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I Thought Shein Was the Real Fast Fashion Company. Then I Researched the Topic.

A recent German article about Amancio Ortega’s 90th birthday (TextilWirtschaft) sparked a surprisingly interesting debate in my head. My first reaction was simple: how can Zara still be called the fast fashion company when Shein exists? If there is now a model that is even faster, even more aggressive, and even more data-driven, then surely the title should belong to the newest and most extreme version of the concept.

I was very close to writing exactly that in a LinkedIn reply to the author (Jorg Nowicki, Linkedin).

But before doing so, I decided to spend some time on the topic. I am glad I did, because I ended up learning something new, and changing my mind.

My original argument seemed logical. Shein feels faster than Zara in almost every way that matters in today’s market.

Reuters has described Shein as a company that churns out thousands of new designs a day, relies on an on-demand model, and has become one of the strongest competitive threats in global fashion. Vogue Business goes further and places Shein among the “ultra-fast fashion” newcomers that have pushed the old guard, including Zara and H&M, into a new competitive reality. If speed alone is the test, then my instinct was understandable: Shein looks like the purest form of fast fashion we have today.

That led me to a sharper thought. If something even faster now exists, does it still make sense to call Zara “fast fashion”?

By that logic, an older technology that was once fast would still deserve the same label forever, even after much faster generations emerged. It is the same reason nobody would seriously call a decades-old processor “fast” today just because it once outperformed the one before it.

My point was not emotional. It was analytical. I was questioning whether the label had become too historical and not precise enough.

And that is exactly where the research became useful.

The first important fact is that Zara is not just another fast-moving fashion company that happened to survive. Zara was founded in 1975, and Inditex’s own history makes clear that the company was built around speed, tight control, and a system designed to move quickly from idea to store. More importantly, when Zara expanded to New York around the turn of 1990, the phrase “fast fashion” was used in connection with Zara’s model. Fashionista cites the New York Times article from December 31, 1989, which described Zara’s promise that a garment could go from a designer’s brain to store racks in just 15 days. Vogue Business also notes that Zara is often considered the original fast fashion brand because that 1989 New York Times coverage helped popularize the term in connection with the company.

That changes the discussion.

If we are asking who best represents the most extreme speed in fashion today, then the answer can absolutely be Shein. If we are asking which company became the original symbolic reference point for the term fast fashion, then the answer is clearly Inditex with Zara. Shein may be the more radical form of the model, but Zara is the company historically tied to the birth of the label itself. Reuters’ reporting on Shein helps explain why so many people, including me, instinctively associate the idea of speed with Shein first. Shein built a direct-selling, online-native, highly responsive model and grew into a global giant much later, at a time when the market was already familiar with the logic of rapid product turnover. In other words, Shein did not create the category. It accelerated it into a new era.

That distinction matters.

Zara belongs to the first great chapter of fast fashion: physical stores, fast design-to-shelf cycles, and a supply chain built to respond quickly to trends. Shein belongs to the next chapter: platform-native, algorithmic, social-media-amplified, and dramatically faster in volume and feedback loops. One could argue that Shein is not the origin of fast fashion, but rather the clearest example of what fast fashion became when digital infrastructure, social platforms, and data-driven decision-making pushed the model to its next limit. That is why terms like “ultra-fast fashion” appeared in the market vocabulary. The category evolved, but the origin story did not disappear.

This is the point where I had to admit that my first reaction, while logical on one level, was incomplete on another.

I was using a strict present-tense definition of the term. The article that inspired me was using the term in its historical and industry sense. Once I accepted that difference, the picture became much clearer. If someone says Zara is the real fast fashion company, they are not necessarily saying Zara is the fastest company in the market today. They are saying Zara is the company most strongly associated with the emergence and naming of the model itself.

And on that point, I now agree. 🙂

This does not make Shein less important. On the contrary, it makes Shein even more interesting. Shein shows what happens when the original logic of fast fashion is reengineered for a digital, global, always-on marketplace. Zara taught the industry how speed could redefine fashion retail. Shein showed how much further that speed could go once the store was replaced by the screen, the merchant by the feed, and the traditional merchandising calendar by real-time demand signals. Shein’s model depends deeply on small-batch testing, rapid replenishment, and direct digital reach. That is not a rejection of the fast fashion model. It is its radical extension.

So yes, I began this small argument convinced that Shein was the only company that truly deserved the label anymore. I was ready to tell the author of that German article he was wrong. Instead, I ended up with a better conclusion: Zara is the original fast fashion company because the term itself became attached to Zara at the moment the industry first recognized this new model in those words. Shein came later and pushed the idea much further, but it did not write the first chapter.

And that, for me, is the best kind of disagreement. The kind in which you start ready to argue and finish having learned something.