When 'fast fashion', both as a path-breaking concept as well as a cutting-edge strategy, caught the imagination of the global textiles and apparel industry, few could have imagined that in around two decades or so not only would the argument be turned on its head, but also that it would be 'fast fashion' primarily that would be seen as giving fashion a bad name. Today, fast fashion is antithecial to sustainable fashion, and if fashion needs to become sustainable, then fast fashion will need to die a sure death.
In the beginning, the concept was a strategy: it was about managing the supply chain so as to meet consumer demand by maximising production and minimising time lags. The term used at the time, sometime in the 1980s, was "quick response". Apparel companies realised that the time lag between the fading away of a trend and the response time to cash in on the emerging one was way too much. So, the objective was clear and goal-oriented: to improve manufacturing processes in the textiles industry so as to optimise time in the production system.
According to Tony Hines, author of Fashion Marketing: Contemporary Issues, "Quick response (QR) was a phrase coined in 1985 by Alan Hunter, a professor at North Carolina State University (in the United States), as a method of improving response time in the textile pipeline. Hunter’s original conceptualisation was concerned with improving the response times of textile suppliers in the face of severe price competition from developing countries." The original concept was about protecting the US textiles and apparel industry, while improving manufacturing efficiencies at the same time.
But what started off as essentially a business strategy of optimising gaps (read, costs) in the supply chain, became a fashion concept once a reclusive Spanish entrepreneur called Amancio Ortega Gaona transformed the "quick response" idea into a disruptive strategy. His Inditex bid goodbye to the traditional model of seasonal lines with its design-to-retail cycle, and "fast fashion" became the model to follow.
How Inditex gave birth to an idea
In March 1936, a railway worker by the name of Antonio Ortega Rodríguez and his wife Josefa Gaona Hernández, who worked as a housemaid, became parents of the youngest of their four children. The family lived a mundane existence at a coastal village in the northwestern province of León in Spain, and moved to the port town of A Coruña some 14 years later. Ortega gave up school and started working as an errand boy for a shirtmaker called Gala, subsequently learning to make clothes by hand. Ortega worked hard and first became an assistant manager, then shop manager. He learnt how retail intricacies worked, and began working on designs while staying at his sister's house.
Ortega kept stashing away his savings, and in 1963 he started Confecciones Goa, selling quilted bathrobes that were produced by local women at sewing cooperatives. Three years later, he married Rosalía Mera, a school dropout at 11 and one who worked as a sales assistant in an apparel shop. Mera herself started off by designing gowns and lingerie at home. In 1975, the husband-wife pair launched Zara, a store in A Coruña. All they did at the time was produce low-priced copies of popular fashion. The idea clicked, and within a year they were able to open new factories and launch more outlets across Spain.
Foresight was synonymous with Ortega. He was quick to understand the importance of the computer, and what it could do to his business. He hired José María Castellano, a man with a doctorate in business economics and professional experience in information technology. Castellano gave a technological shape to Ortega's ideas of design and distribution by minimising the time between design, production and arrival at retail stores. Castellano became the CEO of the company in 1984, and Industria de Diseno Textil SA or Inditex was created as a holding company for Zara and its manufacturing plants the following year. Inditex made its first initial public offering (IPO) only in 2001, and till that time there were no publicly available photographs of Ortega. So reclusive was he.
Ortega and Mera parted ways in 1986, but Zara went on to become part of fashion folklore. Today, Inditex is the world's biggest fashion group, operating over 7,000 stores in 91 markets worldwide. Its flagship store remains Zara, but it also owns the chains Zara Home, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Oysho, Pull and Bear, Stradivarius and Uterqüe. Also today, both Fashion101 and Retail01 start with Zara-Inditex. The company's history is textbook material, and Zara-Inditex is the subject of innumerable case studies.
In its own words, "The Inditex business model is characterised by a high degree of vertical integration. It is involved in all stages of the fashion process: design, manufacture, logistics and distribution to its own managed both physical and online stores. It has a flexible structure and a strong customer-centric focus across all of its business areas.
