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| Chapter 1 |
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SOURCE | INTRODUCTION
This chapter explores the complexities associated with the sourcing and manufacturing of sustainable fashion materials and products in a globalized industry. Sourcing within the fashion supply chain is typically associated with business: budgets and deadlines, purchasing and selling, shipping and supplying. This is complicated further with the interdependent relationships between supplier and designer, designer and maker, maker and seller, seller and user, all of whom are connected to a product that is often determined by price, quality and speed.
Designers play a significant role in the development of new fashion products and they can lead the selection of materials and services used within the production process. A designer may need to locate fabric suppliers, trimmings suppliers, textile dyers and finishers, manufacturers for sample runs, and so on. But what are the ethical and environmental dilemmas that arise as a consequence of this decision-making? Most designers or product developers would probably admit that they do not question the production processes involved in developing a fabric or recognize what negative environmental and social impacts may be associated with a fabric during the manufacture, use and disposal of a garment. This unquestioning approach is typical and perhaps understandable since a companyās interest in or time available for research into sustainable fibres, materials and processes may be minimal. This then raises the question of how a designer should select materials and choose services.
Building a relationship with a responsible and well-informed supplier can alleviate some of these concerns. The knowledge shared through this trusted association can be pivotal in assisting the designer. As suppliers communicate the sustainability credentials of a fabric, or a service, the designer becomes empowered through knowledge. Undeniably designers need to better familiarize themselves with the materials and processes that they use and promote in the production of fashion. Fashion fabrics go through a number of production processes from growing or manufacturing fibres and yarns, through to the dyeing and processing of fibres into fabrics. However, few designers would recognize the negative impacts of a fabric that are felt through the entire lifecycle of the garment, beyond fibre and textile production through to garment manufacture and disposal. Coming to terms with this fact will provide the designer the opportunity to reduce negative impacts whilst at the same time maximizing positive impacts; this should be the fundamental goal.
Joan Farrer ponders the idea of achieving sustainability in a global fashion and textiles industry as a utopian ideal. Farrer discusses the significance of the sector in relation to people, while highlighting the physical impact of the industry on the environment. By drawing together solutions for a more sustainable fashion industry Farrer also raises the need for a change in mindset by consumers, manufacturer and retailers. Meanwhile, Marie OāMahony explores the issue of materials and the argument relating to water usage in the production and care of natural and man-made fibres. In comparing the benefits and drawbacks of both types of fibres and materials OāMahony poses the thought that the future of materials may lie in hybrid combinations, particularly if water becomes increasingly short in supply.
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JOAN FARRER
1.1 REMEDIATION:
Discussing Fashion Textiles Sustainability
Remediation: (noun) acting as a remedy or solution to a problem; in this case the use of remedial methods to improve learning skills to reverse social and environmental damage.
INTRODUCTION
This essay will review the idea of fashion (and by association textiles) sustainability to establish if it is a utopian ideal by looking at the triple bottom line in business relating to āpeople, profit, planetā. To begin to answer this question, in the first instance, it is essential to define what sustainability is or is not in this clothing context. For the purpose of this discussion, sustainability will be explained in terms of its current principles relating to the social, economic and environmental consequences of our behaviour as consumers. This essay seeks to explain the significance of the fashion and textiles sector and its importance in relation to our cultural and emotional connection to clothes. This will include historical and contemporary consumption patterns (people), assessing the importance of the global industry driving macro and micro economies (profit), and outlining the physical impact this industry has, and is having, on the environment (planet). In this chapter Joan Farrer, whose doctoral thesis on these issues (Royal College of Art, London, 2000) is celebrating its tenth anniversary, sets out to clarify the core ideals of sustainability, in particular in relation to fashion and textiles, in light of the modern zeitgeist. The objective will be to review some key solutions that may offer a remedy to the current situation in order to move towards the apparent contradiction of a more sustainable fashion industry. Examples include recent research that profiles upcycling and re-manufacture (Fraser, 2009), design for source local/sell local (Finn, 2008) and her own work in smart technological solutions for producers, retailers and consumers (Farrer and Parr, 2008). A model of āremediationā is explored as a potential way to provide the most up-to-date solution to what remains a critical issue for the fashion and textiles industry.
WHAT IS SUSTAINABILITY?
The word sustainability has a plethora of meanings and is frequently misunderstood; unfortunately it has become synonymous and interchangeable with recycling and the environment, whereas the original rationale from the 1950s was to focus on social change to alleviate global poverty. The misrepresentation and cherry picking of values from the sustainable agenda, particularly over the last decade, by business, marketers, politicians and even by education, has led to the movement becoming hijacked for commercial purposes.
In many expert circles there is a struggle to find another word to replace sustainability, because its deeper meanings and associated philosophies have become worthless, vacuous brand development and āgreen-washā tools. One of the most cohesive descriptions given more than 20 years ago by Bruntland was that āā¦sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needsā (Brundtland, 1987). For poor countries, this was perfectly commendable and appropriate. However, as Wood points out in Chapter 5 of Designers, Visionaries and Other Stories:
Before we knew where we were, we had stretched the original idea of āsustainable developmentā and were talking about āsustainable productsā, āsustainable approachesā and āsustainable housingāā¦ politically the idea of sustainable development created the idea that there was a common agenda or consensus (Wood, 2007).
