Fast fashion is a business model employed by the fashion industry to produce large amounts of garments at cheap costs through reliance on outsourced labor and synthetic fabrics. This process reinforces neocolonial relationships between producer countries in the Global South and consumer countries in the Global North and produces high amounts of ecological waste. For consumers, fast fashion fulfills a need for self-expression, participates in identity-formation, and is reinforced through cultural pressures of advertising and marketing.
Traditional archival methodologies struggle to accommodate this complexity, signaling an urgent need for adaptable, latent variable frameworks that can engage with the temporal and spatial fluidity of fast fashion objects. Additionally, while fast fashion is a prominent subject of discourse among scholars interested in fashion studies and environmental justice, it is not a particularly prominent topic in archival or information theory. To address this, we propose a new framework for understanding fast fashion – the “phantasmagorical cultural object” (PCO). Drawing on scholarship in fashion archiving, eco-criticism, and computer vision, we develop this framework to take the first steps in constructing an archival practice capable of addressing the interconnectedness of fast fashion garments with social, cultural, and economic processes.
Nick Brenner
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