Fashion Future

Fastest Growing Sector

How fashion is changing, a journey into the future

One of the fastest sectors is slowing down. Nothing we wear will be like before, or maybe it will? Short journey into the future of fashion.

Fashion must slow down. Giorgio Armani, the “king of fashion”, said this in the open letter to Women’s wear daily, according to Alessandro Michele, creative director of Gucci, who has launched a fashion closer to consumers and the environment, able to respond to needs after the epidemic of Covid-19, and the Belgian designer Dries van Noten also endorses it, in the letter asking the system for radical changes.

It was December 31, 1989 when the New York Times first used the expression fast fashion. The occasion was the opening of a store of the Spanish fast fashion brand Zara in New York. The meaning was simple: according to the American newspaper, it took only 15 days to transform an item of clothing from the designer’s thought into a product that could be purchased in store. Fast fashion was already a reality and allowed everyone to dress following the latest trends and spending little.

The first turning point in the history of the sector was this: the evolution of shopping in the form of entertainment, with frantic rhythms of design, production and distribution to satisfy a growing demand for cheap and always new clothes. For the next two decades, recycling and mending was out of fashion. The reduction of costs, the simplification of processes and the increase in the purchasing power of consumers. According to the consulting firm McKinsey, they caused apparel production to double between 2000 and 2014 and the number of garments purchased each year by the average consumer to increase by 60 percent. Sales of clothes are about 400 percent more today than they were twenty years ago.

The first consequence is the halving of the life cycle of clothing compared to the early 2000s: some estimates go as far as to suggest that consumers treat cheaper clothes as if they were “disposable”, discarding them after wearing them only seven or eight times. The second is the multiplication of collections : