Will fast fashion ever slow down?

In April 2013, over 2,000 garment workers headed into the five factories inside Bangladesh’s eight-storey Rana Plaza, ready to produce thousands of pieces of clothing for western brands such as Matalan and Primark.

The previous day, the building had been declared unsafe due to cracks in the infrastructure, and the workers were sent home. But there was such a high demand for garments, and the factories faced heavy taxes on delayed work, so employees were instructed to return anyway, or they would not be paid. A few hours into the day there was a power cut, and the heavy-duty generators were turned on, sending reverberating vibrations through the building. The vibrations shattered the pillars, and one-by-one each floor tilted and collapsed. The entire building slid from side to side, before crashing and trapping the workers inside. More than a thousand people were killed.

The tragedy was presented as a wake-up call for consumers in the West, a brutal reminder of the true cost of cheap clothing and the consumer desire for ever cheaper and more disposable fashion.

Fast forward seven years. Critics say the fashion industry has made little progress towards establishing ethical or sustainable production lines and the deaths of the Bangladeshi workers have almost faded from memory.

But poor conditions persist in domestic production too. Just this week a factory in Leicester was found to have continued operating throughout the lockdown and despite the coronavirus regulations. Having so many employees working in such cramped conditions may have led to the decision by Leicester to impose a second lockdown. It also emerged that workers making clothes destined for fashion retailer Boohoo.com were being paid £3.50 an hour. The minimum wage in the UK for over 25s is £8.72.

Such continual disregard for the safety and wellbeing of its workers in the wake of a pandemic raises the question, will fast fashion ever slow down?

What is fast fashion?

Traditionally, buying clothes marked an occasion or a change in seasons. Wearing out your old clothes used to be commonplace too. But rapid economic growth, together with the global expansion of the middle class and disposable incomes, fostered a throw-away society. Fast fashion was born.

Sustainable brand index, Good on You, defines fast fashion as “cheap, trendy clothing, that samples ideas from the catwalk or celebrity culture and turns them into garments in high street stores at breakneck speed to meet consumer demand.” It’s the high street stores that work – or did pre-Covid-19 – by “micro seasons” continuously creating cheap clothes to fulfil the cultural need for outfits for every occasion.

The rise of fast fashion and the invention of the influencer – used by brands to promote their wares – go hand in hand. Individuals rise to popularity through Instagram or reality TV and climb the ranks of B-list fame through the predictable progression from Boohoo discount code to clothing range.

The resulting overproduction and overconsumption created an industry that not only poses a threat to human rights through life-threatening worker conditions. It has also become a toxic drain on the environment. McKinsey and Co. estimate the textile sector, which contributes $2.4 trillion to global manufacturing, represents 6% of global greenhouse-gas emissions and 10-20% of pesticide use. The ashes, solvents and dyes make up a fifth of industrial water pollution, and somewhere between 20-35% of the microplastic polluting our oceans.

Fashion in Isolation

This booming industry suffered a rapid reverse when Covid-19 hit. According to Barclaycard data, consumer spending in the UK shrank by more than a third in April as Covid-19 put the country into lockdown. And though many consumers turned to online retail, the thirst for new clothes was quenched when it was only possible to leave the house for an hour a day.

Online sales finder LovetheSales.com reported a 145% decrease in demand for high street brands in May, compared to 2019. “There’s evidence that people are shopping more carefully, they’re thinking about what’s underlying the crisis and the fractures or fault lines the crisis exposes in society,” says Good on You founder and CEO, Gordon Renouf.

Brands did, however, attempt to adjust to the “new normal” and not lose business. Fast fashion retailers Boohoo and Nasty Gal introduced #boohoointhehouse and work from home ranges. Their marketing worked: apparently there was a huge 433% increase in demand for casualwear at the beginning of lockdown.

There was also a trend for “revenge shopping” in China. The sinister term refers to a mass spending-spree making up for missed retail therapy time during lockdown. So far, the term is mainly contained to high-end fashion with one Hermes store in Guangzhou making $2.7 million the day it opened, according to a CNBC report.

In Britain, the hit to the high street was well documented in the media with concerns expressed that some shops would not make a comeback. Once again the plight of the garment workers in countries such as Bangladesh and Cambodia was overlooked. Major brands cancelled orders and claimed to be unable to pay for the garments already in production. With no government furlough schemes or welfare state, this has had a devastating effect on the factories and their workers.

“The brands that are not transparent, the brands that don’t have policies in place to protect workers, they are the ones that are cancelling orders and not taking care with covid properly in the working conditions through the supply chain,” says Renouf. “Some parts of the fashion industry have done quite well concerning moving fast on some environmental and animal welfare issues,” he adds.

Searching for a middle ground

Might there be a way to combine the best advantages of global trade and the desire for higher standards? A key problem with the concept of sustainable fashion is the “intention-action gap”. Consumers become interested in the supply chain of their products and look for sustainable and ethical brands but don’t follow through. One Harvard Business Review survey found around 65% of consumers said they want to buy from purpose-driven brands that are eco and ethical, but only 26% do so.

