Love,want,need – the language of fast fashion

Love, want, need - a phrase central to the common ‘need desire’ language of the fast-fashion industry and the media. Created for the consumer.


Fashion is no longer just seasonal. It changes by the week, and even by the day, with the ‘fast fashion’ peddled by high-street mega-chains such as Primark central to the transient trends and enduring need culture. But it’s not just fashion that’s fast and fleeting; the instant and 24/7 nature of digital media also requires a continual stream of fresh content to keep readers interested.

So as publishers and brands become ever more dependent on each other to shift their products, they’ve developed a new language of ‘need desire’ which has been willingly adopted by young fashionistas – a status term itself a construct of this new idiom.

Shop, don’t buy

‘Love, want, need’, ‘must-have piece’, ‘shop the look’ - all phrases now in common use in fashion magazines, on fashion sites and fashion blogs are just a more sophisticated form of advertising, which has always been based on the creation of need and want.

‘Shop’ has become the verb of choice over the more appropriate ‘buy’, as shopping is considered a form of sport and an acceptable past-time - especially for the teenage girls and young women targeted by such messages. ‘Buying’, although it is essentially what shopping is, is too practical and, particularly during the recession, a word to be avoided.

But even in the financial crisis language was employed to maintain the need culture that the economy relies on: ‘Recessionista’ and ‘bargainista’ became common terms, adding status to and congratulating those who found a way to continue shopping throughout the hard times.


The language of love

The language of fast fashion is now just as widely used by consumers as the publishers and brands. They are, perhaps unknowingly, doing the job of the advertisers via new forms of word-of-mouth - on their fashion blogs, on social networking sites, on the high-street.

The idiom is emotive and passionate with words such as ‘crush’ and ‘lust’, once reserved to describe the emotional attachments of humans to other humans, now used to express desire for clothing and fashion accessories. It is as hungrily devoured by the consumer as the fast fashion items themselves – so widely utilised that girls don’t need to finish their sentences to be understood by their peers. “I love…” is attributed to objects of desire, as well as used as an expression of acceptance of another’s fashion choices. And where words aren’t required, making a heart shape with your hands expresses the same thing.


Fashion and content, sitting in a tree…

With everyone now a content creator, there is little difference between working on a fashion weekly and writing content for a brand – just maybe that there’s more variety of brands and products to promote in an ‘independent’ magazine. The fashion weeklies depend on the fast fashion industry to supply products to write about just as much as the industry depends on the weeklies to promote their products and help create the constant desire for the new.

Look magazine, for example, ‘Britain’s best-selling fashion weekly’, includes regular features ‘this week we need…’ and ‘fashion trends of the week’, and accompanies every calendar event with messages that the consumer needs to shop for it: ‘Your Bank Holiday Weekend Wardrobe Sorted’ shouts a headline on the front-cover of the most recent issue of the magazine. With a website to maintain the need for the new is ever intensified – reduced to hours rather than weeks - and such features couldn’t exist without fast fashion.

These would most likely have seemed ridiculous editorial concepts thirty years ago but it’s all advertising – just not as we know it.

Which other fast-fashion phrases have you heard? Do you use them yourself? Let me know in the comments box below.