This is part three of a series. Read part one here and part two here.
Australia has an addiction to fast fashion. Every year, Australians acquire on average 27 kilos of new clothing per person, chucking out 23 kilos each year. 800,000 tonnes of clothing and textiles are discarded by Australians each year, 90% of which ends up in landfill.
It’s such an issue that in June Environment Minister Sussan Ley added clothing textile waste to the National Priority Waste List alongside electronics, plastic oil containers and child car seats. A $1 million grant has been given to the Australian Fashion Council (AFC) to help address fast-fashion waste.
But we’re not alone: the fashion industry business model has changed, relying on constantly evolving fashion trends to peddle products by exploiting workers, producing mass amounts of waste every year.
While the pandemic slowed fashion spending, the changes were temporary, with the industry set to bounce back. According to McKinsey & Company’s 2022 State of Fashion report, non-luxury fashion sales dipped by 20% in 2020, but rebounded in mid-2021 with pent-up demand creating spikes of so-called “revenge buying”. In the US that year, sales increased by 5-10% compared to 2019 levels, while globally sales about returned to 2019 levels.
It’s a different story online: The online apparel market grew faster year-on-year in 2020 than the years before, while in 2021 clothing was the top segment for online shopping.
How has the fashion industry changed?
The fashion business model has changed dramatically across the past two decades, largely driven by social media, University of Technology Sydney fashion and textiles designer Mark Liu tells Crikey.
“In the past, companies and the designers predicted what is going to be popular,” he said.
“Now, companies are taking analytics from people’s social media and search behaviour … then making products that sell and making variations of them. So it’s this cycle where what sells gets replicated. You don’t need to guess what will be successful — you just need to put it out there.”
This process is called consumer-to-manufacturer: instead of seasonal styles, fashion trends are ongoing, tailored to niche trends and aesthetics driven by shoppers.
Chinese-based fashion company Shein has been successful at cornering this market, with shirts selling for as little as $3.76. On TikTok, users show off their “Shein hauls” – dozens of clothing items they model, mix and match. It was the top-visited clothing site for several months across 2021 and is worth more than $20 billion.
With young people documenting their lives daily online, there’s pressure to always show off new outfits and stay on-trend, Lui said.
“The cycle just churns … creating needless amounts of clothing.”
How are things so cheap?
Clothing remains low-cost by using cheap textiles such as polyester, and by exploiting labour markers in developing nations. Manufacturers including Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger and Izod are turning away from China and to Ethiopia where workers are paid as little as US$26 a month — the world’s lowest wages. Ethiopia has no legally mandated minimum wage for the private sector.
As a result, waste isn’t an issue for brands, Lui said — staying on trend is. “Wastage has been built into the business model, so then wasting things is not going to negatively affect the bottom line. It’s just going to affect the environment.”
Even those attempting to shop sustainably are often duped: greenwashing is prominent in the fashion industry, with many “sustainable” brands still relying on fast-fashion manufacturing chains to stay both profitable and on-trend.
In the US, New York is introducing a bill where clothing companies will have to map 50% of their supplies across all tiers of production.
But, Lui said, this wasn’t enough: “Some of the worst offenders at the moment disclose about 70% of their supply chain, but they don’t tell people what happens in the rest. That’s where all the big problems occur.”
What can be done?
Australians often turn to charity stores to dispose of the 23kg of clothes a year they no longer want – but it’s costing charities $13 million a year to send unusable donations to landfill, equalling around 60,000 tonnes of waste. Some donations are given to developing countries — but this can have negative impacts on local textile markets.
Senior adviser to the AFC Kellie Hush said recycling clothing is incredibly complex. Globally just 12% of clothing textiles are recycled.
“Textiles have to be pulled apart and put through processing,” she said, with tags and lining often made from different materials than the rest of a piece of clothing. As part of the $1 million grant, the AFC is undertaking a 17-month research project into fast fashion manufacturing, clothes disposal and consumer awareness.
Five key questions shoppers should ask themselves, Hush said, were around where the clothing materials came from and where it was manufactured; whether shoppers really needed the item; how long the item was likely to last; whether the clothes could be recycled or what could be done with them at their end-of-life; and why something was being sold so cheaply.
Both Hush annd Lui said while shoppers should be taking care of what they buy, manufactuers needed to shoulder the bulk of the responsibility.
“Companies are overproducing and the industry needs to slow down and start producing what people really need,” Hush said.
“Even when brands use best practices, things can still slip through because there’s corruption in some manufacturing countries.”
For me, reading this article only highlights the extravagance, indulgence, greed, superficiality, thoughtlessness, waste and pollution which are the necessary concomitants of capitalism.
