Fast Fashion Brands

Fast Fashion Brands

[This guide is being updated today 7th October 2026. Please check back later for the final version.]

Our research found that most major fast fashion brands rate poorly across supply chain, worker rights, environmental criteria, tax conduct and for use of unsustainable materials. 

We rated 51 brands against eight categories. Full scores are available to subscribers.

And with a maximum of 100 points available, it's disappointing to see many brands in the fast fashion world still scoring below 25 points. No brands scored over 50 points, although three did score 40 or over.

Introduction to fast fashion

Fashion changes. That’s the point. But where changes were once seasonal, under the fast fashion model they now occur constantly, with thousands of new items appearing daily on some brands’ sites. A garment’s lead time (the time it takes for a product to go from design to purchase) has shrunk and Chinese brand Shein now has garments ready to be sold in just ten days.

This acceleration in fashion has exacerbated the already grave negative social and environmental impacts of the clothing sector.

Fast fashion is heavily dependent on synthetic fibres, which are derived from fossil fuels. When discarded, they do not biodegrade and often end up polluting beaches and deserts far from where they were sold. The pressure put on suppliers by brands to produce clothing as quickly and cheaply as possible drives worker exploitation and numerous NGO reports have exposed low wages, abusive employment practices, and hazardous working conditions. 

We take an in-depth look at these and other issues in this guide.

Who's in this guide to fast fashion brands?

This guide focuses on fast fashion brands. We’ve included some of the UK’s biggest clothing retailers such as M&S, New Look, Next, Primark, and Topman, which have chains of bricks-and-mortar high street shops, as well as online-only brands such as Amazon Essentials and Chinese fast fashion giants Shein and Temu.

We've also included Boohoo and all brands now under its ownership, such as Burton, Dorothy Perkins, Oasis, PrettyLittleThing, Principles, and Wallis; plus ASOS and its subsidiary Topshop.

We’ve also included some smaller chains such as FatFace and Wallis because they’re owned by fast fashion companies.

The This guide focuses on fast fashion brands. For that reason, we’ve removed two brands that previously scored well in this guide, Patagonia and Seasalt. These are now included in our ethical clothing guide on page XX. In this guide, we’ve included some of the UK’s biggest clothing retailers such as Next and Primark which have chains of bricks-and-mortar shops up and down the country as well as online-only brands such as Amazon Essentials and Chinese fast fashion giants Shein and Temu.

We’ve also included some smaller chains such as FatFace and Wallis because they’re owned by fast fashion companies.

Previously this guide including high street brands like Patagonia and Seasalt, who are now included in our ethical clothing guide, as they don't really fit the 'fast fashion' concept. 

Materials used by fast fashion brands

The materials used to make clothing are a significant source of climate and environmental impacts and one of the biggest areas for greenwashing. While lots of the fast fashion brands discussed increasing the quantity of sustainable materials, or “preferred materials” as they tended to call them, in their products we found that there was a widespread lack of transparency when it came to disclosing the quantities actually being used.

The following offered a full picture of their material use that enabled a clear understanding of the proportion of sustainable materials being used:

• Inditex (covering all brands), H&M (covering all brands), FatFace, Next, ASOS, Miss Selfridge, New Look, White Stuff, Whistles, Shein (covering all brands).
• Secondhand: H&M, M&S, and River Island received points for having a secondhand store. Others such as Shein and Mango encouraged peer-to-peer selling but did not sell secondhand clothing directly and so did not receive any points.
• Repair: Hobbs and Whistles, both owned by Foschini Group, were the only brands offering free repairs of their clothing. A few others operated paid-for repair services: FatFace, Karen Millen, Next, Miss Selfridge, Uniqlo, and Zara.

A lot of companies have been increasing the use of recycled polyester as a way to boost the sustainability of their clothing. We explain why this is not a meaningful way to improve sustainability and is arguably counter-productive in a separate article.

Which clothing brands scored worst for sustainable materials?

The worst fast fashion clothing brands for sustainable materials use (scoring 0/100) were:

• Amazon
• Primark
• Frasers Group: I Saw It First, Jack Wills
• Temu
• Mango
• TKMaxx
• Boohoo Group: Boohoo, Burton, Coast, Dorothy Perkins, Oasis, MissPap, Maine New England, Nasty Gal, Principles, Pretty Little Thing, Wallis, Warehouse
• Phase Eight

Karen Millen, also part of the Boohoo Group, managed to scrape 10 points.

