Forever 21's Bankruptcy Shows How Teens Outgrew Malls - The Atlantic - 0 views
www.theatlantic.com/...599356
clothing fashion fast fashion bankruptcy internet climate change teens youth Generation Z
shared by Javier E on 03 Oct 19
- No Cached
-
Forever 21 has been among the quickest and dirtiest participants in the quick and dirty “fast fashion” business that has come to dominate the American apparel market.
-
Fast fashion is what it sounds like: Global behemoths such as Zara and H&M have built massive, highly efficient supply chains in which low-wage garment workers turn cheap textiles into of-the-moment clothing that’s distributed around the world as quickly as possible and sold for next to nothing.
-
At Forever 21, a tank top costs as little as $2.90. The brand’s average store has grown to nearly 40,000 square feet—more than 30 percent bigger than the average Best Buy. That’s a lot of cheap tank tops.
- ...10 more annotations...
-
Forever 21, like its fast-fashion compatriots Zara and H&M, succeeded because it gave young people the thrill of personal choice, more so than any other business model in the world. It crippled some of those other models in the process.
-
Generation Z consumers—kids currently in grade school and college—just see a bunch of cheap stuff that everyone already knows about.
-
Gen Z “likes to do research, they have a limited budget, they spend online because they can get better deals.”
-
“We have a new generation that is more sophisticated in the sense that they are more interested in what they’re consuming,” she says. “They have strong convictions about what they should be wearing and the ethical and authenticity aspects of it, and transparency in terms of manufacturing—especially the ones that are really concerned about climate change.”
-
She pointed to Greta Thunberg and the success of her recent student climate protests as an indicator of what Generation Z is willing to do in order to stand up for their beliefs.
-
For some young consumers, those beliefs mean eschewing fast fashion—a business shot through with ethical, environmental, and human-rights problems—in favor of buying clothes secondhand
-
Teens have been gifted thrifters for generations, but start-ups like Depop have turned that facility into something that can be done on a far larger scale. These start-ups allow young people to buy used clothing from each other and scour the internet for weird finds from the backs of strangers’ closets
-
That growth, along with all the other ways that the internet lets teens explore identities and aesthetics for themselves and find things they like, has started to change how fashion trends form in and of themselves. “It’s now much more common to see trends growing from the bottom up, and then the press catches on to them, and then they become mass-marketed,
-
It might be social media, not online shopping itself, that presents the biggest problem for Forever 21 as it moves forward. Young Americans have the most direct window into the lives of others that they’ve ever had, which means they’re acutely aware of how people shop, and any particular marketer’s ability to influence their decisions is limited by the fragmented, decentralized way that adolescents learn about the world