Fast fashion is destroying the planet and our love of it is unsustainable.
This is a message we keep hearing. In the last ten years we have been buying twice the amount of clothing than in previous decades and in 2017 sent 235 million items to landfill. The problem with fast fashion isn’t just the speed in which consumers tire of items but also the impact on quality as an idea moves rapidly from the drawing board to adorning someone’s back. The speed of production hasn’t really been picked up by the media but this significantly impacts on why fast fashion isn’t sustainable. Having spent decades working in the fashion industry, I have seen how rushing to get an idea into the shops can lead to poorly designed, inferior quality and badly performing fashion items. When the process was slower there was time to have more stringent quality control; wear testing, wash testing and evaluating products more closely before manufacturing hundreds or thousands in order to be at the forefront of a new trend. There was time to choose the most suitable cloth for the garment, time to check the cloth had been finished properly, time to perfect the fit so it suits a larger proportion of wearers and time to check the final garments were made correctly before being dispatched. So often now garments no longer wear well, don’t look good after laundering or just aren’t fit for the purpose you want them for. Because of the intense competitiveness and seasonality of fashion the fashion industry is ruthless at ensuring deadlines are met and if not suppliers and brands are penalised with late delivery costs at all stages of the supply chain. Hence a system where all along the supply chain suppliers will try to cut any corners that need to be cut to ensure that delivery deadlines are met. This operates alongside the need to maximise profits whilst so often making sure the product sells as cheaply as possible.
The emphasis goes into how garments will look photographed on a model (someone until recently who was exclusively young, tall and slim) and that they are on trend rather than being an item the purchaser will want to keep wearing. Fast fashion is usually associated with cheap fashion but I think the speed of manufacture and the consumer’s ability to tire of something is happening at all price levels. Paying more does not always guarantee better performance. Making clothes is an artform that requires considerable expertise and skill at all stages of the process. There are so many things that can go wrong with garments and so much you need to consider if you want to make garments that consumers keep wearing. The whole idea of consumers loving and keeping wearing garments as they did last millennium is disappearing. We are so overwhelmed with choice and the instant gratification we feel with something new that the majority of consumers have very low expectations of how their garments will perform. The idea of the perfect item you’ll wear for ten years went out of fashion this millennium. My movement is about bringing it back into fashion. When something doesn’t last as long consumers will have to replace it sooner rather than later and companies will sell more, make more profit and proportionately do more damage to the planet. In the last couple of seasons, I have noticed quality seems to have got worse, fabrics often look and feel cheaper. I’ve been buying the same compositions of jumpers for the last five years from the same brands yet while all my earlier ones still look great after hundreds of wears the more recent ones have all pilled straight away. Likewise, with boots, on my latest pair the heel pads wore through in three weeks. My cobbler, who replaced them with more hard-wearing pads, said that he is replacing heel pads all the time on high-end and low-end shoes that have hardly been worn. I have other similarly priced boots that I’ve worn a lot over a number of years and never needed to replace the heels. I am curious to know if this is because the resources are poorer quality due to over demand or that the suppliers are using inferior resources. Even though fashion brands and manufacturers have been fairly forced to pay more for labour and provide better working conditions ironically prices haven’t increased, is this because they or their suppliers have sourced cheaper substandard materials instead? We live in a world where the majority of fashion consumers now buy cheaply with low expectations, knowing that if it isn’t great they won’t be too out of pocket when they inevitably get rid of it.
What is quality?
Quality has been at the forefront of all that I’ve done for the last 30 years. I had my own successful low environmental impact fashion label in the days before the phrase ‘fashion sustainability’ had been coined, where quality was given the same recognition as innovation. Later I spent years working in fashion technology, improving and assessing the quality of garments for several leading UK fashion brands and more recently uniforms for the luxury market. For me the technology of how garments are created is what differentiates them. As anyone who has bought clothes online knows something can look great in a photo on a model but the subtle details like how the cloth moulds to your body, feels against your skin, retains its shape, looks after it has been laundered, where the seams and detailing are positioned on your body, the fastenings used, the seam constructions, the position and depth of the pockets, the ability to move comfortably in it and whether it flatters your body are what really makes you want to keep wearing it.
I’ve frequently read that the fashion industry only produces cheaper lower quality garments because people don’t want to spend much and invest in quality products. I don’t always agree. I think the problem is that most consumers no longer know what quality is and also that consumers have such different lifestyles and quality needs. Quality being defined as ‘the degree to which something meets or exceeds the expectations of its consumers’. Since the start of the millennium the price differential has become more extreme from the lower end to the higher end with not as many good quality staples in between. The mid-market to be competitive has become more focused on design and luxury rather than longevity and practicality. The inequalities in the world are very visible in fashion, the £2 bikini or the £625 bikini? The upper price tags are the ‘luxury market’. Luxury is expensive and sumptuous but does not necessarily equate with longevity and durability. Anyone who’s ever owned high end ivory trousers or a white silk shirt knows how hard it is to keep them from staining, or a delicate knit or a fine silk georgette dress how hard it is to avoid snagging or ripping. Luxury is more likely to require more specialist care and gentler treatment. For garments to last consumers need to learn how to choose at their budget garments that will perform to their expectations while fitting with their lifestyle. It is possible to make successful purchases at the lower end, where due to mass production brands can afford to spend more time investing in technology and quality control. Independent tests have even shown that price does not necessarily correlate to quality. As consumers we need to be better informed and should be spending more time, not money, to buy better quality fashion (new or used) that is fit for our purpose and learning to look after our purchases. A major advantage of buying secondhand is that you can see how a garment will look after wearing and washing. On my website there are guides to choosing the right fabric compositions, how to assess clothes so they are fit for your individual purpose and how to care for them so they last.
