100 billion question marks

In an industry infamous for misinformation, one basic number we should know by now is how many clothes are made each year. But no one in the industry has a clear answer.

Certainly, there are estimates about clothing production volume, but they are nearly impossible to verify. Production allegedly doubled in the 2000s with the rise of fast fashion—surpassing more than 100 billion garments a year in 2014, according to a report from McKinsey. But other estimates have varied widely, putting the number anywhere between 80 and 150 billion garments a year. Many in the sustainable fashion space still cite these estimates despite the fact that they don’t seem based on scientific evidence or verifiable data. And they’re increasingly out of date. The 100 billion estimate is nearly a decade old—a decade that has seen the cultural acceleration of ultra-cheap, disposable fashion thanks to the likes of SHEIN, Boohoo, and more.

While searching for an accurate number leads to dead ends, what’s clear is that too many clothes are produced each year. And despite all the lip service they give transparency, brands won’t tell us.

According to Fashion Revolution’s Transparency Index 2022, a stunning 85% of the industry does not disclose their annual product volumes despite an endless, echoing call from advocates, citizens, and executives for fashion to reduce its negative impact.

What’s stopping brands from sharing such a basic dataset? The answers to that question reveal the dynamics keeping the industry from making significant progress on overproduction, the waste crisis, and overall environmental impacts.

Fashion’s misinformation problem

The fashion industry’s inconsistent data—whether that’s issues with brand disclosure or more foundational, research-driven analysis—has long been a point of contention.

“This misinformation problem is deeply entrenched,” explains Sandra Capponi, co-founder of Good On You, which published this report. “It’s the very thing that led us to founding Good On You in the first place: to help people see through the greenwashing and get info they can trust. But when ultra fast fashion brands like Boohoo and SHEIN are shouting out about their sustainability credentials, we know the problem is massive and the consequences very real.”

A prickly combination of irresponsible marketing practices; a lack of funding for peer-reviewed research, and a general lack of oversight of science-based methodology standards may be partly to blame for the industry’s lingering misinformation.

Yet despite a range of industry initiatives, there is no legally-binding, industry-wide, or globally objective way of auditing a fashion brand’s responsibility performance. Instead, the industry largely operates based on voluntary disclosure from brands.

And in a regulatory environment where brands are not obliged to disclose such information, it is fashion and apparel companies themselves that are failing to be more transparent.

“I think [brands] would say it’s hard to keep track because of complex supply chains,” says Ruth MacGilp, a spokesperson for Fashion Revolution, a London-based charity that has published an annual report since 2017 to account for fashion’s transparency efforts. “[Fashion Revolution’s] argument is that every business should know its output. The reason they’re not telling us is that these numbers represent such a huge amount of products: it’s disgusting.”

Certainly, it’s difficult for anyone to wrap their heads around the complexity of fashion’s supply chains, Capponi explains. “It’s difficult for brands to even know where a garment has been and who has touched it before it arrives in the store or on your doorstep,” she says. “But brands have a responsibility to do better.”

Production and waste at an unforeseen level

To understand fashion’s unprecedented overproduction crisis, you only need to survey the landfills. As with production volume, it’s hard to get an accurate estimate of textile waste, as well. In fact, we don’t know how much clothing is actually sent to landfills. More than 90 million tonnes of textile waste may be created each year, by one estimate. But the mountains of clothing waste dumped on countries from Ghana to Chile make clear the problem is only getting worse, and as the 2023 Textile Exchange Material Market Report reveals, global fibre production per person has increased from 8.3 kilograms in 1975 to 14.6 kilograms per person in 2022.

The emotional response to waste and production on this scale—particularly when it comes to fast fashion—speaks to an industry-wide bewilderment with how such numbers are even possible.

In spring 2022, for example, an infographic about SHEIN’s “incomparable churn” sent shock-waves through social media. SHEIN had reportedly uploaded more than 300,000 individual new styles to its website year to date, Business of Fashion reported. That number blew the original architects of fast fashion (H&M Group, Zara, Boohoo.com) out of the water. This data (originally compiled by analytics platform EDITED to help fashion decode the brand’s ultra fast business model) highlights the tension between certain industry leaders who see numbers of such a scale as a mark of business success and others who condemn the practice as an irresponsible affront to a planet in crisis.