• ASOS: ASOS, Miss Selfridge, Topman, Topshop

How sustainable are recycled textiles?

One way the clothing sector is seeking to combat criticisms about its negative environmental impact is by increasing its use of recycled materials. This has the potential to reduce its climate and waste footprint and is therefore increasingly appearing in brands’ sustainability reports as a positive action.

A series of reports by the Dutch NGO Arisa has investigated the textile recycling industry and reported on conditions in recycling factories in India and Pakistan. The sector was found to be dominated by informality, meaning that workers lack legal recognition and access to basic rights such as minimum wages, health insurance, safe working conditions, and pension schemes. As a result, job insecurity and rights violations are persistent across the sector. The work is repetitive, physically demanding, and often takes place in unhealthy conditions in which workers are exposed to dust and chemicals and are not provided with protective clothing.

The sector is also highly polluting. In Pakistan, researchers found that bleaching water is released into open drains, affecting drinking water, soil, and agriculture, and unusable waste is burnt as fuel or dumped, creating toxic emissions and air and soil pollution. This is harmful to nearby communities.

As part of the research, 20 major brands were asked about their use of recycled textile materials. They had very little awareness of this area of their supply chains and mainly cited the environmental benefits, while making no reference to workers’ rights or working conditions.

Arisa concluded that “having recycled content in your garment or textile products ... does not automatically mean that you sell responsible products to customers” and that to achieve sustainability, a substantial reduction in global clothing production is essential.

Environmental impacts and greenwashing

The fashion industry has come under increasing pressure to clean up its act – from campaigners, from governments, and from shoppers themselves. A survey from earlier this year found that over 80% of UK shoppers take sustainability into account when purchasing clothes. Unfortunately, rather than making genuine efforts to change their ways, many fast fashion companies turn to greenwashing to present a low-impact image that is often far from the truth.

The global fashion industry is estimated to be responsible for up to 10% of global carbon emissions despite representing under 2% of the global economy. According to the Fossil Free Fashion report 2025: “If SHEIN were a country, it would be the 100th biggest emitter in the world, almost as much pollution as the entire country of Lebanon”.

The industry needs to rapidly reduce its emissions in order to play its part in mitigating extreme impacts on the climate. While many brands offer specific sustainable ranges and are, in some cases, making some progress towards reducing emissions, it is difficult to get away from the fact that the lowest impact clothes are the ones we already own. Lauding the introduction of small sustainability improvements is not going to cut it while the industry is still predicated on encouraging unnecessary over-consumption.

Tighter regulations on greenwashing in the fashion industry

Regulators are increasingly stepping in to ensure companies aren’t exaggerating their green credentials. The Advertising Standards Authority recently banned some Uniqlo ads for clothing made from recycled materials as they potentially misled consumers into believing the items were 100% recycled when only the polyester was recycled. Uniqlo insisted that its customers would understand the clothing was made “to a meaningful extent” from recycled materials.

In April 2025, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) gained new powers to impose hefty fines on any companies found to be making misleading environmental claims. Prior to this the CMA made ASOS and Boohoo sign formal agreements regarding the accuracy of their claims going forward and it reportedly wrote directly to 17 other companies to make them aware of its guidelines. Earlier this year it also updated these guidelines to make it clear that consumer-facing companies cannot shift responsibility down the supply chain if they have not made proper efforts to verify any sustainability credentials found to be misleading. Consumers can report misleading claims to the CMA.

Workers’ rights in the clothing sector

Campaigners have been exposing abuses of garment sector workers for decades. Readers of our clothing news column will be aware of the stream of reports on issues such as wage theft, union busting, hazardous factory conditions, and ruthless crackdowns on workers protesting for better pay and conditions.

After facing years of justified criticism, most brands report that they are taking some steps to improve worker conditions. For example, they all have some form of code of conduct with which their suppliers must comply, many publish the names of their suppliers (a measure which increases campaigners’ ability to hold them to account), and some discuss and are beginning to address the issue of living wages.

