Fast fashion has inundated every corner of modern living, whether you want to admit it or not. While no one wants to admit they started off buying long-lines from H&M, the unfortunate truth is that many found the affordable, modern, and inoffensive designs from H&M and Forever 21 too appealing to pass up. And while everyone now wants to say that they’re past that phase, it’s not hard to see that fast fashion’s grip on modern consumerism is still strong.

Unfortunately for these brands, awareness is growing that cheap fashion is anything but sustainable or ethical. You’ve probably read the articles detailing the terrible labor conditions of foreign factories pumping out polyester sweaters reading “Los California,” a million times now, but it’s important to reiterate. People are literally dying to make these clothes at the prices that they’re being sold at, and it’ll continue until mainstream consumers realize that, while yes, spending 900 dollars on a sweater is ridiculous, it’s just as delusional to expect a sweater selling for 10 dollars to be made under reasonable circumstances.

This shit is literally killing the environment too. While replacing cotton with polyester is an ingenious way to save money, it’s also a great way to destroy the planet we live on. Hopefully this isn’t news to you, but plastics are a bit of an issue when it comes to Earth’s lifespan. And now that fast fashion brands are pumping out so much polyester infused clothing, my long-lines will probably outlive anything that I write.

This isn’t to say that high end fashion production is rainbows and lollipops, however. I specifically wanted to address fast fashion in this article, and will definitely be returning to speak on high end fashion production as well.

While the slow death of our planet and lack of proper labor conditions are both worthwhile points of conversation, I rarely see the talking point of “culture” being brought up when discussing the future of fast fashion. Yeah, maybe we’ll all be dead and underwater before Fashion Nova stops dumping out men’s rompers, but I think an important factor in the longevity of fast fashion will be it’s cultural influence.

To me, brands like H&M and Guess are doomed to fail (sick throwback) because they have no cultural base or influence. Designs are incoherent and collections are more focused on spitting out clothes and hoping they’ll stick rather than having a theme. There’s no room for these brands to grow because they didn’t have a direction to go when they started. Did you know that H&M is a Swedish based brand? Or that Primark is Irish? Probably not. High end fashion is filled to the brim with cultural markers and constant indications of where these designs and ideas came from.

It’s always a bit ironic to see fast fashion brands steal a design that references a place or lifestyle and replace it with something that doesn’t exist.

Not every fast fashion exists like this, however. Personally, my favorite fast fashion brand, Uniqlo, does a good job of recognizing it’s origin. The brand consistently collaborates with Japanese designers, and because of this I think it’s an outlier, a fast fashion brand that doesn’t appear as a blob of stolen and undercooked ideas.

This cultural vacancy argument was inspired by Rick Owens, who recently mentioned that his newest collection was influenced by his Mexican heritage, and how he wanted to explore that in his clothing. It made me realize that while these fast fashion brands can endlessly pump out their clothing, their retention rate will always be awful because there’s nothing special to bring a customer back to a new collection.

And sure, if you have a more cynical outlook on human consumerism, and think that we’re all sheep that’ll eat up anything, you’ll probably be unconvinced by this article that fast fashion is on it’s way out. If anything, you’re probably thinking that I’m completely wrong, considering how fast consumer culture beyond fashion is growing and how quickly fashion brands are only expanding across the world, but I’d argue with you that we’re just nearing the top of a roller-coaster.

I’m a bit idealistic when it comes to fashion, but I know that it’s realistic to think this won’t last forever. It’s just a question of how many more factories in Myanmar will explode before people decide it’s time to change how we approach fast fashion. Or if we’re really willing to put up with another H&M sweater that reads “Off-Black” on it for the 1000th time.