Due to the global consumption increase, the strain on resources has increased. The fashion industry contributes to the depletion and pollution of natural resources. The increasing urgency to deal with environmental issues and climate change is pushing governments to take measures to minimize the emissions of greenhouse gasses ( Paris Agreement) and implement strict environmental regulations, including policies that integrate measures related to circular economy (e.g. waste management legislation in the EU, China and India). These policies increase the pressure on the industry to address its environmental footprint.Consumerist culture is expanding. The values and behavior of most people feed the current business model of the fashion industry because they demand high quantities of new products and affordability drives purchasing decisions more than durability. This trend is not limited to the fashion industry, but apparel takes a central place in consumer culture. there is also growing attention to social and environmental injustices, not just in the fashion industry, but across industries and consumer goods. This public attention puts a spotlight on the issues of the fashion industry and creates pressure for change.
EMERGING FASHION ALTERNATIVES
The term ‘niches’ refers to initiatives that experiment with new and/or alternative ways of doing, thinking and organizing. The experimentation that is happening in the fashion industry is very diverse, but can be broadly characterized into three categories:
• Technology and Fibers
Recycling innovations; 3D-printing; virtual prototyping; robotic or AI automation; design for circularity; use of new materials (e.g. fruit leather or algae); rediscovery of existing materials (e.g. hemp, flax); innovations that reduce the impact of the dyeing process and water, energy and chemical use (e.g. with enzymes and nanotechnology)
• Business Models and Customer Relations Fashion as a service and longer-term or personalized relationships with customers (e.g. lease/rent models, reuse, remake, repair, resell, personalization, on-demand production); customer behavior and social media customer trends (e.g. minimalism, capsule wardrobes, zero waste, slow fashion, sharing initiatives, vintage20)
• Value Chain Models and Partnerships Ethical brands working closely with manufacturers; short supply chains; local for local (or regional) production and reshoring; radical transparency initiatives; IT-based traceability initiatives using blockchain (e.g. Bext360); environmental profit and loss accounting (e.g. Kering)
In spite of improvement efforts to turn the fashion industry into a force for good, it seems that the mainstream industry’s development pathways remain along the lines of expansion, optimization, growth, low-cost production and high consumption. This is largely due to the industry’s path dependency: the established structures, networks, routines, technologies and production processes keep the fashion industry locked in. Rather than looking at the symptoms of unsustainability of these processes, we need to look at the underlying structural characteristics of the fashion industry that keep it locked in. Only when these fundamental persistent problems are structurally addressed (e.g. in a transition) can the fashion industry secure a future where people can thrive.
Emerging from the transition perspective and our analysis of the fashion regime, we have identified the following four characteristics at the root of the unsustainability of the fashion system. These characteristics of the regime
– combined with some of the landscape pressures – reinforce each other and create a cycle of persistency:
• Disconnected
The transactional relationships, fragmentation and unequal power relations that characterize the industry lead to collective irresponsibility, conservatism and risk aversion (with manufacturers and suppliers carrying a disproportionate amount of social and environmental risk).
• Uncontrollable
The industry operates in an unregulated global market where negative externalities can be produced freely, becoming a ‘footloose’ industry that moves production to wherever it is cheapest, with strong vested interests to keep practices opaque.
• Extractive & growth-driven
When price is the major point of competition between companies in the supply chain, margins and externalities are squeezed to maximize profits, and sustainability is often considered a costly additional feature. The supply chain relies heavily on non-renewable fossil resources and virgin resource inputs.
• Disposable
The culture in the global north and increasingly in the global south values consumption and individualism and often at the expense of durability. Customers demand quantity and novelty and they dispose of items quickly.
These four characteristics combined help explain both the relatively marginal effect of many attempts to move towards sustainability and the longer-term inevitability of structural change. The marginal effects of interventions and sustainability efforts relate to the complexity and incumbent nature of the fashion regime: small changes are absorbed by the regime as it continuously adapts to changing contexts through, for example, the geographical movement of manufacturing, the invention of new materials and chemicals that are not yet regulated or illegal practices (e.g. forced labor or discarding untreated wastewater into the environment). However, a lock-in is also the early phase of a future transition: society will increasingly push for structural changes and provide a fruitful context for it, and entrepreneurial actors will develop new alternatives. We have described a number of the niches, but we can also point to a number of broader landscape developments that gradually increase pressures for transition.
While the above landscape trends influence the regime, other landscape influences can offer inspiration for niche developments in fashion. The growing importance of social media and digitalization are changing the face of the fashion industry23, pushing retail online and creating new interactive platforms for communication and interaction between consumers and producers and within the supply chain. The emerging availability of IT innovations, for example data tracking and sharing technologies such as blockchain, has the potential to change traceability in the industry. The growth of the platform economy and the sharing/renting economy in other industries (including fast-growing service platforms such as Uber, AirBnB and Deliveroo) is transforming the way value chains operate and how customers find suppliers.
Other innovations such as 3D-printing and automation could change the nature of manufacturing. Besides the opportunities that the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ has from a business perspective (to lower production costs and change the quality of work, for example), it could also mean the loss of many jobs in textile and garment manufacturing if the disruption is unmanaged.
There is a revival in cooperatives and other structures of decentralized local ownership and governance. These cooperatives are popping up in agriculture, energy, healthcare and manufacturing. It could offer opportunities for the circular fashion industry, for instance through worker-owned factories or local closed-loop systems. This trend ties in with a growing undercurrent of unsatisfied citizens who are disillusioned by the capitalist structures and use bottom-up organization and social media to explore alternative, more sustainable ways of living, producing and consuming, including the ‘prosumer’ movement in renewable energy and agriculture.
An emerging policy and academic discourse on natural capital solutions is trying to develop assessment and reporting standards for ecosystems and natural resources to aid the limitation of environmental degradation. On top of this, geo-political developments
– such as the currently strained China-USA relations and ‘trade war’ – affect economic policies (i.e. increased protectionism) and trade relations within markets or industries. Should this trend continue, it will likely change the geography of production and consumption as well as the resources used (and wasted) in the fashion industry.
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