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Fast Fashion Nation

In the 2000s, fast fashion learned to undercut the luxury business and never turned back. And yet, the underside of today’s cheap-and-cheerful fashion math is its boring sameness.

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retail sales shopping bags
The stagnation in luxury has coincided with growing interest in affordable-but-still-stylish clothes, namely fast fashion, the nimblest players in contemporary retailing. Photo: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Teri Agins
August 21, 2025

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The kingpins of luxury fashion, led by Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Prada, managed to hold on to their rarefied cachet over the past three decades, even as they grew to become ubiquitous, multibillion-dollar brands at the center of some of the largest companies in the world. But luxury’s heyday is waning: 2025 is expected to be the second consecutive year of flat demand in the sector. This follows the sales downturn in 2024, luxury’s worst results since the 2008 global financial crisis. 

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