With the internet and social media, trends come and go rapidly, leading ‘fast-fashion’ stores such as H&M or Zara to renew their items each week. This amounts to an approximate 52 small collections per year, versus 4 in previous generations where new collections came along with the change of seasons. This incessant turnover in fashion leads to huge textile waste, both by consumers, who continuously purchase clothing and dispose of out-of-trend items which consequently end up in landfills, contributing to pollution, and by stores. Overproduction by fashion brands has indeed created extreme product surplus. A few scandals have underlined the phenomenon such as the 2010s discoveries that H&M, Urban Outfitters, and Primark, among else, were cutting their unsold clothes before throwing them out, to ensure the clothes could not be reused, thus adding to the tons of fabrics which end each year in landfills. The scandal resurged in 2018 with Burberry, Chanel, and Louis Vuitton being accused of burning unsold goods worth hundreds of millions, to avoid theft and retail sales.
The issues associated with ‘fast-fashion’ have been present for some time now, but in the last decade, brands have sought to recover their ‘brand integrity’. The notion of ‘brand integrity’ is essentially the way a brand is perceived by people, relative to the promises it made and the values it purports to sustain. Missing the mark on a brand promise can mean a big loss both in term of credibility, and consequently in terms of business. This environmental scandal was a hard blow on all the brands impacted, but especially the luxury ones, as their customers expect more from the reputation preceding the brands.
Following the scandal, brands attempted to repair their strongly hurt ‘brand integrity’. To this end, many made use of a technique called ‘Greenwashing’, or the creation of a façade allowing a fashion company to pretend to remedy company issues in terms of environment and garment workers, while continuing their previous practices.
Burberry is a good example of the shallow claims made by brands to improve themselves radically. Following a strong backlash, the brand declared it would stop using real fur in its products. In addition, Burberry claimed it would increase drastically the campaign to reuse, repair, donate or recycle unsold products, and pledged that it would cease completely the incineration of its overstock. Despite its grand claims, there is, four years later, no proof that the brand has kept its promises and new scandals keep arising.
As for brands of ‘fast-fashion’, don’t be fooled by collections named ‘H&M Conscious Collection’ or ‘Primark Cares’. If it seems authentic, it’s actually greenwashing, used as a marketing ploy. H&M, for example, introduced its latest line as environmentally friendlier, made from ‘more sustainable materials’ such as organic cotton or recycled polyester. The collection was then found to contain a higher share of damaging synthetic materials than its main line.
Why then would brands act in such a deceitful way? This past decade or so, sustainability became the new trend to abide by, and most of the brands that surround us understood this and sought to reap the benefits of an environmental and social transformation, without having to surpass the obstacles of actually evolving towards a slower fashion.
The story repeats itself when it comes to the plight of garment workers. Following the 2013 collapse of Rana Plaza, a garment factory in Bangladesh, H&M took the initiative to draw a ‘roadmap to living wages’, designed to improve the living situation of its workers by 2018. This process had the desired outcome and brought the brand a much-needed positive media coverage. However, when the deadline for results came, activists noticed that not only was there no proof of even the slightest action having been undertaken, but the roadmap had been taken off the H&M website, and was nowhere to be found. Since then, the company made every claim possible to deny its mere existence.
To see any real progress, brands need to focus more on human cost and sustainability rather than on margins. To this end, our society needs to take a stark turn, from ultra-fast fashion to a much slower fashion, more respectful both of workers and the environment. Actions can be undertaken at the individual scale, by adopting simple initiatives such as buying fewer clothing of higher quality, or thrifting.
Sources:
https://www.bigissue.com/news/environment/hm-greenwashing-is-disguising-the-reality-of-fast-fashion/
https://turnaroundhm.org/static/background-hm-roadmap-0f39b2ebc3330eead84a71f1b5b8a8d4.pdf
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-45430683