Such an uncomfortable clash of ideologies gets to the crux of emerging degrowth principles that are slowly taking hold in many corners of the industry. A rejection of the fast fashion business model; decoupling the production of cheap garments from profitability, and ultimately producing fewer garments (that we repair instead of discard) are examples of core strategies that the sustainable fashion movement is trying to grapple with.

But as Fashion Revolution’s Transparency Index alludes to, implementing this work at scale is immensely challenging without reliable data to work from.

“The reason the index exists is to incentivise brands to be more transparent,” MacGilp says. “We hope that with more brands disclosing, it’ll be a knock-on effect for industry-wide change.”

Hiding behind the complexity of it all

If trying to picture unwanted mountains of textile seems intimidating, try visualising the network of the fashion industry’s global supply chain. Across different regions, stakeholders, tier suppliers, shipping routes from farming to fabric, it’s a level of complexity that escalates according to fashion’s freewheeling growth objectives. And no brand’s supply chain is quite like another’s.

“Sometimes we assume that brands and corporations’ internal operations are very much the same: that one system’s organisation exists like another,” says Natalie Grillon, founder of Open Supply Hub whose work includes mapping more than 90,000 facilities in the apparel sector to clean, standardise, and open up those data sets. “What we’ve found working with brand supply chain information is that this is very much not the case.”

Divergences in digital tracking tools and how data exchange happens across team structures is where fashion gets lost in its own “complex supply chain” mess, Grillon explains.

“If a brand is working with an agent, for example, it may not be possible to have per factory or per facility data: it’s difficult to know how much product they make if they don’t know their supply chain directly.”

But it’s more than likely that the biggest players in fashion have a sense. And they may be hiding behind the complexity of it all, Grillon admits: “On an aggregate level, they probably know.”

“Let’s not pretend that every brand and corporation is on board with this transparency and sustainability agenda—and let’s not pretend that all consumers are either,” Grillon reminds us. “The majority of people are still not aware that there’s a waste problem in this industry.”

Despite extensive sustainability strategies from companies (and the personal efforts of many well-intentioned individuals embedded within them), the industry-wide disconnect between brand speak and the waste they generate undermines the values they claim to be built on.

In a now legendary viral TikTok, New York-based waste consultant Anna Sacks (known as “The Trash Walker”) read out consumer-friendly sustainability copy from Coach’s repair program (eg “don’t ditch it—repair it!”) while holding slashed product she’d acquired from a store dumpster. The incident was so detrimental to the brand that Coach issued a statement in response, claiming that “the damaged product that was being destroyed in stores represents approximately 1% of units globally.”

Empowering consumers to act

It’s clear that getting brands to tell us how many clothes they make depends on this agenda being elevated in as many public domains as possible: increasing the pressure on fashion to publish its impact.

The stakes are real. Greater transparency is an essential first step in addressing the industry’s overall impacts, says Capponi. But she also argues that perfect can’t be the enemy of progress.

“Like most things, there’s a balance”. Capponi co-founded Good On You after recognising that consumers wanted to shop more sustainably but, because of missing or poorly-communicated information, didn’t know where to start. “We shouldn’t wait for perfect data to help consumers make better choices. We should give them the best information that we currently have access to and empower them to take action today.”

The swells of a mass movement interested in and insistent on addressing the question marks are building. What comes next must be a global commitment to accountability in which production volume disclosure is the rule, not the exception, within sustainability reporting in fashion.

The post No One Knows How Many Clothes Are Made. Why Won’t Brands Tell Us? appeared first on Good On You.

Fashion’s negative impacts are getting worse

How do you solve a problem like fashion? The industry is only getting bigger and its sustainability performance is not catching up with the pace of growth.

Set to a backdrop this stark, it’s no surprise that an emerging number of super-engaged, eco-critical academics, activists, designers, and advocates are turning towards the ultimate alternative: rejecting mainstream economics in favour of something hopeful, complex, and to some, delusional.

The banner they fly is “degrowth”—a fascinating word, as it refers to a process, a calling, a framework, and a lifestyle all wrapped up into one.

For the diverse movement of people calling for degrowth, the motivation is simple: rich countries must balance their economies with planetary boundaries.

For many in the growth-focused fashion industry, the term creates discomfort by challenging establishment thinking. So much so, it might be hard to imagine the fashion industry choosing this route.

