fast fashion
In November last year, Arcadia Group went into administration after the worst year of sales in its history, thanks to COVID19. It heralded the start of what would result in the biggest change to our high streets since BHS or Blockbuster Video went bust. But at the time, I wasn't all that phased. I was kinda meh about the whole thing if truth be told. As far as I was concerned, we'd see one of two outcomes. Some billionaire tycoon would make a phone call from his yacht and snap up the lot, meaning the clothes would keep on coming. Or the news at ten would report that some of the biggest players in our global sustainability crisis would be wiped from the chess board. I found the mere thought of it hard to mourn at first. I figured that the loss of such an engine for mutually assured destruction wasn't much of a loss.
Objectively, there's no getting around that it's a valid argument, albeit a heartless one. Retailers like Topshop, Miss Selfridge, Debenhams, Dorothy Perkins, Evans, Wallis and Warehouse, have a very simple business model - they make a shit tonne of clothes. According to Good On You, "It is estimated that around the world, about 107 billion units of apparel and 14.5 billion pairs of shoes were purchased in 2016," with "Three out of five fast fashion items ending up in a landfill."
I found it ludicrous, but the reality is that attitudes have changed since World War II. Gone is the make-do and mend attitude, replaced with a throw-away culture in which some households bulk-buy single-use plates and cutlery for each meal. In the words of Juliet Schor, Phd Economist and Socialist, "we are too materialistic in the everyday sense of the word, and we are not at all materialistic enough in the true sense of the word."
It's not happened overnight either. This is the fruits of a slow invasion into our culture, a careful blend of post-war prosperity and good old fashioned capitalism, that has resulted in whole generations of people being born and raised into a society whose first instinct is to throw something away rather than trying to repair it. A society that cares so little for its material goods because such goods are so cheap and readily available. Clothing, among other things, can go from a digital shopping cart to your doorstep within the day in some places. And all too often, that new item, the belt, the shoes, or that new dress, will barely see the outside of the wardrobe. In 2019, The Guardian found that "One in three young women, the biggest segment of consumers, consider garments worn once or twice to be old." So clearly, the fast element of fast fashion is working. The industry is repeatedly convincing consumers that they are out of style, a key element to its success.
This was the catalyst really, the spark which lit the eternal flame. Fashion retailers went from working in four seasons per year, to "a cycle of fifty-two seasons per year," according to Sustainable Apparel Consultant Shannon Whitehead. Far-removed from how your grandparents would dress, clothes for the warm seasons and clothes for the cold. Shannon reports that "they want you to feel like you are out of trend after one week, so that you will buy something new the following week." Their main priority is sales, after all. But this comes at a huge humanitarian cost.
Unethically and unsustainably-sourced materials, mass-produced in truly ridiculous quantities, in sweatshops by an underpaid (and often illegal) workforce. The practice is toxic to ourselves and our planet and the buck stops at the consumer. It stops as soon as the vast majority of consumers turn round and say no, enough is enough.
The problem is that most consumers will turn a blind eye in the face of a bargain, out of desire or sheer necessity. I've done it myself. I don't know how many pairs of Topman or River Island "Stretch Skinny" jeans I've went through, just in my late teens and early twenties. I swear, few pairs lasted even a year! And so long as we all continue to shop in this way, mindlessly demanding, buying, consuming, the wheel will keep turning.
At the time, it was my undivided opinion that shopping mindfully and sustainably isn't expensive if you know where to look. Yes, the sustainability niche has now developed a whole new label for itself that can carry a hefty price tag, but you needn't pay it. What's that old saying, often considered the words of Yves Saint Laurent, "Fashion fades, style is eternal." There's a reason that your parents will comment on your brand new fashion statement with, "I had one of them when I was your age." It's because originality in the fashion industry is very hard to come by. The new trends are just the resurrected ideas from history, dusty old classics, washed down and polished off and consumers will lap it up. The point? Well to loosely quote Meryl Streep in her role as Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, every single piece that hits the runway in Paris will eventually hit the discounted section in Walmart! Good quality, timeless pieces are the ones which will stand the test of time, the ones that will eventually show up in a trendy thrift store for a steal. So surely, buying little and rarely and always always used, is the way to go?
