Settle In
People send me different articles relating to the fashion industry all the time, but this article was different – many, many people sent me this article. I must admit, I was a bit put off by the title: “Sweatpants Forever.” As a fashion enthusiast and someone who gets up, showers and puts on a pair of 100% cotton jeans each-and-every day, even in quarantine, I wasn’t sure I wanted to read an article referencing sweatpants; but man, I am so glad that I read this piece. Why? It talked about a lot of stuff in detail that I didn’t really know. While the focus of the article wasn’t specifically on sustainability, it did talk a lot about the unrealistic, fast-paced system that the fashion industry has operated by for so long.
The article’s byline states, “even before the pandemic, the whole fashion industry had started to unravel” (Aleksander, 2020). So why the unraveling? Well, in many ways, the internet. Once everyday consumers gained immediate access to the luxury fashion industry via the internet, what was once an industry of two exclusive, luxury collections a year suddenly turned into four, sometimes even six, collections a year. Consumers started to demand more-and-more product, which in turn meant that buyers needed more-and-more product, leaving designers to operate and produce at unrealistic speeds. Fashion shows turned into extravagant marketing events to ensure that designers stayed relevant. Following New York Fashion Week in fall 2008, the economy collapsed. Irina Aleksander (2020) states, “the luxury market was already oversaturated, and now there was no one to buy the stuff. Stores panicked and marked everything down early. But then they did it again the next year, and the year after that, relying on markdowns to generate revenue and training consumers to shop on sale” (para. 23). The sped-up fashion calendar led to strange, “seasonless” clothing and buyers demanded exclusive, “novelty” pieces (para. 25). Designers were no longer designing pieces they liked or even thought the consumer liked, they were designing for buyers, designing to stay relevant in stores. The fashion industry ended up with too much stuff and not enough people who even wanted it – aka a recipe for waste.
“We’ve done everything to such excess that there is no consumer for all of it...Everyone is exhausted by it. The designers are exhausted by it. The journalists are exhausted from following it...When you’re just told to produce, to produce, to produce, it’s like having a gun to your head and saying, you know, Dance, monkey!”
Marc Jacobs
The article discusses something in the fashion industry called R.T.V.s. R.T.V. stands for “return to vendor” and it basically means “if a collection – the one that the store has asked [designers] to pad out with novelty and exclusives – doesn’t sell, the retailer can return it and ask for its money back” (para. 31). As stores committed to larger and larger buys (that they couldn’t actually sell) in an effort to maintain exclusivity for its consumers, it resulted in a fast-pace of R.T.V.s. Constant overproduction and quick discounting of luxury goods makes everything seem disposable. Aleksander (2020) states, “so detrimental was the cycle of overproduction and discounting to luxury goods that in 2018, Burberry, the British label revealed that it had been burning – not metaphorically but literally: burning - $37 million of worth of merchandise per year to maintain ‘brand value’” (para. 32). Shocking, right?
What am I getting at with all of this information? The fashion industry must SLOW DOWN if it even remotely wants to survive. The way it’s been operating for so long isn’t sustainable in many, many different ways. It’s detrimental to the environment; it burns out designers and industry professionals; it breeds wasteful consumers looking for the next “it” thing. Covid-19 forced the fashion industry’s hand – it must reassess to survive.
“Sweatpants Forever” is a long read, but it’s definitely worth the time. Grab a cup of coffee and settle in.
Bye for now,
McGee