The time we stopped fast fashion…
By Dr Mark Liu
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At the turn of the century, clothes made by cheap offshore labour flooded the fashion industry. Everyone could now afford more clothing. Sober styles were replaced by daring brightly coloured garments. Constantly consuming clothing that would quickly become “unfashionable” became a trendy way to show off. Local designers were outraged because they could not compete with this new fast fashion’s novelty, low prices, and high volumes. The wealth and control shifted from local textile manufacturers to giant corporations. A few European industrialists who imported vast amounts of garments from overseas, massively profited by exploiting labour in less developed countries. Then one day, a law was implemented that banned all fast fashion imports. Suddenly the police could put you in jail for importing and possessing fast fashion. Everything changed.
You may have thought I was talking about 2022 and maybe a dark dystopian future. However, I am referring to about 300 years ago when in 1721 in England where laws called “The Calico Acts” (1700, 1721) banned the flood of inexpensive imported garments. At the time, a calico fabric made from Indian cotton was being imported into Europe and disrupted the market. The material was softer and cheaper than local cotton, wool, linen and silk. The textiles came in a wide range of patterns, colours and styles. It was much more colourfast when washed than locally produced materials. Giant corporations such as the East India Company in England, France and the Netherlands would import vast quantities of these garments. They flooded Europe with cheap textiles of great novelty and superior quality. To protect the interests of the local wool, linen and silk makers, European companies banned the importation of imported fashion. In the words of the author Virginia Postrel, “For 73 years, France treated calico the way the U.S. treats cocaine.”.
Laws banning fast fashion effectively protected local industry but were still not a perfect solution. This was a fascinating time in history when pirates would smuggle in fashion as illegal contraband, and fashion police could arrest you for wearing fast fashion in the streets. These laws protected the interest of European countries. It eliminated competition from superior quality products from Asia. Eventually, 80 years of protection allowed technology to advance. The fashion industry would adopt automated looms and spinning machines, replacing the entire skilled textile workforce. Industrialists needed vast quantities of raw material and cheap labour to run textile mills and they repealed calico laws.
I bring up this time in history because it shows that governments have been able to stop the fast fashion industry when it aligns with their sovereign interests. Admittedly these were extremely colonial and discriminatory interests. However, it shows that laws and enforcement have the actual power to change the fashion industry. As you can see, in 2022, we are in a similar place to 1721 with a new fast fashion. This time climate change will affect all life on this planet. The fashion industry is responsible for 8% of global CO2 emissions. The World Bank anticipates it will expand emissions by 50% by 2030. How can we learn from the past the save our planet from the fast fashion industry?
Existential dread sells greenwashed products.
It is essential to emphasize the idea that government laws and legislation should be protecting us from the exploitative business models of the fast fashion industry. I am not talking about commitments, pledges, intentions or aspirations, existing laws. Fast fashion companies should also be held accountable for their actions. This narrative seems to be deliberately avoided by most media platforms that try and make the environmental crisis the personal responsibility of individual consumers. Companies tell us the only way we can stop fast fashion’s overproduction is by consuming more expensive greenwashed products. After guilting you and making you feel existential dread, one minute later, an ad plays, selling you a product with some green properties that you must buy. It creates the illusion that if we consume the right products, we can stop the existential crisis of climate change. It absolves companies and governments from any responsibility and stifles any nuanced discussion of the topic. Yet corporate and political decisions often make consumers powerless, and this is an uncomfortable truth.
The problem with the fast fashion business model is that they profit while everyone else pays for their wastefulness. Fast fashion companies are only interested in designing, shipping, and selling clothing. They deliberately outsource their work and do not own the factories they produce in. They do not pay taxes in those countries or take legal responsibility for the people who make their clothes. When they create excessive amounts of clothing, they do not have to pay to dispose of it. Sadly, charity organizations that collect clothing for the poor end up paying millions of dollars every year to dispose of excessive amounts of discarded fast fashion. In 2019 Australian charities paid 13 million dollars to dispose of unwanted textiles. Our laws must be on the wrong side of history when a few foreign billionaires make our charities pay millions of dollars for their greed.
It is possible for consumers to boycott fast fashion, but not buying fast fashion does not stop the damage to the environment. The fast-fashion business model works on economies of scale, so the more they make, the cheaper it gets. Companies do not need to sell all their stock to be profitable because the overproduction of garments is built into the business model. Fast fashion companies do not need to pay to dispose of their garments. There is no consequence for overproduction, just the opportunity for more profit. All these garments are being produced and will all end up in landfills. It does not matter if you buy fast fashion or not; the damage to the environment has already been done.
The very existence of fast fashion companies places our planet in peril and nullifies many of the positive improvements made in the other parts of the fashion industry. Consumers choosing not to buy fast fashion does not affect its damage. It only affects how much that company profits. Fast fashion companies know that their low prices and novel styles make them highly competitive, and they will have a critical mass of customers to make a profit. With targeted advertising and social media to fuel their clothing consumption. The question is not if they will survive but how much profit they will make.
The cost of a fast fashion garment includes paying the design team, materials, labour, shipping, retail or online sales platform and import duties. The design team and retail staff in the developed world have adequate compensation. The cost of materials and labour is kept deliberately low, and if they become too high, they shift to the next country in a line that is willing to do the production. According to the Clean Clothes Campaign, fashion retailers earn 59% of the price of a garment while the worker who sews garments get paid a shocking 0.6%. Recently, shipping costs have increased due to the global pandemic, creating havoc in the fashion industry.
The only other economic lever that we are not utilizing is to increase the cost of import duties for a fashion company that imports an excessive amount of garments. If fast fashion companies use our countries as dumping grounds, they should pay for the privilege. Governments have the power to take actions that consumers alone cannot. The cost of overproducing garments in Australia is that we will need to build recycling plants for roughly 800,000 tonnes of garments per year due to the fast fashion industry. The actual cost of building a fabric recycling plant such as the one proposed by the company Blocktexx will cost about 5.2 million dollars, which will process about 10,000 tonnes a year. We will need at least 80 times that capacity which will cost something in the hundreds of millions. We will need to build this infrastructure, but simply reducing the number of garments coming into the country would reduce the need to create so much of it.
A proposed tax to charge a penny on each garment created was quickly dismissed in the United Kingdom, despite the overwhelming need to address the waste from the fast fashion industry produced in the UK each year. The European Union is looking at ways of colour-coding textiles to make them easier to recycle, yet this is not looking at over-production. A bill proposed in New York would require fashion companies over a size of $100 million to provide transparency over 50% of their supply chains. The penalty for breaching this code would be 2% of the company’s total revenue or 450 million dollars or more. Yet this would make almost all fast fashion worst offenders compliant to this law rendering it meaningless. Fast fashion companies can still hide their worst practices without legal consequences. It is not until organizations such as the Stern Center for Business and Human Rights uncovered in their 2019 report that Ethiopian workers get paid $26 a month to sew garments. Fast-fashion companies will not be publishing these statistics in their annual reports.
Clearly, any policy that affects the bottom line of corporations will be opposed, stifled and watered down by politicians and corporate lobbyists. But we cannot continue business as usual without climate change affecting all of our lives. We need policymakers to explore legal mechanisms where import duties that target fast fashion companies could pay for the cost of textile recycling facilities and ease the burden on charities to dispose of fast fashion.
It is not in the interest of the world's people to have a handful of foreign billionaires profit off us while filling our countries with garbage, decimating our local industries, and making our taxpayers and charities pay to clean up their mess.
For 73 years, the nations of the world were able to stop the fast fashion industry around 300 years ago. Will we be able to do it again to save ourselves in time?