Fast Fashion Brands ‘Stealing’ From Small Designers
@StudioPIBE
Making it as a designer in the fashion industry is the opposite of a simple task. It requires long hours, relentless unpaid work, and heaps and heaps of talent. Despite this deterrence, we are still seeing many new names emerging in the industry, giving us unique, inspired, and ethical designs. The designers reward for their hard work? Sharing and selling their pieces to the masses, being recognised for their innovation, and seeing style and trends influenced by their work. But fast fashion brands have a different agenda when it comes to small designers, and instead of appreciating, they are stealing both the designers designs and their recognition.
Fast fashion stealing from smaller designers does have its highs and lows, however.
The “highs” in question are higher environmental impacts and higher trend turnover time, which in turn leads to the low’s, resulting in clothes being sold at lower prices and lower quality, with no credit given to the original designer. Because of the huge amount of clothes being made in factories and sweatshops, the production process will be reduced in both time and budget, diminishing the quality of the pieces in sustainability and material. Then these cheap garments will be worn by an influencer in one photograph for Instagram, sold to their millions of followers and consumers, worn by them once and never to be worn again until finally this wasteful cycle starts all over again. And as repetitive and damaging as this cycle is, nothing beats how unethical these corporations and brands are treating small designers.
We’ve seen it happen hundreds of times, but our most recent victim is Bailey Prado. Specialising in handmade crotchet garments, Bailey designs and creates made to order, size inclusive high-quality garments, that have been stolen by huge fast fashion corporation: SHEIN, over 40 times and counting, and being sold at times for less than $10. There has been no acknowledgement, no credit, no payment, and no apology issued to Bailey Prado, which unfortunately is far too common and far too unsurprising in this industry.
What message is this sending to new designers? At any moment if you’re good enough, maybe, just maybe, you too could get ripped off and never be reimbursed for your hard work and creativity.
We must appreciate the accessibility of fast fashion to those with lower amounts of disposable income, allowing them to keep up with trends without the price tag. But is it really saving these people money when there’s a new trend every week? Fast fashion lures consumers in with small prices, but in the big picture you end up spending significantly more on short term pieces that will be old news in a fortnight, rather than investing in slow fashion garments that don’t succumb to trends. Talking about trends would require a totally separate article and I simply could not discuss both in depth without this ending up as a piece any shorter than a novel, but whatever your personal opinions on trends are, there are certain facts we cannot ignore about them, that they damage the planet and damage your wallet. If you are wondering what trends have to do with theft of small designer’s work, then I am about to answer your questions.
If a fast fashion company was to dedicate hiring designers to whack out designs like a winning slot machine, that would be one thing and a separate topic. But with these corporations stealing from the eccentric, unconventional and sustainable designers, they are tainting the slower and ethical side of fashion, forcing them to become one of the thousands of short-lived trends, leaving the designers lifelong work left hanging on last year’s sale rail ready for landfill.
By raising consumer awareness to what’s going on behind the scenes, fast fashion brands will start to be held accountable for their actions and will no longer be able to inconsequentially cherry picking which designers they’d like to steal from today.
Words / Lessie McCarthy