Fashion is and always has been an elusive concept. What it means to be fashionable is strongly contested both among the masses and the sheltered self-proclaimed fashionistas that live in ivory towers. Yet not many would argue that it is by any means insignificant. This industry is worth over 2.5 trillion dollars globally and, in the UK, it scrapes in a whopping 27 billion and contributes around 800,000 jobs to the economy, something that may make ears perk in the dawn of the pandemic’s recession. In the time that the Earth orbits around the sun, we manage to consume around 80 million new pieces of clothing. This obsession with accumulating garments is growing, as this is 400 percent more than what we consumed only 20 years ago.
If you find yourself scratching your head, wondering why expanding wardrobes may be a problem, then oh sweet summer child have I got some shocks in store for you.
The pitfalls of our ever-growing consumption first materialise in our obsession with cotton. Approximately 75 percent of the world clothing products contain cotton in at least some shape or form and this makes it the most used fibre for textiles in the entire world. This unassuming soft and fluffy plant has been indispensable ever since it was first cultivated as a fabric in 3000BC Indus River Valley where present-day Pakistan now stands. The British eventually became responsible for over half the world’s trade in cotton however it was Arab Merchants that opened up this possibility when they brought cotton cloth to Europe in 800AD.
Christopher Columbus who is most famous for his perfect curls and large soft hat, also made the little-known discovery of a small island which would soon be called America. Columbus has of course been labelled as immoral, incompetent and as McGonagall might say, really the ‘worst sort of colonist’, curls notwithstanding. Yet his so-called discovery did aid the eventual awareness of cotton around the world by the 1500s. And to nobody’s surprise, it was England that in the dawn of the Industrial revolution first spun cotton by machinery in the 1730s. However, today when we think of cotton it isn’t Europe that comes to mind but rather Asia. India and China remain neck to neck in the battle for dominance in global cotton production, despite India having overtaken its south East Asian neighbour around 2017. The both of them produce a combined total over 12 million metric tons of the stuff, followed by the US that averages around 4.5.
There is no denying that the production of cotton proves beneficial to rural economies, especially in countries like India which are still agro-based. Agriculture is often seen as the one of the chief pillars of the rustic sustenance in India and continues to service its core due to the economic security that it provides. Of course, the Indian textiles industry, which is one of the largest sources of employment, giving jobs to around 120 million people directly and indirectly, also makes up around 5 percent of the gross domestic product, or the GDP. That may not sound like much on its own however when you realise that India often frequents the club of the largest economies in the world, that 5 percent can be magnanimous in its own right. Naturally, it has a hard time making use of all this cotton cloth itself, there’s only so much people will buy, so textiles – including cotton cloth- add up to around 11 percent of all of India’s earnings from export.
But don’t let that get you excited, this stuff is far from magic.
The first downside to cotton production is the amount of water that it consumes, yet over half of all cotton in the world is produced in areas that are under extreme water stress. No wonder then that the production of this wonder crop can often do more harm than good. And in more bad news for those that care about organically farming, over 90 percent of cotton crop is aided by genetic modification and thus cotton easily claims the throne, being directly responsible for a large of sum of global pesticide and insecticide uses. If cotton doesn’t suck up local water resources dry, all that slush can end up being drained out into the local eco system, polluting it and the local drinking supply of water too. This is first when the externalities of cotton come into context and make clear why the fashion industry’s dependence on the crop can be bad for the environment, a cost that it seems only locals have to pay.
“Of must stills he prates and would haughtily bring, the world to acknowledge that cotton is king.” This is an excerpt from the poem ‘the gospel of slavery’ written by Abel C. Thomas in 1864, yet cotton is king is just how many people recall the highs of the American economy during the mid 19th century. Yet that only goes to show how interwoven America’s cotton economy was with its use of slave labour and how deeply ingrained its effects really are. And it is even more important to remember the significance of the American slave produced cotton to the rest of the world, countries like Britain which was still in its glory days back then, depended on it for over 80 percent of the raw materials it needed for industrial production. Thus, it is hard to look at a field of cotton plants today and not reflect on the role it played in perpetuating an ugly and brutal system of oppression in the past.
And this cotton tyranny is not one that modern fashion companies that make use of the crop in their products today have been able to shy away from. Cotton’s terrible legacy is maintained as there have been many instances of child and forced labour when cotton is produced, often involving heart wrenching revelations such as the involvement of children who are as young as five in places like Uzbekistan and Egypt. Just when they should be learning to scrawl some semblance of the alphabet and be able to string beads, these kids are instead being exploited in cotton cultivation. Their freedom and childhood snatched away.