"The key element for the corporation is the physical and online store, a carefully designed space designed to make customers comfortable as they experience our collections. It is also where we obtain useful information for adapting our collections to customers’ tastes.In this fully integrated model is key the ability to adapt our merchandise to customer tastes in the shortest time possible. For Inditex, speed is the No. 1 priority, above and beyond production costs. Vertical integration enables us to shorten turnaround times and achieve greater flexibility, keeping merchandise stock and fashion risk at a minimum." What it doesn't say is that for Zara, it takes a new garment only 15 days to go from design and production to shelves.
Ortega gave up his chairmainship of the company in 2012, but still retains 60 per cent of the share. He wears a modest suit, visits the same coffee shop in his hometown every day, and has lunch at the company cafeteria when in office. Yet, for all his vision, Ortega had not seen one thing coming: a tide against fast fashion, that has been rising by the day for the last few years.
The unbridled growth of fast fashion
The year that Inditex launched its IPO, the World Trade Organization (WTO) had a new member at the fag end of the year: China. In another three years, the Multi-Fibre-Agreement too came to an end. The world textiles and apparel industry boomed, and so did fast fashion.
But Zara was not the only one into fast fashion, though it was the spearhead. There were other big players: The Gap in the US, Hennes & Mauritz in Sweden, and Benetton in Italy. A case study on Zara by two professors for the Harvard Business School in December 2006 pointed out their differences, "While Inditex competed with local retailers in most of its markets, analysts considered its three closest comparable competitors to be The Gap, H&M, and Benetton. All three had narrower vertical scope than Zara, which owned much of its production and most of its stores. The Gap and H&M, which were the two largest specialist apparel retailers in the world, ahead of Inditex, owned most of their stores but outsourced all production. Benetton, in contrast, had invested relatively heavily in production, but licensees ran its stores."
Around the time that the quota regime came to and end and China boosted the textiles and apparel industry, Zara sped ahead of Benetton. Only ten years earlier, in 1995, Benetton owned or franchised about 8,000 stores in 110 countries, with a quarter located in Italy. Zara, then, had only 500 stores, with three-quarters of them in Spain. Benetton had had a similar trajectory. Launched in 1965 by Giuliana Benetton and her brother Luciano, Benetton opened its first store in 1968. According to a study by Donald Sull and Stefano Turconi that was published in the Business Strategy Review of the London Business School in 2008, "Benetton combined its own production facilities with a complex network of contractors and subcontractors, many of which were owned by former Benetton employees. Managers could switch parts of the network on or off to respond nimbly to shifting demand for different garment styles."
The fast fashion model caught on, so much so that in the US people were wondering whether fast fashion could in fact save the country's apparel industry. Peter Doeringer of the Department of Economics at Boston University and Sarah Crean of the Garment Industry Development Corporation concluded in a research study in 2005, "If there is any prospect for the US apparel industry to develop secure market niches for which it has a comparative advantage, it is likely to be in high value-added fashion products where design, quality and speed matter, and where orders are too small to attract offshore competitors. These are qualities that are present in New York City and one or two other urban garment districts in the United States and which are unlikely to survive much longer without substantial supply chain reforms."
But mindless replication of the Zara-Inditex would not work. Sull and Turconi had remarked in their study, “Attempts by older mainstream companies simply to rethink their supply chains, or to borrow elements from fast fashion retailers without building situation awareness, have yielded only limited results.”
Their conclusions were prophetic, “Of course, the trouble with predicting the future of fashion is that it remains the industry most susceptible to trends. A backlash against fast fashion may be brewing as the generation that grows up with it becomes older and richer. What if consumers increasingly favour quality and buy superior goods? What if they become concerned about the environmental impact of disposable clothing? Might they turn against fast fashion as quickly as they tossed out those puffy gowns from 2006?”
The backlash against fast fashion
But then, Sull and Turconi probably had not noticed; the backlash against fast fashion had already started. After all, few in the industry ever noticed what was happening outside, so cocooned was its existence.
In fact, two years earlier, researchers from the Institute of Manufacturing at the University of Cambridge had quantified the degradation of the environment that was being wrought by fashion, particularly fast fashion. Their 84-page report, Well dressed? The present and future sustainability of clothing and textiles in the United Kingdom, addressed businesses, consumers and campaigners, and did not have an agenda, or seek to promote a particular change or approach. Nevertheless, its findings were stark and incriminating.
