Re-thinking Fast Fashion

The global fashion industry produces over 100 billion garments each year, yet nearly 80% are discarded within the same year. This linear model of production and consumption has made fashion one of the most resource-intensive and wasteful industries — contributing significantly to carbon emissions, water pollution, and environmental degradation.

In this immersive session, learners follow the journey of clothing across continents — from centres of consumption to sites of consequence, and finally to places where the system is being reimagined.

You will begin in London or New York, exploring the scale, speed, and psychology of modern fashion consumption and the forces driving overproduction.

From there, you will travel to Kenya, where second-hand markets receive over 15 million garments every week. Here, you will meet traders whose livelihoods depend on this global flow of clothing, while also witnessing the growing challenge of low-quality garments that cannot be resold.

The journey then moves to landfill sites, where discarded clothing contributes to pollution, fires, and health risks for nearby communities — revealing the hidden reality of fast fashion waste.

Finally, you will travel to Amsterdam, where designers and innovators are pioneering circular and upcycled fashion models — transforming waste into resources and redefining how clothing is produced, used, and valued.

Through these connected experiences, learners gain a systems-level understanding of how global consumption patterns are directly linked to environmental and social outcomes — and how the fashion system can be redesigned.