Development & Research on a magazine article

 Hello,

In today's post I would like to develop my initial idea for a project and make a quick research. My project will be a magazine article about fast fashion consumption in the 21st century, as previous project idea turned out to be inappropriate according to lack of time to finalise it. In this post I will be trying to understand how to write that article, look at the definition of a 'fast fashion' term, seek for explanation why fashion consumption is a serious issue and critically respond to the texts I found.

How to write a magazine article?

Firstly to write an interesting, captivating article I believe I need to look for some examples and professional's advice on this. For this I found this video covering the topic how to create the perfect magazine article. 

Please watch the video here:

How to create the perfect magazine article by The English Teacher (2015)

The video was useful to me as it helped me understand that I need to prepare for my project. The author of a clip suggested that the method - an article planning practice is the key point in to get higher marks. According to this I decided to plan the whole process including the content and the structure of my article in the further development of the project on this blog.

What is 'fast fashion'?

Secondly, to create a perfect article I have to fully understand the topic starting with the main term, which is 'fast fashion'

In three different online sources I found three distinct definitions of 'fast fashion' buzzword.

'Fast Fashion-clothes that are made and sold cheaply, so that people can buy new clothes often.'  (Dictionary Cambridge, n.d)

'Fast fashion is a design, manufacturing, and marketing method focused on rapidly producing high volumes of clothing.' (Stanton, n.d., para.2)

'fast fashion - cheap clothing produced quickly and sold by large, mass-market retailers in order to respond to the latest fashion trends.' (Macmillan Dictionary, 2018)

In every definition I found some similar words refering to time, such as often, rapidly and quickly. This means that fast fashion, what even is suggested by this phenomenon name is fast, quick, rapid for real and it does occur often in reality in the 21st century. Another words that caught my attention was 'clothes are made' or 'clothing produced' that informs us that fast fashion is about producing a massive amount of clothing rapidly by ... By who? According to the quotes above clothes are made by huge fashion companies or  clothes retailers.

To sum up please look at my definition of the term discussed previously.

What is 'fast fashion' in my own words?

Fast Fashion is a phenomenon within large fashion companies or clothes retailers are producing a massive amount of clothing rapidly for commerce.

Why is 'fashion consumption' a potential danger?

I wrote that text to explain briefly main negative aspects of  'fast fashion' these days. With this text and sources (given in the end of a post) I created a list of worth telling aspects that refers to my topic and which should be contained and discussed in the final magazine article.

Alex (Crumbie, 2019, para.2) ' in his article indicates that 'According to the Fixing Fashion report, a scathing cross-party analysis published by the UK Parliament in 2019 (...), the fast fashion business model is “encouraging over-consumption and generating excessive waste.' By this quote we can conjecture that 'fast consumption' has a huge impact on social aspects of life, people's wallets and most important - the planet Earth. It is nothing else but business, huge companies benefit from cheaply made synthetic fabric fibers, which mostly end up in the see polluting oceans and being eaten by aquatic animals.

The speed of clothes production and its distribution plays a crucial role in creating large textile waste in a highly developed countries. Most of these countries are seeking overseas for retailers delivering fast fashion, while UK's companies stopped on exporting and expanded garments production locally mainly in Leicester for big brands, for instance BooHoo, Missguided and ASOS.

'Fast Fashion' is produced quickly and what is even more concerning purchased massively with little consideration as items prices are lower than ever before. Consumers rarely consider buying products, which can stay with them forever. This attitude develops 'throw-away' culture both for companies and consumers, especially if the quality is low clothing degrades after just several wears or trends created by influencers and social media change.

Aspects of Fast Fashion 

1. Fast production

2. Fast trade and sale

3. Fast use

4. Environmental impact

5. Solutions to the problem (recycling, second-hand clothes purchase)

Crumbie, A. (2019) What it is fast fashion and why it is a problem? [WWW] Available from:https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/fashion-clothing/what-fast-fashion-why-it-problem [Accessed: 01/02/21]

Battered Women's Support Service (2019) The Problem with Fast Fashion. [WWW] Available from:https://www.bwss.org/fastfashion/ [Accessed: 01/02/21]

Schlossber, T. (2019) How Fast Fashion Is Destroying the Planet. [WWW] Available from: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/03/books/review/how-fast-fashion-is-destroying-the-planet.html [Accessed: 01/02/21]

Rauterier, S. (2020) What Is Fast Fashion? [WWW] Available from:https://goodonyou.eco/what-is-fast-fashion/ [Accessed: 01/02/21]

The English Teacher (2015) GCSE English Language: How to create the perfect magazine article [Online film] Available from:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAZB2PSm5UU&ab_channel=TheEnglishTeacher [Accessed: 01/02/21]