Researchers Julian M Allwood, Søren Ellebæk Laursen, Cecilia Malvido de Rodríguez and Nancy MP Bocken found major environmental impacts of the apparel sector because of the use of energy and toxic chemicals. The report revealed, “The sector’s contribution to climate change is dominated by the requirement for burning fossil fuel to create electricity for heating water and air in laundering. Other major energy uses arise in providing fuel for agricultural machinery and electricity for production. Toxic chemicals are used widely in cotton agriculture and in many manufacturing stages such as pre-treatment, dyeing and printing.
“Waste volumes from the sector are high and growing in the UK with the advent of ‘fast fashion’. On average, UK consumers send 30kg of clothing and textiles per capita to landfill each year. Water consumption—especially the extensive use of water in cotton crop cultivation—can also be a major environmental issue as seen dramatically in the Aral Sea region.” Gradually, evidence kept mounting—evidence that was well-documented, and evidence that spoke numbers.
Curiously, the first decade of this millennium was when Zara made it big; it was also the same period when fashion started talking in environmental terms. The words “people” and “planet” had entered the lexicon with the release of the Brundtland Commission’s report in 1987 and the subsequent Rio Summit of June 1992; the two words went the fashion way with the new millennium. In 2001, British fashion designer Stella McCartney, known for not using leather or fur in her designs, launched her eponymous fashion house with the Gucci Group (now Kering) and showcased her first collection in Paris. Then came EDUN—a fashion brand founded by Irish activist Ali Hewson and her musician husband Bono in 2005 to promote trade in Africa by sourcing production throughout the continent. In 2009, EDUN became part of the LVMH group. The first Ethical Fashion Show was held in Paris in 2004. In May 2007, Vogue magazine asserted that sustainable fashion was not a short-term trend, but one which could last multiple seasons.
The New York Fashion Week launched its first Eco Fashion Week in 2009, and the first official sustainable-fashion show at London Fashion Week (LFW) was held following year. The Copenhagen Fashion Summit became the world's largest summit on sustainability in fashion. The summit was first held in 2009 during the UN Climate Change Conference—COP15—in Copenhagen. Meanwhile, high-street label H&M launched its Conscious Collection. The company has since been a pioneer in limiting water use, donates garments to charities, and aims to use organic materials. That fashion, certainly high fashion, was going the sustainable way was evident at the LFW in 2013. In 2005, less than 5 per cent of the designers had been sustainable fashion brands, but at the 2013 show, almost a third of designers were eco-focused. Many saw this as an elitist fad, perhaps passing in significance; the watchword still remained “fast fashion”.
Side-effects and after-effects of fashion
In 2012, Penguin Portfolio published a journalistic account of the fast fashion industry titled Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion. Authored by New York-based journalist Elizabeth L Cline, the book delved into the environmental and socio-economic impacts of fast fashion, and went beyond theories. While Overdressed looked at the collective psyche—of manufacturers, retailers and consumers, an article of Cline’s two years later looked at just the colossal waste that the industry was generating.
She reported in the Atlantic in 2014, “In New York City, clothing and textiles account for more than six per cent of all garbage, which translates to 193,000 tons tossed annually. (These numbers mirror national averages: Americans recycle or donate only 15 per cent of their used clothing, and the rest—about 10.5 million tons a year—goes into landfills, giving textiles one of the poorest recycling rates of any reusable material.)… Charities have been our de facto national textile recyclers going back to the early 20th century, and Goodwill started providing bins for clothing donations as early as the 1940s. But this system was set up in a pre-consumerist America, when we had neither a landfill crunch nor a waste crisis: Americans now buy five times as much clothing as they did in 1980, according to Mattias Wallander, CEO of USAgain, a textile-recycling company. And between 1999 and 2009, the volume of textile trash rose by 40 per cent. Particularly due to the advent of cheap, disposable clothing, charities have seen themselves transformed into dumps that accept clothes of varying condition in ever-increasing volumes.” Unending fashion meant ever-piling garbage.
More books about the pitfalls of the fast fashion ecosystem on the planet and its resources continued to be written. In 2016, Nikolay Anguelov, a professor of economic development in the Department of Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts, published The Dirty Side of the Garment Industry: Fast Fashion and Its Negative Impact on Environment and Society.
