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42 I Southeast Europe bne October 2018
Swedish H&M entered the Ukrainian market in August 2018, opening its first store in Kyiv. (Source: H&M)
Fast fashion’s race to the frontiers
Clare Nuttall in Bucharest
On Bucharest’s changing skyline, a colossal building on central Unirii Square has been a constant pres- ence for the last 42 years. Opened by the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu
in September 1976, the Unirea depart- ment store was the flagship universal shop in the communist republic which at that time was booming on the back of investments in heavy industry financed by foreign loans.
Old photographs of the shopping centre show a strip-lit interior bursting with consumer goods, women brows- ing closely packed rows of fur coats, shelves packed with souvenirs, and lines of briefcases laid out on the floor. It was spread over seven floors, from the 1,000-square metre food hall in the basement to a confectioner’s on the top floor with views across the city. Both were lavishly stocked at the launch, a few years before a debt crisis forced Bucharest to adopt harsh austerity poli-
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cies resulting in desperate shortages of food and consumer goods.
Today the building still stands but its exterior is hardly recognisable being covered as it is with giant hoard-
ings that proclaim “Zara”, “Bershka”, “Stradivarius” and other brands from the Spanish Inditex group stable. They fill the department store that is now a rather old fashioned mall, alongside Sweden’s H&M and Turkey’s Koton and LC Waikiki.
All of these are “fast fashion” retailers, a term coined to describe chains such as Forever 21, H&M, Primark, Topshop and Zara, whose fashions progress from design to manufacturing to the shop floor at lightning speed, compressing processes that once took months into a few short weeks. Their low prices and constantly changing stock caused an explosion in the amount of garments purchased in the West European and
North American markets – the number doubled between 2000 and 2014, when it passed the €100bn mark. This sent profits soaring as the increased volume of sales more than offset downward pressure on prices, and turned the own- ers of fast fashion retailers into multi- billionaires. Inditex founder Amancio Ortega is currently the world’s sixth rich- est man with a $64.3bn fortune.
Several of the leading fast fashion brands have been present in Central and Eastern Europe since the early 2000s. They are now “part of the contemporary consumer culture” says Olga Gurova, senior fellow at the University of Helsinki and author of Fashion and the Consumer Revolution in Contemporary Russia, although their main markets remain the more affluent countries of Western Europe and North America. But with a business model based on people buying ever more clothes – and fast fashion retailers are adept at persuad-