As far as the clothing retailers are concerned, I am sure that they will be thinking of creative ways of trying to persuade shoppers that 27 kg of new clothes per annum is simply not enough. They would give no thought to the waste that this madness creates. They are only concerned with making a profit. But this is the very way that capitalism wants us all to think. After-all, clothing manufacturers and retailers, like the rest of us, have to put food on the table, clothes on their own back and a roof over their heads too. Like all participants in this capitalist ‘free-for-all’, they are never happy until shoppers are rushing wildly into shopping complexes waving their credit cards around, frothing at the mouth and hysterically shouting “buy, spend and consume”. (At least that is how I used to joke about it with my former wife. My current wife in only marginally less parsimonious than I am.)
But seriously, this ‘dog-chasing-it’s-tail’, sort of behavior is expected of all members of a capitalist society. Capitalism is a system that is really holding us all hostage to ‘buying, spending and consuming’, not to mention creating so much waste that it now threatens the global environment.
We are told that we need to do this in order to create jobs, full employment and economic growth. It promises us that if we do this then we are destined to live in some kind of economic paradise (which mysteriously always fails to materialize). And we are told that if we do not spend like drunken sailors then the economy will collapse and we will “all be rooned”. Well, as far as I am concerned, capitalism, at least as it is currently practiced, will eventually collapse under its own weight. It is simply not sustainable.
The clothing madness described in this article is only one aspect of this system. The absurdity of it all has been described by writers for decades, for example, many readers will recall Vance Packard’s excellent book, “The Waste Makers’ which was published back in 1960. This situation has, I am sure, changed little since then. Then again, for those who wish to gain a deeper insight into the machinations this nefarious system, publications by Karl Marx might be an even better starting point.
I still have polo shirt made here in Australia which would be at least 40 years old which is still presentable and I still wear on occasion . However similar garments made overseas begin to disintegrate after about twelve to eighteen months.Ah, but we disposed of our TCF didn’t we, (Textile, Clothing & Footwear) industries, didn’t we.As ye sow, so shall ye reap.
Malcolm, we sold our soul for a cheap pair of socks, a cheap shirt and cheap cars, etc. The role of a bunch of maggots, aka free-market economists was integral in this thinking. This (and much else besides), was their version of ‘efficiency’.
Yup. I have clothes I bought in the 90s still going strong. Everything since then, not so much, unless I made it myself.
Or, “as you sew, such shall you keep“?
Applies to ALL manufacturing (if anyone remembers the concept) unless the supply lines are as taut as a violin string.
Actually, we didn’t dispose of our TCF industry. It was protected by tariffs, and it shouldn’t have been. People fondly remember the good Australian made clothing that they bought, but the forget there was a lot of badly made clothing the manufacturers of which were protected by taxpayers money.
The TCF industry disposed of itself because it couldn’t adapt. If manufacturers had moved to producing high quality clothing for export, far more of the TCF industry would have survived. At the time we knew we had on our doorstep countries like China which were about to produce consumers en masse. These were consumers who were already demanding quality goods. The TCF industry were told this, and most of them chose not to follow that path. Furthermore, the TCF industry chose not to invest in secondary industries. All of our primary products were, and still mostly are, sent overseas for processing and bought back by our TCF manufacturers at an inflated price. Whilst Kennett’s purchase of a wool processing machine was ill advised and tokenistic, the thought behind it was correct – our TCF industries should not have been letting raw goods be processed outside the country.
I still remember driving through the backstreets of Coburg and Pascoe Vale through all the empty TCF factories. They represented the loss of thousands of jobs, many of them held by women who migrated here in the post war migration boom and had no chance of getting a job anywhere else. It was heartbreaking. And it didn’t need to happen. The TCF industry had plenty of warning. They could have, as the term is now, pivoted. But being owned by the sort of greedy, short sighted capitalists that Australia seems to specialise in producing, they didn’t. And the lie that has been told is that it was the government’s fault. It wasn’t.
Fashion as an industry is surely one of the most ludicrous endeavours ever undertaken.
The fast fashion craze needs to become, ahem, unfashionable. Somewhat like cigarette smoking or littering are seen to be anti-social. If the next generation was educated to appreciate quality & durability & made aware of the wide-ranging consequences of cheap clothing as outlined in this article, over-production of garments would dwindle.
It never fails to bemuse me that with more extremes of weather, in particular hotter summers, women’s clothes are often made of cheap synthetic materials which cause the wearer to sweat. Ditto underwear. Synthetics can’t have a useful second life as commercial rags because they don’t absorb. And why don’t designers make men’s shorts from linen, the coolest fabric, anymore?
No cheap & efficient retting machine has yet been devised for flax – as cotton remained expensive without cheap Egyptian or Indian labour until the Spinning Jenny was invented in1720 then steam powered 50yrs later.
The best linen is worked and won mostly by hand, involving long steeping periods until suitably smelly & rotted before attempting to separate the fibres.
It is the queen of fibre – when the price was too low it was commonly used in Ireland, esp Donegal where it was an important cottage crop, for thatching until the price rose sufficiently to be stripped off years later, the loosening process having occurred even more slowly than when steeped and the fibre spun from it attracted a premium.
I find fast fashion hard to fathom. One of the few benefits of the pandemic for me is that I bought hardly any new clothes in the past two years.