He wrote in the introduction to his book, “The combined ecological impact of the above-noted processes (towards fast fashion) makes textile production, arguably, the most polluting industrial sector that produces goods for mass consumption. In support of that claim, there is little empirical evidence allowing comparative analysis with other industries. As is, current estimates indicate that textile production is second only to agricultural production in total freshwater pollution. And yet, unlike in agriculture, little is done to change this alarming reality. In agricultural production, examples of methods for environmental stewardship abound in watershed management and in the disciplines that focus on water purification for agrarian use. In textile production, however, pollution is simply noted as a problem, and that is where the discussion ends. In the context of the entire industry, this fact is worrisome, because garment industry analysis seldom includes ecological components.”
In between Cline and Anguelov’s works, disaster struck. In all, 1,129 people died and over 2,500 others were injured on May 13, 2013 when an eight-storied commercial building called Rana Plaza collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The tragedy exposed how incessant pressures by Western brands were pressuring Bangladeshi manufacturers to cut costs by throwing safety mechanisms to the winds and over-exploiting already over-worked garment workers. The silver lining here was that sustainability as a concept could no longer be confined to environmental impacts, and now very necessarily included the hitherto ignored human cost too.
The primary discourse in the textiles and apparel industry now hinges more on sustainability than any other subject. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that were announced in September 2015 have given a new shape to the vision of a sustainable future, and the Paris Agreement of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) dealing with greenhouse gases emissions mitigation, adaptation and finance has paved the way for a new path.
Yet, fast fashion thrives. Only in December 2016, a study carried out by McKinsey & Co revealed that clothing production has doubled from 2000 to 2014, and the number of garments purchased each year by the average consumer has increased by whopping 60 per cent. The production of garments exceeded 100 billion units for the first time in 2014—this means that on an average, there are 14 clothing items per person on the planet. None of these numbers, unfortunately, point to a sustainable future.
Fashion needs to slow down
Industry cannot be straddling the twin planks of fast fashion and sustainable fashion for long. Sooner or later, it will need to give up the former. Fashion will need to reinvent itself fast, relying more on technological inventions rather than information technology in the days to come.
As of now, the world is generating textile waste at a much faster rate than at which industry can respond. H&M, for instance, wants customers to recycle their clothes. But according to the company's own admission, only 0.1 per cent of the clothing collected is recycled into new textile fibre.
An article in Newsweek in January 2016 explained the conundrum, “When natural fibres, like cotton, linen and silk, or semi-synthetic fibers created from plant-based cellulose, like rayon, Tencel and modal, are buried in a landfill, in one sense they act like food waste, producing the potent greenhouse gas methane as they degrade. But unlike banana peels, you can’t compost old clothes, even if they're made of natural materials. ‘Natural fibers go through a lot of unnatural processes on their way to becoming clothing,’ says Jason Kibbey, CEO of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition. ‘They’ve been bleached, dyed, printed on, scoured in chemical baths.’ Those chemicals can leach from the textiles and—in improperly sealed landfills—into groundwater. Burning the items in incinerators can release those toxins into the air.
“Meanwhile, synthetic fibres, like polyester, nylon and acrylic, have the same environmental drawbacks, and because they are essentially a type of plastic made from petroleum, they will take hundreds of years, if not a thousand, to biodegrade. Despite these ugly statistics, Americans are blithely trashing more clothes than ever. In less than 20 years, the volume of clothing Americans toss each year has doubled from 7 million to 14 million tons, or an astounding 80 pounds per person. The EPA estimates that diverting all of those often-toxic trashed textiles into a recycling program would be the environmental equivalent of taking 7.3 million cars and their carbon dioxide emissions off the road.” That’s how bad things are, and till closed-loop textile recycling technology becomes a commercially-viable and scalable technology, that’s how things will remain.
It is not that industry has been sleeping away all this while: it’s that environmental decay is fast outpacing industry initiatives. Beyond a point it is not an industry issue; it is a lifestyle problem. But here too, industry has a role to play. A case in point is that of the Danish Fashion Institute, the industry’s network association in Denmark, which has been charting out a green and sustainable path. In 2012, it launched a new code of conduct tailored to the fashion industry, and initiated an online campaign designed to change consumer behaviour by helping consumers to make conscious choices. In short, consumers need to slow down too.
Everyone needs to understand that growth is debilitating, unless it is sustainable.
