European fast fashion brands ranked by worldwide revenue 2019

Based on the revenue figures from the company's financial year 2018, Spain-based retailer Zara (Inditex) ranked as the leading fast-fashion company in Europe. In that year, Zara generated around 22 billion British pounds, surpassing the annual revenues of British retailers Marks & Spencer and Primark combined.

Fast fashion’s product suppliers

The fashion industry’s big names such as Zara and H&M are known for driving overproduction of apparel, which is predominantly outsourced through supplier factories in developing countries. H&M’s two main suppliers are located in China and Bangladesh, for instance. While the former also happens to be where most of the Inditex Group’s products are manufactured, the Spanish fashion retailer also has suppliers around European countries, such as Portugal and Spain.

Europe’s textile waste problem

Fast fashion companies often receive criticism for a string of reasons, the main ones revolving around environmental and ethical issues. Besides concerns around materials used in the production of clothes, unsold apparel that may end up sitting in companies’ inventories and clothing products that actually reach consumers but end up getting discarded create immediate problems. Recent studies looking into discarded textile items demonstrated that in Europe total textile waste produced per person was as high as nearly 15 kilograms, most of which went to landfills to complicate the matter even further.