ANSWER Q2.

Case study: The Fashion Industry

What happens when billions of trend-seeking fashion consumers around the world meet producers willing to make new clothing for them at cheap prices? The answer is fast fashion (BBC, 2018). In the UK, the impact of fast fashion can be seen in consumers acquiring 26.7 kg of new clothes each year (more than any EU country) while the same consumers send 235 million items of clothing to landfills. The disposal of clothes even included new and never-worn clothes as British fashion house Burberry's admitted it had destroyed 105 million worth of products from 2013 to 2018 to keep these products from being sold at drastically reduced prices (Kollewe, 2018).

Fast fashion became a phenomenon in the late 1980s as brands such as Spain-based Zara and Sweden-based H & M brought vast amounts of trendy and inexpensive garments into their chain stores around the world. To keep prices low, fast-fashion brands used the cheapest labor available in the world's poorest countries. Such off-shoring of manufacturing began just as globalization intensified. From 1989 to 2019, the fashion industry has almost quintupled from $500 billion to $2.4 trillion (Thomas, 2019).

This eye-popping growth came with costs to society. First, labor in developed countries lost jobs. From 1990 to 2012, the US textile and garment industry lost 1.2 million jobs as firms shifted production to Latin America and Asia. In the 1980s, 1 million worked in the textile industry in the UK, but there were only 100,000 workers in 2019.

Second, human rights in developing countries suffered with low pay (fewer than two percent of workers in these countries earn a living wage), withheld wages, no vacation and unsanitary and unsafe working conditions. One out of six in the world work in the fashion industry - mostly women and kids.

Thirdly, fast fashion has contributed to further degradation of the natural environment. The industry accounts for almost 20 percent of all industrial water pollution each year. It releases 10 percent of the carbon emissions in the atmosphere each year, too. (One kilogram of new clothes generates 23 kilograms of greenhouse gases.) Of the more than 100 billion garments made each year, 20 percent go unsold and are buried, shredded or incinerated (as Burberry admitted - but no longer does).

Stella McCartney, the British fashion designer, wrote an open letter to the fashion industry in the Sunday Times newspaper of London calling the industry to take action on critical issues for the industry (Candy, 2019). In her letter, McCartney noted that the fashion industry accounts for more than a third of ocean microplastics while textile dyeing is the second largest polluter of clean water globally. McCartney also decried the lack of creativity in fast fashion as digital technology allows designs put on display at fashion shows to be photographed and sent to overseas factories where these designs are then copied.

McCartney called for the fashion industry to develop alternative sources for materials (such as mycelium-based 'leather' grown in a lab and not from animals). She also proposed that firms choosing to use sustainable materials (such as organic cotton, recycled polyester or other verified inputs) should be rewarded by governments. McCartney also called for firms to pursue circularity in their processes and work with firms such as Italy- based Econyl (www.econyl.com/) which focuses on regenerated nylon made from waste industrial plastic, waste fabric, and discarded fishing nets. McCartney also highlighted Washington-based Evrnu (www.evrnu.com) for textile-to-textile recycling. McCartney declared it unacceptable that less than one percent of textiles are recycled back into textiles each year.

Questions

Q1. Why do you think sales in the fashion industry have exploded since 1989?

Q2. Who would you say is more to blame for the excesses of the fashion industry -

fashion producers or fashion consumers? Assign a percentage for the blame you

would assign to each. Explain.

Q3. Which of Stella McCartney's criticisms of the fashion industry is the most

compelling to you? Explain