Yes, COS is a fast fashion brand.
COS is a British fashion retailer. It is owned by H&M Group, and is the sister brand to & Other Stories, Afound, ARKET, Cheap Monday, H&M, Monki, and Weekday. It was founded in 2007 by H&M Group as a concept store on Regent Street, and has grown to 264 stores in 48 markets around the world.
H&M Group was founded by white Swedish businessman Erling Persson, and now predominantly owned by his son, Stefan Persson (worth $28 billion).
COS is a fast fashion brand due to the speed it produces its clothes, the huge scale of clothing styles that it offers, and the sheer number of clothes that it sells.
Fashion Revolution Transparency Rating: 66/100
Good On You Sustainability Rating: 3/5
Remake Fashion Accountability Report Rating: 39/150
Additional Reasons Why COS Is A Fast Fashion Brand
- Despite proclaiming to sell items that ‘last beyond the season’, COS sells over 1000 styles of clothing on its site at any given time (when I checked: 623 styles in womenswear, 425 styles in menswear). This is way too many styles of clothing, even if they claim these are ‘timeless designs and sustainably made pieces’.
- COS’ supply chains are shared with the rest of H&M Group, so how they claim to be making ‘sustainably made pieces’ is a mystery to me. Good On You notes that “almost none of [COS’s] supply chain is certified by labour standards which ensure worker health and safety, living wages or other labour rights.”
- If COS’s claim of ‘sustainably made pieces’ refers to its use of more sustainable materials, Remake’s Fashion Accountability Report 2021 counters this by claiming H&M Group “greenwashes its existing business model of churning out increasing volumes of clothes made with slightly less damaging materials”.
- H&M Group’s transparency rating has slowly declined, dropping to 66/100 in 2022 according to Fashion Revolution’s Fashion Transparency Index.
- In 2022, H&M Group was found to have multiple links to JBS, a Brazilian firm responsible for much of the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest through cattle rearing and leather production.
- In the same year, the Changing Markets Foundation found that 96% of H&M’s green claims were greenwashed.
- In the UK, H&M Group – which includes COS – reported a gender pay gap of 43% in 2021, meaning that women earn 57p for every £1 that men earn when comparing median hourly pay.
- In 2020, H&M Group announced aims to “reach net zero by 2040“, 10 years after the impending climate crisis based on UN predictions.
- In the same year, H&M Group stopped paying its contracted garment factories using covid-19 as an excuse. After external pressure, they promised to pay their garment factories – but the incident should never have happened in the first place.
- In 2019, H&M Group was caught suspending employees in New Zealand who were campaigning for a living wage. Conversely, in 2013, H&M Group’s Global Head of Sustainability committed to paying their garment workers a living wage by 2018 but it still doesn’t pay them a living wage either.
- In 2017, clothes sold in H&M stores (and its sister brands like COS) were found to have been made by 14 year old children in Myanmar for as little as 13p per hour.
- In 2016, H&M Group allegedly tried to overshadow Fashion Revolution Week and the Rana Plaza Disaster by launching ‘World Recycling Week’ across the same week.
- In 2011, it was reported that nearly 300 workers passed out in one week at a Cambodian factory supplying H&M Group.
- In the same year, H&M Group was amongst major European and American retailers who rejected plans for a legally-binding detailed safety proposal that “entailed the establishment of independent inspections of garment factories” in Bangladesh.
Sustainable Alternatives To COS
If you’re looking to stop shopping at COS, I recommend checking out brands with similar styles and better ethical and sustainable credentials such as Kings of Indigo, Komodo, Mother of Pearl*, Organic Basics*, Ninety Percent*, and Toast.
You could also check out my guide to 150+ sustainable fashion brands to find more, or consider searching for second-hand COS garments on my favourite second-hand fashion sites, as well as COS’ own resale site, COS Resell. (Read my review of COS Resell here).
This post is part of a larger guide to UK fast fashion brands, which goes into more detail about the issues with fast fashion, why it will never be sustainable, and how to make your wardrobe more sustainable.
Data for this review is taken from the brand’s website, corporate website, Wikipedia, and sites linked throughout. All information is assumed correct at date of publication. Last updated: October 2022.