For these actions, they receive points in our Workers rating. However, the vast majority of the brands in the guide score poorly overall, with all but one scoring under 50. This is because we deduct points if a brand has been criticised for poor practice, such as sourcing from a factory where there is evidence of labour rights abuses. The clothing sector loses points for this type of criticism more than any other sector that we rate. For example, brands including Boohoo, H&M, New Look, Primark, and White Stuff scored 80 or 90 for their policies but lost 50 points because of media and NGO reports of connections to factories where labour abuses have taken place.

This is indicative of the gulf that exists between brands’ reporting and the reality for supply chain workers. And so it remains the case that brands have much further to go to end the exploitative practices that characterise the sector.

Clothing factory safety

The 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh which killed 1,138 workers meant that clothing brands could no longer ignore the deadly conditions in which their products were made. The Bangladesh Safety Accord was launched, a binding agreement between brands and unions to ensure factories are regularly inspected by independent engineers to identify fire, electrical, structural, and boiler safety hazards.

As a result, the numbers of deaths and injuries dropped dramatically.

The agreement now also covers Pakistan and has been rebranded as the International Accord but so far it does not cover other garment-producing countries such as India, China, Morocco, and Turkey where workers continue to be at risk of death by fire, explosion, or building collapse.

Most of the brands in this guide have signed the Accord but some have not.

BRANDS THAT HAVE NOT SIGNED THE INTERNATIONAL ACCORD

Amazon, Frasers (Jack Wills, I Saw It First), Shein (Shein, Missguided, Romwe), Temu, The Foschini Group (Hobbs, Phase Eight, Whistles, White Stuff), and TK Maxx.

You can write to these brands directly asking them to join the Accord or you can sign this petition to urge Amazon to join: action.eko.org/a/wrangler-ikea-amazon-protect-your-workers.

Are workers training their own AI replacements?

It’s possible that garment brands won’t have to worry about workers’ rights for much longer as those very workers are unwittingly training their own AI replacements. Reports emerged earlier this year of garment workers in India wearing head-mounted cameras to record their activity. The footage collected is being used to train robots to mimic the movement of humans, in particular the precise and complex actions required to make clothes or other products. Robotics companies will need millions of hours of footage to ensure robots can operate successfully in the real world and garment factories have started cooperating with an emerging cluster of data-gathering companies to feed this need.

The workers have had no say in this process and are receiving no benefit from it. They weren’t told what the cameras were for and received no compensation for sharing their skills with the data-gatherers other than a soft drink. In some cases, the data was used to provide factory owners with productivity reports which ranked workers according to how much time they spent actually working and tracked their socialising. It seems that this already exploitative sector has found a new way to extract value from its workers with no recompense other than ultimate redundancy.

Retail robots

It’s not just supply chain workers that are being displaced by robots. Lefties, a brand in the Zara group, opened its first UK shop in Liverpool in August 2026. It uses automated checkouts and robots for sorting clothes and hangers which the company director says is to “make shopping convenient and enjoyable”. But it’s cheaper than Zara and we can only assume that one of the ways it’s keeping costs down is by reducing staff numbers.

Waste Colonialism

Our new Waste colonialism rating looks at what brands are doing to prevent their clothing ending up dumped in places like Ghana, Chile, and Kenya. You can read more about the issue of waste colonialism in a forthcoming feature.

Only the Foschini Group had signed up to the Speak Volumes Campaign and disclosed its production volumes. This covered Hobbs, Phase Eight, Whistles, and White Stuff.

Clothing from Gap, H&M, Shein, and Zara was found in all three clothing dumps: Accra beach in Ghana, Nairobi in Kenya, and the Attacama desert in Chile.

ASOS, Boohoo, Gap, H&M, Marks & Spencer, Next, Primark, and Zara were all named as top polluting brands by the Or Foundation in both 2023 and 2024 meaning more of their clothing was on Ghana’s beaches than that of other brands.

Animal products and clothing

There are no vegan brands in this guide and overall the sector scored poorly in this category.

The highest score was 50, achieved by Next (including its brand FatFace); ASOS (and its brands Miss Selfridge, Topman and Topshop) which had some adequate policies covering some of its animal fibres; and Boohoo Group which sold very few animal-based products. I Saw It First also scored 50 because, although it wasn’t explicitly vegan, it didn’t appear to sell any animal products – most products were made of polyester. It didn’t score more because its parent company Frasers didn’t have any animal welfare policies and it owned many brands which sold leather and wool.

