Sustainable Fashion: What is the Challenge?
Food, shelter and clothing are all necessities that have evolved into luxury items. Many of the things that we choose to wear, where we go, and what we eat are designed to make us look good. While poverty and scarcity are common in our world, most people don’t experience it. According to the U.S. Census Bureau: “The official poverty rate in 2021 was 11.6 percent, with 37.9 million people in poverty. Neither the rate nor the number in poverty was significantly different from 2020.”
Globally, the World Bank sets the bar much lower than the U.S. and measures “extreme poverty.” They estimate that about 860 million people experience extreme poverty. Brookings found that there are approximately 250 million wealthy households in the world and another 3.6 trillion people who belong to the middle class.
Environmental impact for wealthy and middle-class persons includes huge impacts from increasingly harmful, culturally bound fashion practices. Sustainable fashion requires that we answer several fundamental questions. Why? How does clothing get made? How much clothing do we have in our cupboards and drawers? What happens to clothes when they are thrown out? These questions are being addressed by experts, but many remain skeptical about sustainable fashion. This is a Harvard Business Review piece entitled “The Myth of Sustainable Fashion,” former Timberland COO Kenneth P. Pucker observes that:
“Few industries tout their sustainability credentials more forcefully than the fashion industry… New business models including recycling, resale, rental, reuse, and repair are sold as environmental life savers. The sad truth however is that all this experimentation and supposed “innovation” in the fashion industry over the past 25 years have failed to lessen its planetary impact…Take the production of shirts and shoes, which has more than doubled in the past quarter century — Three quarters are buried or burnt in landfills.…Thanks to trade liberalization, globalization, and enduring cost pressures, very few brands own the assets of their upstream factories, and most companies outsource final production…Like all industries, fashion is nested in a broader system. It is a system premised on growth….Combine the imperative of growth with accelerating product drops, long lead times, and global supply chains, and the result is inevitable overproduction…predicting demand across tens of styles that are launched seasonally is much easier than doing the same for thousands of styles released monthly…Five years ago, McKinsey reported that shorter production lead times enabled by technology and revised business systems enabled brands to “introduce new lines more frequently. Zara offers 24 new clothing collections each year; H&M offers 12 to 16 and refreshes them weekly.” This acceleration and proliferation of “newness” served as a constant draw to bring consumers back to sites and stores.”
Technology and ineffective regulation of global supply chain are key factors that enable this business model. But it is made profitable by a culture of demand for changing fashion and “newness.” The demand for new looks is accelerated by social media and visual apps like TikTok and Instagram. The purpose of clothing is to be worn as an expression of one’s self, not for utility purposes like warmth or modesty. The expression of this aspect isn’t going away. Pucker’s point is that the private sector alone will be unable to increase the utilization of sustainable materials and the development of sustainable business models. He proposes to price any negative externalities, returning to the economist approach. According to Pucker: “After a quarter century of experimentation with the voluntary, market-based win-win approach to fashion sustainability, it is time to shift.”
If he thinks voluntary change doesn’t work, wait until he tries enforced change. The elegant economic theory of pricing externalities works until it is confronted with political reality. It is generally not possible to price externalities. Taxes are not something people like to pay for. Pricing externalities can have an equity impact because the prices that poor people pay will be the same as those who earn more. To change behavior it is better to not increase the price of destructive behaviors but to instead subsidize positive behavior. It will prove difficult to change the culture of innovation. This is reinforced by the business imperatives of finance and design.
But it’s also the case that there is a growing understanding of the nature of the problem, and young people, who are the primary market for fast fashion, are beginning to understand the environmental damage caused by fast fashion. Dieter Holger, in a recent Wall Street Journal That was piece that I wrote
“Fashion companies are planning to buy more recycled fibers as part of a wider trend of businesses using their spending power to foster innovative, low-carbon suppliers. Fashion brands owners H&M, Gucci, Zara and Stella McCartney are among the companies who announced Monday that they will collectively purchase 550,000 tonnes of alternative fibers for textiles and packaging. These include those made from agricultural residuals or recycled material. The planned purchase represents only a small portion of their total output and no deadline was set, largely because the materials are currently in scarce supply…Like many sectors, the fashion industry is coming under increased scrutiny from consumers and regulators about where its fabrics come from and the waste it produces. American textile waste to landfills is on the rise since 1960, reaching 11.3 Million tons in 2018. According to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s latest data. Also, the fashion industry is booming. Regulations from the European Union, whose executive arm published a plan in March that said clothing should be “long-lived and recyclable, to a great extent made of recycled fibers” by 2030.”
Kenneth Pucker made the same points, but none of these contradicts his efforts. These are small-scale, symbolic initiatives. In these articles, another issue is not covered: the widespread oppression of labor in this industry. A recent opinion piece was published in the New York TimesRachel Greenley, graduate student and worker in the fast fashion industry reported:
“Of the 75 million garment workers worldwide, it’s estimated that less than 2 percent make a living wage, according to 2017 data compiled By one advocacy group. When we buy fast fashion from the comfort of our couches, we support a system in which low-wage workers (most of them people of color) make the clothes at one end of the world, and other low-wage workers (many of them also people of color) process the returns, unseen in the concrete suburbs of American cities.”
With economic growth, it is likely that automation will take many of these jobs. Nevertheless, today’s fashion industry must be characterized as oppressive and polluting. The industry should also be considered culturally valuable. The deep connections it has to modern art and culture reflect its closeness to the past, present, and future. People who create clothing express beauty and their personal aesthetics. They also enable customers to do so. While I personally don’t participate in this world, I admire some of the people who do. Because it puts pressure on fashion to grow, the business model is not admirable. How to minimize the negative effects of that growth and make it less oppressive is the challenge for sustainable fashion.
In New York City back in mid-20Th century, before the fashion industry went big time and mass-scale, 500,000 workers used to make nearly all of America’s clothing. For many, clothing was still an essential item rather than a luxury purchase. Although we no longer produce any samples, approximately 100,000 New Yorkers design, market and manage New York’s fashion industry. It’s part of New York City’s culture, arts, media, information, finance and education that makes it financially viable. The transition to sustainable materials, renewable energies, and business models that promote ecological well-being, fair labor practices, will not be simple. The fashion industry, however, is not different from others involved in the long-term transition that we all are making across the developing world. Its goal is to create an economically sustainable global economy. Like earlier transitions from agriculture and trade to manufacturing and from mass manufacturing to today’s automated manufacturing and service economy, the transition to sustainability is not always apparent in its early stages. The sustainability transition is happening, however, it’s important to not underestimate the difficulty and complexity of the future.