But then Arcadia Group filed Chapter 15 in February this year, something I never imagined would actually happen. The company and all it's subsidiary brands were bought by the online fast fashion retailer ASOS, who closed all of their physical stores to bring them in line with the business model that had been ever-so successful for ASOS in the past. With this, it suddenly occurred to me that the paradigm is not so black-and-white.
This issues were, as always, brought to my attention by the people around me, my friends and family.
From a wide-angle lens, we can first focus on the economy. Like it or not, the fashion industry is a huge boost to the global economy, injecting some $1.65 trillion in 2020 alone. In fact, according to Attire Media, our "growth in apparel consumption increases by 4.5% every year - just over twice the average growth in global income." Whilst that may spell disaster for the planet, it spells profit for the world. And while money doesn't make the world go round, it's crucial to strike a balance between money and the lives of the 7.64 billion real people who call planet Earth their home.
Real people who won't all be born into families of lawyers and doctors and engineers. Many will be born into poverty, rely on food banks for years of their lives and will rely on vendors of cheap apparel for the clothing on their back. I've never tried, but I imagine that finding suitable clothing for a toddler in a thrift store is a near-impossibility. Those in our communities who have little utility over their budget, without the luxury of choice to shop at ethical stores, will miss the affordability of these high street brands that are probably gone for good. I dare say that many kids this term will be returning to school after another few months in lockdown wearing clothes that don't fit quite as well as they did at the start of the year.
And then there are they employees themselves, all 12,000 of them in Britain, who have lost their jobs following the closure of the shop fronts. Hundreds of whom could now face a two-year legal battle just to secure the fair and correct redundancy package. This is the foremost reminder to me that the enemy here is not the thousands-strong workforce as a whole, but the handful of fat cats sitting pretty at the top, getting ever-richer despite scandal after scandal. Philip Green, the man-unworthy of his Sir, who sold BHS for a £1 from his super-yacht in Monaco and walked away. 11,000 jobs gone. A pension deficit of £571m. And yet he walks a free-man on the pearled cobble-stone streets of the French Riviera. Are we fuck "all in this together." Never before has a fiend been more undeserving of his knighthood, a man willing to cut the little guy at the knees to save his own arse.
Naturally, this fuels a surge in unemployment and punches another gaping hole in Britains job market, making an already competitive line of work even more-so difficult to land. The market itself is cornered. It is becoming of increasing concern that apparent market rivals are not in fact rivals, but are owned by one and the same company. Perhaps once, the average shopper was presented with the illusion of choice, but even that is slipping into the periphery.
The closure of shops spreads like a plague, too. Once it's in the well it will poison the whole water supply. The convenience and cost-efficiency of online shopping, combined with high premise rates and heavy pedestrianisation by local councils have culminated into a loose-loose. The clothing stores disappear and so the foot-fall on our high streets and shopping centre forecourts plummet. Cafe's and restaurants and bars and even child minding services swiftly follow. Before long, the visual evidence of the death of the high street becomes plain as day. My local high street is a barren wasteland, a shell of it's former glory. My closest shopping presinct is a maze of echoing caverns, with shells and artefacts of things that once were - the few surviving eateries vastly outnumbering the shops themselves. A wrecking ball will eventually be dropped on it all, another shopping complex converted to flats in the name of progress.
I rather sickened myself when I came to realise my one-sidedness on the topic. I had it so clear-cut in my mind. I'd say things like"fast fashion is bad, period." And whilst it's by no means a good thing exactly, it's also by no means a black and white issue either. The problem is systemic, intertwining social issues with sustainability and environmental issues in such a way that our society both hates and demands the existence of fast fashion. Tackling those issues first is our only path to overcoming the value-minus elements of fast fashion without surrendering the most vulnerable in our communities to do so.
~ Aedan.