The following companies scored 0: Amazon, Gap, H&M, Jack Wills, Marks & Spencer, Inditex, Elite Depot Limited (Missguided, Romwe, Shein), and Temu. Many of these brands had been criticised for animal abuses found in their supply chains, for example, in April 2026, PETA released footage from a South African sheep farm that sells its wool through a broker that supplies H&M Group. PETA also criticised Temu for “flooding its platform with products made from fur, wild-animal skins, angora, and a long list of other products of cruelty.” You can support PETA’s Temu campaign here: https://tinyurl.com/ynndeb36

See our separate feature on animal fibres in the clothing sector.

Fast fashion brands and tax 

Two thirds of the companies in this guide scored 0/100 for Tax Conduct.

These were Amazon, ASOS, Elite Depot Limited (Missguided, Romwe, Shein), Frasers, Inditex, M&S, New Look, Primark, River Island, TK Maxx, and Temu. 

Elite Depot Limited and Temu are both headquartered in the tax haven of the Cayman Islands, and New Look and River Island are headquartered in Jersey, another tax haven. 

Shein was criticised by the Fair Tax Foundation for transferring the majority of its UK earnings to Singapore to avoid paying UK tax. 

The remaining companies have more than one subsidiary in tax havens such as Bermuda, Luxembourg, and Mauritius. Only Uniqlo scored 100 for Tax Conduct as we found no evidence of tax avoidance activity.
 

Israel-Palestine

The highest mark was 80. The companies which scored this did so because, while we couldn’t find any direct relation between them and Israel or the abuse of Palestinians, they did not appear to be taking any proactive steps to uphold Palestinian rights.

Two companies scored 0 as they are BDS targets: Amazon because it provides cloud computing services to the Israeli state and military, and Inditex because of close ties between the chair of ZARA’s Israeli franchise and ultra-nationalist minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Frasers Group, H&M, and Mango all had stores but not subsidiaries in Israel. AB Foods, owner of Primark at the time of writing, owned a subsidiary in Israel, M&S’s subsidiary Ocado was found to source some products from Israel and over 25% of shareholdings of TJX Companies (TK Maxx) and Next were held by companies named in various reports as complicit in the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians. There is also a hotel chain in Israel within the River Island company group.

Senior figures in Next, The Foschini Group, and River Island were also connected to charitable foundations which have donated to groups supportive of the Israeli government.

CEO salaries

In our Company Ethos rating, companies lose points for excessively high pay to top directors or CEOs. While CEO salaries in the fashion world are not quite as eye-watering as some other industries, they are still pretty galling considering the widespread exploitation occurring in the garment sector. Oxfam has estimated that it takes a CEO from top high-street fashion brands a mere four days to earn what the average Bangladeshi garment worker will earn in their entire lifetime.

The least excessive pay was at New Look where the poor CEO had to scrape by on a measly £700k. The highest payout was at TJX Companies (owner of TK Maxx) at a whopping £19.7m last year. The CEO of Amazon received over $2m in 2025, however this comes in the wake of receiving over $200m in 2021.

After the company failed to meet its targets, the CEO at Frasers Group made the noble decision to waive his £1m salary. Don’t worry though, if he manages to turn things around by 2030 he is in line for a bonus payout of £100m.
 

Additional research by Ruairidh Fraser.

GAMIFICATION MARKETING

For the fast fashion model to flourish, companies need to convince shoppers to keep buying new clothes and it’s evident that ultra-low costs and a manufactured cycle of new trends have helped drive over-consumption.

Fashion’s marketing techniques have long been criticised for creating unrealistic beauty standards and the perception that these can be attained by purchasing the latest styles. We are increasingly seeing the use of gamified apps to keep people shopping, particularly from companies like Shein and Temu. Professor of behavioural addiction at Nottingham Trent University, Mark Griffiths told the BBC: "They've mixed shopping and gamification really well. Temu's marketing strategy means you are literally having to browse to get your rewards” and compared it to how slot machines work.

Shein rewards user interaction in various ways, including through awarding points for every 7 day streak on their app.

Addictive shopping apps can be particularly harmful for young or vulnerable people and the EU has launched an investigation into Shein for its marketing tactics.