.

In 2013, the tragic collapse of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh that killed more than 1,100 factory workers brought global attention to the human cost of fast fashion, forcing companies to reckon with labor standards, transparency, and the limits of unregulated low-cost production in low-income countries.

Fast fashion retailers were compelled to disclose their global supplier lists to show where their clothes were made, agree to third-party audits to determine safe working conditions, and sign up for social compliance programs.

Consumer activism and a growing focus on sustainability, which has led to more regulations, only further complicated things for brands.

Over the years, retailers have responded to this pressure by rolling out “green” initiatives. H&M, for instance, launched its Conscious Collection in 2010, Zara followed with Join Life in 2016, and others have promoted capsule lines featuring recycled or organic fabrics. Experts, however, cast doubt on how much of this is optics and lip service versus real change.

Meanwhile, the resale, rental and build-to-order model has also picked up steam with companies like ThredUp, Depop, and eBay offering secondhand and affordable alternatives to fast fashion. In fact, secondhand has also shown up on the runways this season with both eBay and Goodwill doing their own shows at New York Fashion Week. In 2024 alone, the resale market hit $49 billion—up from $28 billion in 2019—and is estimated to reach $74 billion by 2029.

Still, for all the fast fashion disruptors, this dizzying demand for newness—especially among Gen Z—is not going anywhere, with analysts valuing the global fast fashion market at $103.2 billion in 2022.

So where does that leave us? The answer seems to be somewhere in the middle for now, where brands that make it big over the next 25 years of fast fashion are able to marry affordability with demonstrable environmental and social progress.

For Prendergast, the light at the end of the tunnel is still Zara. “One of the ways they’ve been successful is they are pre-positioning themselves in fabric and in factory capacity, and when I say pre-positioning, I mean owning it,” he said. “They own their own factories, and then they buy on spec a lot of inventory in fabrications and cut and trims.”

He added that is likely a model that should be replicated into the future in order for brands to be “less wasteful.”

“If you have a base fabric assortment that you're using, as well as a base of factory capacity that has been vetted, that has weeded out child labor, which is pro-human rights, so you control your own destiny, versus the opposite of fast fashion, which is sort of this quick, rapid-fire pace,” he said. “From a fulfillment standpoint—where it opens itself up to a less strict ability to monitor what’s actually happening—Zara really controlled their own destiny, and that’s what companies have to do to be successful and protect themselves in the future.”