It has been revealed in a recent estimate in fact that around 1 in 5 cotton clothing can find its roots in forced labour. The Xinjiang region in China, a home to China’s Muslim ethnic minority Uyghurs sources around 20 percent of the world cotton, a place which is notorious for its used of forced labour facilitated by the local government. The forced labour is often used in conjunction with re-education camps and forced sterilisations and abortions in a bid by the Communist party to eradicate or at the very least brutally hegemonize this group. While countries like the US have proclaimed that this is a modern case of genocide, up until recently many big fashion labels and clothes manufacturers were happily exploiting the gains of dirt-cheap labour at the expense of the local population’s freedom and dignity. These include names like Nike, H and M, Marks and Spencer, Gap, Adidas and Abercrombie and Fitch, among others.
And thus, it appears that today’s fashion industry’s reliance on cotton may prove a boon to select rural economies but eventually hurt the environment end up perpetuating cotton’s history as a tool of oppression that clearly trump any economic benefits it may bring. Thus, it appears fashions firms have a bit more sewing to do before they can even think of profiting off of the crop in a manner that could be even remotely ethical.
And while we’re talking about child labour, we must venture into the rocky economic territory of sweatshops. Now this is an interesting topic, purely because the case of sweatshops often isn’t a black and white argument. Sweatshops in themselves are factories that often have deplorable working conditions, long hours, low wages, the whole shtick. So you surely might be wondering why anyone could justify such conditions, why do sweatshops fall into this grey area despite their awful conditions? The reasons have to do less with the sweatshops themselves and more with where they are often situated.
Most of these sweatshops that manufacture clothing for many big brands and allow them to sell at cheaper prices whilst maintaining thick profit margins are situated in developing countries. Many economists have long argued that they are justifiable as they provide jobs to people in these poorer countries and give them opportunities they wouldn’t have had. This may sound unbelievable yet the theory often goes that through sweatshops the people living in these countries would eventually be able to lift themselves out of poverty. I think it’s important to note here that this idea is highly contested, often by other economists. One such man Stefan Dercon, the chief economist at the UK’s department for International development, joined forces with a political scientist by the name of Chris Blattman to test the theory themselves. What they did was rather simple and ingenious in its simplicity.
They worked together with various employers of manufacturing businesses in Ethiopia that would fit the bill of sweatshops and received applications from many Ethiopians eager to work in the industrial sector, a good number of which were younger and female. They were then divided into 3 categories, those that were offered jobs, those that weren’t and a third category which was put in there for a further twist. Of the first two groups they were surprised to find that those given the factory job didn’t end up faring any better than those that were rejected and most of them didn’t hang onto the post for more than a few months before they quit. It appears that the door kept revolving in these factories and the work is often temporary, not exactly the poverty lifting spell many thought it to be.
Yet before you bring out your pitchforks on the multinational brands that use this system, I think it’s important to look at the other side. A study by economists Powell and Skarbek found that the money that is paid in these sweatshops is often higher than the average in most of the countries they operate in and nearly half of the countries they looked at they found that these wages were three times the national average. Thus, an argument could be made that perhaps these higher paying factory jobs are important for workers, not purely in the fact that manufacturing often helps increase a country’s GDP over an extended time period but that they serve as something to fall back upon when those in poorer conditions need them the most. By western standards these factories don’t appear to pay much and wouldn’t be remotely acceptable if they didn’t help people stave off the worst of poverty.
Now before we get swept away, I think it’s best we revisit that allusive third group, the twist that made Blattman and Dercon’s experiment all the more revealing. These chosen ones were given somewhere around 300 dollars and less than a week’s worth of entrepreneurial training. If you don’t expect much to come out of this then you wouldn’t be alone. Yet, these people came out on top of the pack in terms of prosperity, they all managed to start some sort of business or follow some kind of venture that allowed them to be able to earn a lot more than either of the other groups.
