Reading: Yes / No / Not Given: Question 7

Fast-fashion retailers have transformed the traditional two-season clothing cycle into a near-continuous stream of "micro-collections," often refreshing online catalogues several times a week and pricing individual items low enough to be treated as disposable. The marketing methods driving this shift deserve far more scrutiny than they currently receive. Limited-run drops, countdown timers on product pages and paid partnerships with social-media influencers who post "clothing haul" videos are deliberately engineered to create a sense of urgency and scarcity around garments that are, in reality, neither rare nor especially well made. The effect is to convert ordinary shopping into something closer to compulsive collecting, in which the pleasure lies in acquisition itself rather than in any lasting use of the item purchased.

Industry representatives frequently argue that consumers are simply exercising free choice, and that low prices democratise fashion by allowing shoppers with modest incomes to participate in current trends. This argument sidesteps the deliberate psychological design of the marketing itself; a choice engineered through manufactured scarcity and constant novelty is not the same as a genuinely free one. It is also worth noting that many of the same companies now promoting "conscious" or "recycled" clothing lines continue, in the same breath, to release thousands of new styles a month, a pace utterly incompatible with the slower consumption such lines are supposed to represent. Describing this practice as greenwashing is not an exaggeration but an accurate description of a marketing strategy designed to ease consumer guilt without altering underlying production volumes.

That said, a small number of brands have introduced genuine repair services and resale platforms that extend the working life of garments already sold, and these initiatives, unlike the recycled-fabric marketing that usually accompanies them, represent a real reduction in the number of new items a customer needs to buy. Such schemes remain a minor part of most retailers' revenue, but they show that an alternative business model, built around durability rather than turnover, is at least commercially possible. Whether major fast-fashion retailers will ever adopt that model at scale is, for now, an open question.

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer? Write YES, NO or NOT GIVEN.

1. Fast-fashion retailers now update their online catalogues almost continuously rather than following the traditional two-season cycle.
2. Countdown timers and limited-run drops are deliberately designed to create a sense of urgency among shoppers.
3. The low prices offered by fast-fashion retailers give shoppers on modest incomes genuine free choice in what they buy.
4. Fast-fashion companies that market "recycled" clothing lines have reduced the total number of new styles they release each month.
5. Repair services and resale platforms introduced by some brands genuinely extend the working life of garments already sold.
6. Government regulators in the European Union have proposed mandatory labelling requirements for the environmental impact of clothing.
7. The influencer marketing strategy used by fast-fashion brands originated in the cosmetics industry.