Like the giant fast food chains, fast fashion brands delivering to your doorstep, in less than a day, have temporarily become a habit for many other people around the world. Both offer an instant and affordable boost: a mini-feast for other people. who, in the existing economic climate, probably have little time and monetary resources. But, of course, there is a cost: the environment and the manufacturing situations of those products.
In recent years, however, we have noticed drastic changes in fast food chains and how other people understand them; provoked either through adjustments in the corporations themselves and through increased awareness among consumers of less than desirable aspects, such as how bad the maximum parts can be; environmental damage caused by its production; and how workers are treated. Fast fashion failed to show an initiative.
I recently had the opportunity to meet Roberta Graham, associate director of cultural and arts consultancy Space Doctors, about how she believes that in order to achieve a genuine replacement in the fashion industry, an incredibly bad sector for the environment, brands will need to be responsible in the same way that fast food companies have been. with strict regulations regarding their effect on the climate crisis, their treatment of personnel, the way they treat waste and their production lines.
Christopher Marquis: What are the main sustainability issues around fast fashion today?
Roberta Graham: The fashion industry is estimated to generate 92 million tonnes of textile waste annually, a figure that is expected to increase by around 60% between 2015 and 2030.
But statistics aside, the elephant in the room is the way we think about fashion: where we place it simple to see things like food, technology, and even cars as “industry”; In one way or another, clothing is a basic need, fashion has managed to maintain a position not only as a sector, but as an art form and our main form of self-expression as individuals.
This is especially true of high-end fashion, which has pretty well masked the fact that it’s nothing more than fast fashion when it comes to environmental damage and unethical practices. The myth they have created around themselves that superior quality lasts longer and is therefore more durable, is no longer applicable when the value is such and some haute couture brands prefer to destroy unsold stock rather than let it revalue at the end of the season.
As the culture itself has accelerated with the growing influence of social media and celebrity culture, we’ve come to see clothing as highly disposable, but as accessories rather than functional items, worthy of an Instagram post before being scrapped. It’s up to us, as buyers and the brands that make the garments, to undo that mindset and shift our thinking towards longevity.
Marquis: What parallels have you seen between the immediate fad and the immediate expansion of the immediate food industry in the 80s and 90s?
Graham: The things that draw us to Shein, PLT and Boohoo are largely similar to what drives other people to McDonald’s for home cooking: convenience, low price, reliability, consistency (for the most part, a Big Mac is the same where you order it), and the near-monopoly they have in their corner of the market. They’re accessible too: McDonald’s food has incredibly broad appeal, and fast fashion brands also offer something for everyone, not just in terms of styles, but sizes too.
Fast fashion and fast food provide a great dopamine seasoning: even though we know they’re bad for us on a larger scale, we still think of them as a quick and easy way to take me, anything almost everyone wants right now. .
Another similarity is the dominant “blame the poor” narrative that has driven discourse on the disorders of either industry. Our society is designed to inspire other people to consume as much as they can, but when the messes of those industries become public: whether obesity and animal cruelty in fast food, or lack of ethics quickly affect paints and the weather, the first port of call has been to demonize consumers; Calling them irresponsible, making possible immoral and even self-centered choices to simply believe and pursue the dream that they were actually sold through business and society.
As with the climate crisis itself, if we wish to have a genuine impact, we wish to replace the cultural context itself, not just the individual movements of some other people living there.
Marquis: What positive steps have we noticed in terms of sustainability in the fast food industry and what motivates them?
Graham: Fast food corporations have been under pressure to play their part by providing healthy features at lower costs, as well as turning their supply chains to be more moral and sustainable, so that they can provide reasonable fast food to other people who want or want it. . , however, they are now held at a higher point through consumers and legislators.
Consumer demand has replaced other people who are more health-conscious and aware of things like plant-based diets; and how intellectual and physical well-being are connected and connected to food.
The way fast food companies have been forced to provide nutritional data, such as the number of calories in products, means they demonstrate the tangible effect of their supply beyond taste and pleasure. This allows consumers to make informed decisions about context. of their physical form and the environment.
These mindset shifts have been accompanied by the fact that those corporations simply can’t get away with it once they could, thanks to government laws and regulations related to things like ingredients and production, like the sugar tax.
It is incidental that even with those changes, fast food still has a long way to go in terms of sustainability; But the positive steps we’ve seen so far, however small, serve to show other industries that even big global brands that seem untouchable can do better.
