Are the Fast-Fashion TNCs Locomotive of Development?

Year 2025, Volume: 5 Issue: 1, 33 - 42, 30.06.2025

Fatma Genç Ünay

https://doi.org/10.61192/indpol.1612551

Abstract

The global business of fashion today requires advanced, fair and sustainable mechanism of governance instead of irresponsible mass production and consumption. This goal could be achieved by investing more in national law of trade in LDCs developing more balanced relationships with all actors in the industry to be protected from exploitative behaviour and to increase national production and export capacities of the LDCs to prevent exploitative behaviours of the TNCs. In this regard, dependency theories put forward by critical development economists to explain the dynamics of economic growth in core and peripheral countries still maintain their validity today and are important in the literature on fast fashion mainly through two streams of thought. One explains the dominant role of globally powerful TNC’s which establish economic and cultural dependency bonds between developed and underdeveloped countries, paving the way for exploiting the resources of weak countries in line with historical facts. The opposite view rejects the idea of dependency theories and blame the domestic institutional weaknesses in these countries for causing underdevelopment. In addition to dependency theories, theories of international trade and capitalism are also linked to the behavioural patterns of the TNC’s by questioning whether the fast-fashion business actors act as the locomotives of consumption based global capitalism. This approach strives to analyse the role of global major fashion brands’ operating facilities or subcontracting strategies in underdeveloped countries. Unlike dependency theories, theoretical approaches that stress economic rationality and efficiency of any business enterprises and regulation environments have been dominant driving the logic of industry in today’s world. Today’s businesses mentality praises this mind and behaviour of the TNCs to engage in FDI in order to gain competitive advantage by setting up production units as well as retail networks in different countries for organizing from production to distribution through a chain of agreements with the subcontracting firms. It is also common practice to organize different stages of design with physical and human aspects of economic activities. This article first identifies the theories of dependency and institutional growth with reference to dominant behaviours of TNCs operating in the LDC’s. It then explores how underdeveloped countries can regulate these dependency relations caused by asymmetric power and capital resources of the TNCs in the light of international trade theories. The fast fashion TNC’s are perceived as the key agents and discussed as one of the main engines of the expansion of global capitalism in the light of the constantly changing nature of fashion as well as hidden tools of global hegemony. As these TNC’s act as engines of desires of novelty, alteration and newness of fashion commodities they can be seen as catalysts of increased international trade and signifiers a of global cultural hegemony by the Western world on the basis of exploitative economic relations.

Keywords

Dependency , Development , Underdevelopment , FDI , TNCs , Fast-Fashion Industry (FF) , Sustainability

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