Fashion in Turbulent Times: New Technologies Meet New Economic Paradigms

Abstract

The fashion industry is experiencing structural change as new manufacturing and distribution technologies emerge. Simultaneously, the environmental impact of garment production and the sector’s record on workers’ rights provokes increasing disquiet. This article explores how new technologies for distributing and making clothes interact with a shifting industrial policy agenda as neoclassical and neoliberal economic paradigms lose their dominance, and state intervention becomes fashionable again. Contemporary ready-to-wear production, which relies on manufacturing goods speculatively in hope that they will meet consumers’ needs, is massively wasteful, and the sector has experienced a series of shocks as established brands fail to correctly anticipate demand. Online-bespoke—in which garments are made to the specifications of the customer—has emerged as a promising sector. In changing how we buy and produce garments, can we transform how we value our clothes, the resources from which they are composed, and how we value the people who make them? This article argues that in order to reap the benefits of new and disruptive technologies, national governments and multilateral organizations must develop industrial strategies to shift current market incentives. Protections for fledgling sustainable and technologically innovative fashion brands, along with Pigovian taxation (taxation targeting negative externalities like pollution), are required to transform the industry.

Keywords:

• sustainability
• online-bespoke
• slow fashion
• new technologies
• garment manufacture
• industrial strategy
• Pigovian taxation

Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks to Quiller Brooke for generously sharing his expertise and for his patience in answering my innumerable questions about the technicalities of value chains, backward linkages, Life Cycle Assessments and the practical challenges of environmental economics.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The government response to the audit committee ignores most of the substantive recommendations raised, and instead reiterates that voluntary schemes to encourage sustainability (SCAP) already exist, that enforcement agencies have the right to challenge illegally low pay, and that young people should be educated to value longer lasting clothes. The fact that these existing approaches are failing to achieve their stated outcomes is not addressed. There is a more meaningful engagement with issues of “modern slavery,” but the solutions suggested remain rather vague and deferred.

2 The “sharing economy” has come to describe the ways in which individuals and companies (such as Airbnb, Uber, Spotify, Netflix or Zipcar) monetize assets like apartments, spare rooms, music, films or cars not by selling these assets, but by leasing them (or by providing subscription access to them) typically via Internet based technologies. Increasingly fashion concerns are also moving into this sector: the American company “Rent the Runway” was founded in 2007, and a number of other providers such as “For Days” have emerged in recent years. Of course, renting garments is not a completely new idea—eveningwear and party costumes have long been offered in this way—but the hope is that by allowing customers to frequently change their style (and to access higher-end clothing) fashion rental companies could provide an answer to the wastefulness of fast fashion: we shall see. A connected though distinct phenomenon is the growing popularity and modish nature of online second hand marketplaces such as Depop which similarly allow consumers to rapidly cycle through styles.

3 Friedrich Hayek understood markets as sophisticated information systems that communicate the prices of goods and labour, in his view, more effectively and efficiently than governments or planners are able to do. He argued, “in a system where the knowledge of the relevant facts is dispersed among many people prices can act to coördinate the separate actions of different people” (Hayek 1945, 526). His distrust of central planning was combined with a broader political anxiety that the involvement of the nation state in the economy would lead to authoritarianism (Hayek 1944). In the immediate post war context these ideas were unfashionable: state intervention was widely accepted as necessary to rebuild countries and economies shattered by conflict. But Hayekian precepts returned to prominence on the political right during the 1970s and were used to argue for privatisation, the shrinking of the welfare state, and the toleration of much higher levels of economic inequality. As I have argued in this article, while markets remain very useful mechanisms for distributing products and services, where they are left to function without oversight and regulation, collective goods (like the maintenance of the environment) are severely compromised, and power is concentrated in the hands of too few people with dangerous consequences.

4 The economist Arthur Pigou developed and formalised the concept of the “externality” (sometimes also known as a “spillover effect”). Externalities are side effects of an economic activity caused, but not paid for by, the producer or economic actor in question: for instance, factory pollution is a negative externality. In The Economics of Welfare ([1920] 2013) Pigou argued that governments should discourage economic activities that have a negative impact on the wider community using taxation, while subsidies should be used to encourage those activities that benefit society. These ideas formed part of Pigou’s broader discussion of how the economy can be managed to maximise the wellbeing and economic welfare of the population in general.

5 “Straight knives” are hand-held band-saws used for cutting through multiple layers of cloth and, therefore, allowing many garments to be cut out in one go, both these and hand-held rotary knives are nineteenth century inventions that speed up ready-to-wear production.

6 Ready-to-wear garments were being produced by the late seventeenth century in England—originally to clothe an expanding military, and subsequently for the production of low-cost smocks and workwear (off-the-peg garments may perhaps have been in use a little earlier in urban centres of the Low Countries). By the early nineteenth century, these methods of manufacture were extended to produce more fashion-oriented garments such as waistcoats and breeches (Godley 1997, 5). Such methods of manufacture were to expand rapidly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries first in menswear and subsequently in womenswear. Nevertheless, since fashion products are subject to rapid change, many garment factories lack the highly standardised production line systems of other more mechanised sectors, as machinists need to be able to turn their hands to a variety of operations and processes and be able to handle a variety of fabrics.

7 The American company Gerber Technologies was a pioneer of computer-based pattern making systems (the first of which was released onto the market in 1988). 3D imaging and prototyping software has taken a longer time to be absorbed into fashion design and manufacture. By 1990 3D software was already widely used in the engineering and aeronautical industries, but these technologies had to undergo significant development to be applicable to the garment industry (Gerber Technology 2018).

8 A number of competitor programmes including V-Stitcher by Browzwear, 3D Virtual Prototyping and 3D Suite, by Optitex; and Tuka3D by Tukatech are also widely used (Baytar and Ashdown 2015).

9 Sabot is the French for clog, and thus a saboteur is an industrial worker who wears clogs while engaged in activism or violent struggle, or who employs their clogs in said struggle. The precise etymology of the word is disputed, but it is generally accepted to relate to French weavers threatened by the advent of the Jacquard loom.

10 It is sometimes mistakenly thought that “increasing productivity” must necessarily equate to producing more stuff. This is wrong. In fact, increased productivity in economic terms is about producing more “value” from the same or fewer resources.

11 One method to measuring the impact of value chains (and indeed of products once they enter into the marketplace) is Life Cycle Assessment or LCA. A flaw in the way that LCAs are sometimes used is that they often measure the average impact of a kilogramme of beef of tonne of steel (trade associations are particularly apt to employ LCAs in this way). This is problematic, because the carbon intensity of a tonne of steel produced using the cleanest technologies available may well be radically different from that produced using the dirtiest. This flattening out and averaging of data can compromise the accuracy of policy making, and therefore value chain and LCA metrics are best disaggregated (Brooke 2020 [personal interview]).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jay McCauley Bowstead

Jay McCauley Bowstead lectures in Cultural and Historical Studies at London College of Fashion (UAL). Jay’s scholarly work focuses on gender, design, and materiality. Recent publications include the monograph Menswear Revolution (2018), a co-authored article on designer Charles Jeffrey (2020), and a chapter on cultural hybridity in the anthology Dandy Style (2021). Other research interests include the relationship between ethics, fashion production and public policy discourses. [email protected]