But as grassroots movements have shown us throughout history, degrowth could be our future if we choose it. And for the diverse movement of people calling for degrowth, the motivation is simple: rich countries must balance their economies with planetary boundaries. The survival of many people around the world already depends on it. And what fashion industry is there without people?

As an emerging sustainability topic for fashion, degrowth can feel like a heady concept rather than a feasible model. Few corporate-level case studies exist. So what does degrowth really mean? What could it look like? For answers, let’s take a look at the ideals behind degrowth and some of the glimmers of progress pushing for change in the industry.

What is degrowth all about? Transforming an unjust system

At a high level, degrowth refers to a voluntary reduction of growth in a democratic society. And degrowth is not specific to fashion alone.

This transformative process doesn’t come from an “outside” force like, for example, a recession. A recession isn’t degrowth because it’s a reactive contraction, rather than proactive, controlled shrinking.

In fashion, degrowth starts with a rejection of the fast fashion business model. That looks like decoupling the production of cheap garments from profitability. That looks like producing fewer garments that we keep for longer and repair instead of throwing them away.

That’s where you can begin to understand why degrowth sounds so radical and controversial: it calls for a full-scale reimagining of our economic system.

Degrowth isn’t new: the movement’s roots go deep

At its core, the ideas behind degrowth call for new strategies: degrowth is a framework that’s about transformation. It builds on the work of ecological and anti-colonial theorists. In this way, the concept of degrowth is closely linked with climate justice, Indigenous rights, and reparations for fashion’s extractive and neo-colonial production models.

As a movement, degrowth is often said to have emerged in France in the 1970s. But that’s not the full story. Non-Eurocentric communities around the world have operated according to degrowth’s ambitions for millennia—proving that our minds create our worlds, not our markets.

Communities around the world have operated according to degrowth’s ambitions for millennia.

Degrowth addresses the contradictions at play within “sustainable fashion”. From our values-based shopping choices through to our brand alignments, it is both compelling and painful to address this industry’s deeply exploitative history.

“Current environmental crises are a result of the societal crisis of inequality” argues Marula Tsagkari, Degrowth PhD candidate at The Autonomous University of Barcelona. She’s also a member of Research & Degrowth, an academic collective dedicated to research and awareness-raising.

New data underscores the urgent need to act now

The global context and system that fashion’s production and consumption operate in make degrowth a radical framework for transformation. One of the movement’s key calls is for rich countries to stop focusing on GDP (gross domestic product) growth as a primary objective and to organise their economies instead around supporting human wellbeing and reducing inequality.

Ground-breaking new data is beginning to reveal the extent of this unequal exchange, highlighting the ecological debt of rich nations in the so-called “Global North” and what they owe the rest of the world.

We have mishandled our relationship with nature because only a small percentage of the population decides on how we deal with it.

The evidence-based research, led by Prof Jason Hickel of the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB), assigns responsibility for damage caused by 160 countries in the past 50 years, demonstrating which regions are behind the vast majority of global ecological damage. It finds that the US is the biggest culprit, accounting for 27% of the world’s excess material use, followed by the EU at 25% (which included the UK during the analysis period).

While this research is not specific to fashion, it’s poignant to see that these polluting regions house the headquarters of many of the world’s powerful global fashion brands. Aside from ecological impact, the social struggles of workers in fashion’s commodity chain expose the inequity driving commercial success for corporations.

Don’t let the terminology distract you from the problem

Like any alternative argument, degrowth is regularly met with mainstream resistance. Despite the tremors of excitement around degrowth among advocates for sustainability, big brands haven’t been great at giving us examples of it in action.

Why, when degrowth offers so much opportunity to resolve climate and human justice issues at scale, is the topic so rarely addressed?

Immediately, we can reference the economic system that fashion operates in that prioritises the accumulation of capital over the wellbeing of people. Market logic is currently at odds with degrowth theory. However, the terminology used is another barrier set in the way between theory and practical adoption.

To engage with degrowth, a high level of political literacy is required. That’s something that turns off many individuals and fashion brands alike. Yes, degrowth—like the problems it aims to solve—is an inherently complex model for the future. It can be time-consuming to understand and apply.

Why is that, when degrowth offers so much opportunity to resolve climate and human justice issues at scale, is the topic so rarely addressed?