Boiling all this down in such a way reveals the true complexity behind sweatshops and why it is often hard to come upon a clear verdict on their ethicality. Many may argue that these fashion companies are simply exploiting the poor people during times where they may be economically vulnerable, they’d argue that it wouldn’t hurt their millions of dollars in profits if they raised their working conditions and took a stand against things like child labour and these people would be right. However, others would loudly attest that removing these factories all together is most likely to do more harm than good, as it takes away this opportunity which while having its pitfalls does aid them when they need it, and surprise, surprise, they’d be right too. Bld xattman and Dercon’s third group remains an important aspect to look at, in making us realise the various other ways one could help people in developing countries lift themselves out of poverty, yet when it comes to the specific issues of sweatshops and the fashions industry’s reliance on them, there simply doesn’t seem to be an easy answer.
Don’t worry just yet, after all we’re not here to cut the fashion industry any slack. Yet to further inspect another of their questionable modern practices, I must take you back a couple thousand years. Sumptuary laws are one antiquity that vied to control public spending, and the first was ratified in 215BC in the Roman Republic, limiting the amount of gold women could wear and the colours of their tunics. Somewhere in the 1300s these laws came to be popular around Europe as governments were formed in England and France. It was in western Europe that these laws morphed to take another form, when they began to disfavour the masses at the expense of the aristocracy, who were the only ones deemed fit to wear lush fabrics, jewels and the lot. In fact it was somewhere around 1337 that King Edward 3rd in England ruled that only those that are a knight or ranks above would be allowed to wear fur.
Of course, the commoners among us haven’t changed, so we still wish to emulate those that are richer in terms of the clothes we wear, but now that there are no laws prohibiting us the only barrier that stood was money. After all, not all of us can afford Versace and Gucci. The well-oiled machine of the market grind into force to help meet that demand and fast fashion was born. Customers could now buy the same high fashion clothes straight off the runways, right as they are trending but now for a fraction of the price. These companies would replicate the fashion of celebrities or on catwalks so that the average mainstream consumer could purchase it for a pittance.
As the purchasing power of the younger consumers increased there was a growing demand for instant indulgence, wherein shopping for clothes shifted from a matter of need or orderly want, to an impulsive act. As shopping becomes a form of entertainment, traditional clothing labels realise that they stand to profit from releasing new collections more often, rather than on a seasonal basis. It came to the point that they were releasing clothes multiples times a week, something that was only feasible because of drastic improvements in supply chain management in fashion retail. As the demands from the consumer changes like lightning, the retailers put in place supply chains that allowed them to respond to those. As these clothes are often modelled off of trends and fads that don’t last for long and the prices must be kept low, these clothes are then of course very poorly made and not built to last. To the extent that people could afford to wear them once and throw them out.
Zara is a key innovator in this scenario, a Spanish chain that has become the face of fast fashion. Zara has mastered the art of being able to design, produce and deliver clothes in a fragment of the time expected, it can do so in under 4 weeks. If that’s not surprising enough, on top of that Zara can make changes to existing designs and have them updated in store within 2 weeks! The secret behind this superspeed is the fact that it keep it’s supply chains very short, by having its factories located closely to its corporate headquarters in Spain, situating them in countries from Turkey to Morocco.
Of course, Zara’s bets have payed off wonderfully, it produces nearly 5 times the number of products compared to the industry average, and it is rewarded accordingly. In 2019 it’s annual net sales were over 20 billion dollars and it has managed to open stores in nearly a 100 countries. This is because Zara and H and M are taking hold of the phenomenon that is fear of missing out. Because turnover of clothes in stores is so fast, people keep visiting. The low prices mean people can afford to keep buying each time they drop in to check out the latest trends. And, the most ingenious part is, that since most of these stores rarely restock on these trending items, the FOMO really kicks in and ensures that people snap up the products the moment they see them because it might just be there only chance to do so.
Fast fashion is not only seemingly good for the finances of the companies, acting as efficient business models but also, they serve the social purpose of making fashion democratic. It ensures that large, ever changing wardrobes filled with innovative and trendy designs aren’t confined to the ultra-wealthy and are something achievable for the masses.
Yet it wouldn’t be a fair assessment unless we looked at the downsides and for fashion, you guessed it, it always revolves back to the environment. Because the way we dress not only influences the economies of multinational corporations and our own mood, but also the planet. Most of the clothes can’t be recycled due to their sub-par quality. So, the more we treat our clothes as discardable single use items, the more waste we contribute to landfills. Thus, at the end of the day fast fashion may be fun and make a quick buck, but it is not in any way sustainable.
As with most things, the fashion industry has its quirks. From the use of cotton, to sweatshops and single use clothing, each aspect has more to it than meets the eye. Yet when it comes to the economics of fashion it is clear we must shift our attention from the greenback to the green around us.
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