Fast fashion has accustomed us to major discounts, free delivery and fast turnaround, advantages which brands investing time and money in creating an ethical supply chain and sustainable materials simply can’t provide. To teach a consumer to unlearn all these expectations and begin to pay more for what feels like less convenience is a challenging task.

For the average consumer, it often feels like there’s a missing middle ground, good quality, sustainable fashion that doesn’t come with the designer label price. Sustainable fashion index Good on You ranks brands from “we avoid” to “great” by looking into the way they treat workers, the environment and animals. The app aims to make it easier for consumers to make ethical decisions about clothing and seek out those middle ground brands.

Renouf wants consumers to evaluate their conceptions on the price of clothing. “Clothes are way cheaper now than they were twenty to thirty years ago,” he says. “The price of housing, the price of electricity, even the price of food has been going up, at least at the rate of inflation. But the price of clothing has not gone up.”

The issue lies in a disconnect with where our clothes come from.

“That is never going to change until people understand what it takes for something to be created, from the seed of the crop right the way through the entire supply chain,” says sustainable style expert Roberta Lee. Understanding the steps and processes involved, says Lee, makes the concept of a £15 top inconceivable.

But, a shift in mindset towards quality over quantity has perhaps slowly begun. The State of Fashion 2020 survey predicts that premium and luxury retail will grow in sales, whilst the high street falls behind. Commenting on the trend for LovetheSales.com, stylist Jessie Stein said this could be due to shoppers not wanting the hassle of returning low-value items: “High street brands thrive on a buzzing high street, where shoppers can try before they buy with ease. The lockdown has stopped a lot of impulse buying for cheaper, ‘wear once’ type clothing.”

Future of fashion

To criticise parents with young children, those on minimum wage or without access to the internet for looking for bargains and buying from shops like Primark is unhelpful and unfair. The onus for sustainable fashion cannot entirely lie with the consumer. So what can be done?

Over several decades the industry shifted production out of the countries that sell clothes, into countries where workers are paid less and work harder. “The globalisation of the industry has meant we have been able to outsource to countries where businesses and brands are able to blur the line saying down the supply line, they don’t know what is going on,” says Lee.

Governments in the West have allowed this to happen and must be aware of the ramifications of doing so.

In 2015, the UK government passed The Modern Slavery Act, requiring fashion brands to report annually on their efforts to eradicate modern slavery across the supply chain. But the government has regularly come under fire for failing to enforce the law. In France, a law was passed in February requiring clothing companies to follow more than 100 sustainability provisions and prohibiting the destruction of unsold goods.

But as developing countries have become wealthier, pushing up wages and labour costs, some production has been reshored  – with fast fashion brands looking for manufacturers who can produce cheaply and quickly.

Boohoo, owner of Pretty Little Thing, Nasty Gal, MissPap, Karen Millen and Coast, was valued at £5.2 billion before the scandal. When confronted with the infringement on labour rights in Leicester, the brand claimed not to know it was using the factory. It has taken a huge hit to its reputation.

Onshoring, which involves moving production to cheaper domestic regions, is an accelerator for fast fashion. The Telegraph estimates that 40% of Boohoo’s dresses, T-shirts and loungewear are made in Britain allowing the brand to keep up with “micro seasons”, avoid rising labour costs in Asia and cut down on transport costs.

But, onshoring should, in theory, have the advantage of making monitoring labour rights easier. “I don’t think there is a right or wrong answer with onshoring, there’s a good way to do things and a bad way to do things,” says Lee, regardless of the factory’s location.

“Brands need to be more transparent but they’re not going to be until there is a law that governs that,” she says. Lee suggests legislation forcing brands to put the steps they’ve taken on clothing tags, visualising the supply chain.

In a statement on the Boohoo scandal, the UK Fashion Textile Association (UKFT) said: “Retailers are looking to de-risk their supply chain by bringing it closer to home and brands are keen to take advantage of the USP of selling a UK-made product. We actively encourage them to do so but only where factories operate to acceptable standards.”

The fallout for Boohoo has been undeniably damaging. Its share price has collapsed by 40%, leaving the group valued at £2.9 billion. ASOS, Next and Zalando have all dropped the brands’ stock from their sites.

But there’s a sense of Déjà vu in the accusations. What is astonishing is that Leicester council has not fully investigated before. The facts have been well documented. In 2017 Channel 4’s Dispatches ran an expose on retailers such as Boohoo, New Look, Misguided and River Island, alleging  that some workers were only being paid between £3-3.50 an hour in factories in Leicester.

When an undercover reporter posed as a new employee at a factory, known to be producing garments for Boohoo, he asked the boss why he was getting paid half of the minimum wage. The boss replied: “We don’t get paid much for our clothes, and we need to compete with China and Bangladesh. They can get it cheap there. How will they get it made cheaper here?”