Fast Fashion and the Overstimulated Brain

Fast fashion and slow fashion are often compared through price or sustainability, but there's another important and rarely discussed aspect about how time moves through the process of making and wearing, and how different the time physics of slow fashion is.

What if the speed at which your clothes are made directly affects how they feel on your body or how long they stay in your life? The pace of making matters a lot.

And humans are not built for this pace. When your nervous system receives rapid signals without rest, it produces stress hormones and fragments your attention.

In the same way, fast fashion keeps giving the brain new stimuli before the previous one has settled. You move from trend to trend without forming attachment.

Slow fashion follows a different physics. Time stretches in the making of a textile that passes through many forms. Nothing responds well to rushing because fibres, dyes, and hands need natural intervals to produce quality. This mirrors how the human body self regulates.

When you wear something handmade over many days or seasons, it begins to feel like a part of you. When you wear something mass produced and discard it after three wears, you may not remember it at all.

Wearing something that took 30 minutes to make feels different from wearing something that took 30 hours. The weight of the fabric, the feel of the seams, the slight irregularity in the weave all send subtle signals to your brain.

Fast fashion works like an assembly line on caffeine. It squeezes design, production, and consumption into the smallest possible window. New collections appear almost every week. The entire cycle feels like a rushed heartbeat that never stabilises. It mimics a nervous system trapped in constant alert mode.

Fast fashion overstimulates not only the buyer but also the entire system of making. Factories are pressured to design, cut, stitch, and ship garments within days, often under harsh deadlines that ignore human limits.

A single worker may sew hundreds of the same piece in a shift, with little room for error or pause. This speed first model treats clothing like disposable content. In contrast, slow fashion respects the natural state of making. The process mirrors how humans actually work.

It's as simple as this. If they are made in a rush, you will likely forget them just as quickly.
If they are made with care, they may walk with you through years.