In fact at the latest count and rising there were 70 different definitions of sustainability (Holmberg and Sandbrook, 1992; Pearce et al, 1989). What do 70 plus definitions of the meaning of sustainability mean for practitioners in the fashion industry now? Which one of these 70 definitions and counting, affect the way we think about how we make and use clothes? One of the easiest visual descriptions of the complexity of sustainability is the milking stool model with its three legs and seat. Leg one represents people, leg two profit and leg three planet, which all support the seat which represents the sustainable platform. In a move towards a more sustainable fashion industry all three legs must be as good and solid as they can possibly be. Consider this example, the industry may produce an organic cotton shirt (planet) which can still be made by a child labourer (people) and flown around the globe to European markets (profit). Can we say this is a sustainable fashion product, although depending on one of your 70 definitions some would?
In North America, Europe and the UK, retailers must be āseen to be greenā due to shareholder pressure, and to be ādoing the right thingā particularly in respect of customersā brand perceptions of the ethical and environmental corporate values. However, the British fashion retail system is unique in the world, in its practice of being driven by a few huge industrial fashion retailers using a āmono-logicalā capitalist system, an overly complex and costly system of products and services, designed to relieve us of the tasks and boring repetitiveness of everyday life (Manzini, 2005).
The mono-logical system means that the flexibility required to enable a more sustainable outcome by taking business risks is difficult. British retailers also have economies of scale and can buy large volumes of clothing at ever lower prices, creating a āchurnā of affordable, well designed goods into and out of store, which can be constantly refreshed, so delighting the consumer who is ever willing to buy more. Cheaper goods mean more consumption, which in turn means cheaper goods, which means more consumption. The customer footfall into the UK industrial fashion retail stores is massive, as is the rapid turnover of stock and item sales. How can this giant industrial fashion system ever be sustainable? Also a lucrative by-product of the British system, now being replicated elsewhere, is the increasing volumes of quality clothing waste leaving the UK, traded as recycled textiles for overseas destinations. This is unregulated āgreen wasteā, which is dumped upon other countries as any waste would be, and where the disposal of the waste at the source of consumption is not the responsibility of that country. Dumping fashion clothing on more than 65 overseas countries is eroding their local fashion textiles industries and creating profit for those few agencies handling the waste, whether private commerce or registered charities.
The major source of the problem in achieving a sustainable fashion industry is the consumer. Fashion customers are hungry for goods, yet need to feel absolved from the responsibility of the constant refreshing of their wardrobe; this is also a physical problem rather than philosophical one. Low prices, good design, good quality fashion clothing items, coupled with an exciting shopping leisure experience on the cheap, mean an increase in purchases, which is difficult to reconcile with the idea of a looming environmental armageddon. Customers can hold a large quantity of clothes in their homes stored in wardrobes, drawers, trunks, garages and lofts, but then when this storage is exhausted what can be done with these items which are almost as good as new? The consumerās only option, apart from trading on online auctions or selling to second-hand stores, is to give these fashion clothes as donations to charities, either over the counter to high street shops or clothing banks, or to the increasing number of curb-side collectors. The clothes are traded from the back of the charity shops and warehouses and sold by weight to fashion textile customers primarily in the second-hand clothing industry, to be dispersed across the globe.
Images of disappearing tribes on TV documentaries wearing branded T-shirts are a direct result of this unregulated free trade, or dumping. Second-hand clothing from the UK is recognized globally as prime quality and in particular labels, such as Marks and Spencer, are recognized as high value to the recycler, where haggling over price rarely takes place at the destination country, due to the quality of goods in each consignment from the UK (Abimbola, 2010). The more clothing generated and sold by industrial retailers, the more clothing waste is generated by the consumer and the more the UK charities benefit by donations of these clothes, which have been given both altruistically and in desperation, in order to salve the conscience of the fashion consumer in the first place. This is a vicious circle because those purged and half empty wardrobes can now contain more new clothes! In response, UK volume high street brands such as Top Shop (Treehugger, 2009), sell expensive second-hand, recycled and restyled lines alongside their main ranges, and TK Maxx (Hussey et al, 2009) offers a clothing take-back system in store, to recycle customersā donated fashion items as they purchase new ones. It is appropriate that the UK is leading the research into sustainable fashion textiles with support from government funds for data capture on the industry; examples include organizations such as the University of Cambridge Centre for Manufacturing who published Well Dressed (2006), because the UK is the source of this questionable business practice that other countries are following. UK educational organizations too are supporting sustainable design networks such as Textile Environment Design (TED), the Textiles Futures Research Group (TFRG) and the Slow Textiles group, and degree courses such as the BA Eco Design at Goldsmiths, University London and the MA Sustainable Fashion Design at the Centre for Sustainable Design. London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London (UAL) and the University College London Department of Anthropology are all producing items or publishing on the reasons behind and solutions to the problem. The source of the escalating crisis of what to do with and where to dump good quality fashion clothing waste is the huge industrial fashion retail and charity system in the UK. Significant research to resolve the problem on many levels should be funded by the fashion retailers and the charities together as they benefit from the lucrative world of free trade, where the consumer is a pawn.
It is crucial for the rest of the world to understand that these UK centric problems are not mirrored to the same extent overseas. We must be careful not to look to the UK for predictive and diagnostic data analysis and solutions to apply to other national systems. Each country and geographical region has its own very effective methods of dealing with the way it makes and uses clothes, which the UK has moved away from. These local methods of production and disposal should be investigated and analysed from a national perspective rather than borrowing rationale and solutions from the catastrophe in the UK where methods and data may be wholly inappropriate. This is a case where the UKās northern hemisphere model of āone size fits allā definitely does not work. Competitors in European countries such as The Netherlands and Italy, or the Antipodes for instance, operate a smaller ...