Some of the tangible, interdisciplinary actions that take place in degrowth strategies include economic modelling, civic scenario planning, environmental justice lobbying, teaching and communications, care work, industry-level systems design, grassroots activism and so much more—all contributing to and occurring under new policy conditions.

In addition, the language of degrowth is subject to interpretation and not always that accessible. When we hear the word “growth”, many of us have been conditioned to immediately associate it with goodness. That poses messaging challenges for the degrowth movement, as we make the case for moving to economic models that respect planetary boundaries.

When the movement was emerging, “degrowth” was chosen intentionally and provocatively as a “missile word” (when used, it creates disruption and reaction) to foster debate. Some thought leaders, including the esteemed economist Kate Raworth, author of “Donut Economics”, argue that the missile tends to backfire: “throw it into a conversation and it causes widespread confusion and mistaken assumptions”.

Degrowth ideas sometimes go by other names, too. “Post-growth”, “Altgrowth”, “Donut Economics”, “the Wellbeing Economy”—there are a constellation of terms and intersectional approaches, which could be why this topic is so vulnerable to its language being co-opted.

Degrowth calls for creativity and collective imagination

Despite these challenges, seeds of degrowth are quietly being planted. An invigorating mass of small and independent brands, which aren’t constrained by public ownership, are rejecting corporate operations in favour of slower, localised, and intentional fashion production. They’re reconfiguring what is meant by the word “success” as they go. There’s so much creative potential when the pressure to exponentially expand as a company isn’t central. That can look like working on small-scale, custom tailoring; upcycle-only operations; renewal and repair offerings, as well as simply limiting the range of available products to prioritise more modular/capsule dressing systems.

In addition to the degrowth values of designers and brands, new services are emerging across the market to support degrowth’s focus on less. In the UK, The Restory is an aftercare service that’s gained a massive social media following for its luxury repair videos. Meanwhile, in the US, newcomer Lotte offers a remote sustainability styling service focused on your relationship with the clothes you already own.

These attitudes are showing up in high-level industry guidance, too. In an effort to shift the narrative, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) created a high-level commitment included in the renewed Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action—sharing recommendations for fashion communicators to align with the Paris Agreement goals.

There’s so much creative potential when the pressure to exponentially expand isn’t central.

It’s a necessary tactic for progress, when, according to Good On You, only 6% of large brands have a science-based greenhouse gas emissions target. Promoting lifestyle changes that help limit global temperature rise is central within the UNEP recommendation, ranging from “spotlighting new role models and notions of aspiration or success” right through to “celebrating the ecological, cultural, and social values of the industry”. Such recommendations align closely with degrowth strategy frameworks and could be integrated into policy that supports wellbeing over wealth.

Elsewhere, fashion is betting on the impact of circular business models as a way to decouple revenue streams from production and resource use. According to the Ellen McArthur Foundation, clothing production doubled between 2000 and 2015 while during the same period, utilisation of those clothes decreased by 36%.

We’re creating more clothes and wearing them less, underscoring the simple call to make less stuff.

In 2021, the British Fashion Council’s Institute of Positive Fashion addressed the impact of the fashion industry. Their top key target outcome? Reduce the volume of new physical clothing.

Encouraging fashion brand stakeholders to reduce consumer demand for new physical goods doesn’t make sense within the current market logic. Yet here we are. Degrowth may be complex, but it’s far from illogical.

The future of fashion can’t centre on consumption

Tackling the dominance of growth is a profound economic question that cuts to the very core of our planetary crisis.

“We don’t want a world where fashion does not exist at all. We want a world where fashion is not overconsumption but freedom of expression”, Tsagkari says. “Imagining this new idea of fashion as something creative but also simple and accessible to everyone can be a great challenge.”

But it can also be fun.

We don’t want a world where fashion does not exist at all. We want a world where fashion is not overconsumption but freedom of expression.

The best way to understand degrowth theory is to try and live out some of the movement’s values. After all, degrowth isn’t just about the economy. It’s about culture. For example, you might try swapping or trading your future fashion rather than focusing on its currency cost. You’ll notice how such small shifts can change your own experiences with clothes.

If our personal values systems are capable of shifting, then maybe our market is, too.

Owing to fashion’s unmatched ability to reflect and influence culture at large, perhaps this industry is well-positioned to move society towards degrowth. It could be the future we choose.

The post Degrowth: The Future Fashion Could Choose appeared first on Good On You.