Marquis: Are there other sectors where fashion can simply take the lead in terms of sustainability?What do they do well and so well?
Graham: Fashion is the only catepasty that already has a culture of second-hand and second-hand pieces. In addition to learning from other sectors, you can also go back to some of your roots to locate answers as some other cathepasries already are. There is a motion in development to rent and transfer clothing, toys and accessories for babies and children in order to accept used parts only for a few months.
We would also do well to view fashion as we do perfume: many other people have an “exclusive fragrance” that is part of their identity, meaning they don’t always feel the need to upgrade, trade, or buy new ones. Another attitude very different from how we consume clothes, where we constantly feel the desire to reinvent ourselves to show who we are.
In the tech world, we’re seeing a number of inventions emerge, such as mushroom leather, but they tend to be sustainable because they’re niche and not mass-produced or putting pressure on a quick resource. Ultimately, if we are unable to meet the inherent demand, we want to find a way to diversify the use of fabrics in fashion to relieve pressure on certain resources, without creating elite systems that are only affordable to the rich.
Marquis: What are the key classes in which the fashion industry can be informed from the fast trajectory of food, and where can brands and shoppers start making positive changes?
Graham: Instead of demonising what fast fashion brands are doing wrong, we want to take a look at what Primark, Shein and others are doing well and what makes them so popular. Only then can we resolve the destructive elements: we want to perceive what they “want” to gather and find a way to update it for consumers in a way that has a less negative impact. We understood the appeal of fast food: doing the same with fast fashion shouldn’t be that hard.
Ultimately, the duty deserves to fall primarily on fast fashion brands rather than individuals. Like fast food companies, they deserve to be responsible and be required to be transparent about their environmental credentials, fabrics and production lines, just as McDonald’s wants to be transparent about ingredients. and processes.
Marquis: To what extent can the language we use around fast fashion help brands become more sustainable and reframe the way we think about fashion more broadly in terms of regeneration/”conscious consumption” etc. ?Are there key terms that want to be re-examined in order to paint a greener future?
Graham: The language around fashion wants to evolve to link the final product to the original resources used, in the same way that food does when describing its ingredients and where they come from.
Fair Trade has done a wonderful job of telling the vivid reports of the social and environmental difficulties of cocoa and coffee as a convincing explanation for why they should be replaced; We also want to perceive those perspectives of the fashion industry.
More broadly, preference should be addressed through problematic terminology such as “seasons” and “trends,” which inspire immediate turnover and give the feeling that they constantly “need” something new.
However, it is important that the replacement comes from both the internal movements of brands and language. Fashion has a big challenge with greenwashing, which is imaginable because the language about sustainable movements that is used across brands is very disparate: the average customer does not have the time or inclination to study whether or not a sustainable claim is valid before buying.
Fashion will have to be regenerative and not sustainable. We’ve reached a point we can’t sustain, so to make an impact, brands will not only have to balance what they take, but they will have to actively give back to the climate and the global network not just with words but with tangible movements through the process of design, production and how they stimulate preference in consumers.
The industry will need to be responsible for a popular set of regenerative rules similar to nutritional labeling of foods to allow consumers to make quick and easy choices based on genuine measures, not marketing jargon. All garments were classified with their carbon and human footprint. . .
Marquis: And finally, how does Space Doctors work with corporations to make those kinds of changes?
Graham: Something I find encouraging and exciting is that we’re seeing more and more customers coming to us with big strategic issues, particularly focused on creating replacement not only externally, but also within internal systems.
In recent years, I have worked on several projects where customers have been actively interested in perceiving and responding to wider societal changes: we have worked with global stores asking us to help them perceive the circular economy to drive internal innovation, for example; And we helped an outerwear logo understand how to design truly inclusive clothing.
We recently worked with an outdoor clothing logo that was very ambitious in the sense of using semiotics and cultural knowledge to explore how they could take steps to become a de facto regenerative logo holistically in the next ten years.
It was not a question of perceiving external signs of regeneration and harnessing them to generate appeal, but of interconnecting semiotics with a speculative and artistic strategy to perceive how groups can begin to race to replace internal systems to create transparent trajectories towards the long term. preferable for the customer
We are fortunate to work with massive influential clients around the world and like other people who not only perceive culture, but also the strength of semiotics to influence it. It is our duty as an industry to be very transparent about what we do. presented and how it will have an effect in the future.