Citizen Writes
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Dangers of unregulated ‘fast fashion’
14/05/2026
The fashion industry has always been cyclical, a constant replacement of ‘last season’s’ styles. But the development of ‘fast fashion’ has had a significant effect on both the industry and those who work in it. Nikolaus Hammer, Professor of Work and Employment in the University of Leicester School of Business, has been researching this emerging sector.
“In the olden days, people went to the shops and bought what brands offered us, but the way it works now is that brands react in a much more short-term way to consumer preferences,” he explains. “Whatever is on television, reality TV shows, etc., can be offered within a week, in shops or more often online. Probably the best way to explain ‘fast fashion’ is that the number of fashion seasons has increased massively, so where we might have once had four fashion seasons each year, we now have 50. The CEO of H&M said there’s a whole new range in their shops every week of the year. And what comes with that is much more tracking of consumer preferences, so brands know in real time what is being sold, either online or through the shops, so they can react very, very quickly.”
In one sense, this development is good for UK manufacturing as fast fashion requires a swiftness of reaction which cannot be accommodated by container ships sailing halfway across the globe. But there are caveats to that convenience.
“What’s necessary for fast fashion is an element of near-shoring, so producing close to the consumer market,” says Professor Hammer. “To produce a particular style in Southeast Asia has a long planning and production and delivery cycle; we’re talking about months. Whereas if you get something produced close to the consumer market, actually in the UK, you’re talking about a week or two. That also allows brands to order much smaller numbers: 500 or so units instead of thousands. But that means the manufacturers have to run all the time to acquire new orders. To produce 500 units doesn’t take very long, so as soon as you have one order, you already need to try to get the next to fill your capacity.”
Professor Hammer has been researching the fashion industry for some time, initially examining the complex international supply chains that stretch from cotton farms to the high street, with items costing £30 or more generating just a few cents for workers further up the chain: “There is an issue, obviously, of power imbalances in the value chain, so my research was more on the workers previously. Then I stumbled onto the fact that Leicester had become the biggest garment production hub in the UK.”
By the mid-2010s there were anything up to 1,500 small companies across the city, producing fast fashion garments for leading high street and online brands. But this was not the good news for the local economy that it might at first appear to be. Research by Professor Hammer, civil society organisations and media showed that some of these ‘factories’ were effectively sweatshops, paying less than minimum wage. Many brands dropped Leicester-based companies like hot potatoes.
Professor Hammer recently collaborated with colleagues at the University of Nottingham on the report Who Pays? Brand’s Purchasing Practices in the UK , commissioned by the organisation Transform Trade. Rather than looking at worker exploitation, this research highlights the unfair practices which created the economic situation that bred the Leicester ‘sweatshops’ in the first place, and which still bedevils those local companies which survived.
“There are huge power asymmetries. We’re talking about global fashion brands on one hand, and on the other a small company with 50, maximum 100 workers, somewhere in an industrial estate in Leicester. Because the entry barrier to build a clothing factory is very low. To build a car factory, you need a lot of technological know-how, you need capital to invest in machines. The garment supply chain, by contrast, is more transactional and dependent, with power stemming from the brand and the interface with consumers.
“Historically the garment industry was always a field where there were a lot of pressure points and power asymmetries, but it has gotten much more unequal. In the large majority of cases, what the brands are doing is not illegal, they just exploit market power. One thing we show in the report is that factories don’t feel they have any recourse. They know when they get a bad deal, but they feel that they have to accept it because they depend on the long-term relationship with the brand. So even if brands come with very unreasonable requests – we found, for example that 40% of manufacturers had to accept orders below the actual cost of production – they have to accept it because they are looking for the next order.
“And we know that pressures at the level of the factories are passed on to workers. It’s a very precarious working relationship because workers only get work and earn wages when there are orders. In that sense, it’s a bit like a zero-hours contract; a worker never knows how much they’re making this week or this month. But at the same time, manufacturers are in the middle so they themselves are under pressure, which is why we thought that this is a good place to look for unequal relationships and to try to make policy suggestions.”
The key recommendation of the Who Pays? report is this: ‘A Garment Trading Adjudicator (GTA) needs to be established to oversee clothing brands and retailers adhere to a new statutory Supply Chain Code of Practice. It should replicate elements of the Groceries sector’s GCA which has successfully reduced unfair practices without harming retailers.’ While eminently reasonable, any such regulation would need to be created in such a way that it didn’t simply push manufacturing out of the UK to nearby countries which could export to the UK within the scale of the fast fashion turnaround.
“That’s a very important issue,” agrees Professor Hammer. “As far as fast fashion is concerned, the UK is not competing with India or Bangladesh, because that’s too far out. Even though labour costs, etc, might be much, much lower, the time and the transportation just makes it too complicated. The real competitors are nearby countries, probably Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, Morocco – these types of countries. And some of that already happened, during COVID and post-COVID, when Boohoo – after the public scandal – took a lot of production out of Leicester and out of the UK. But if you think of, for example, Morocco: to get goods from Morocco to the UK, you have two sea crossings. It’s not easy and not always plannable, so there will still be very innovative and capable factories right here that can work. For example, some almost halved the turnaround time, from 28 days to 14 days, which is exceptional.
“Could an adjudicator work? There is already a template, a grocery sector adjudicator which is mainly for UK farms and agricultural producers interacting with brands and big supermarkets, and that has been relatively successful. Adapting this to the garment and the fashion industry would be an important step.”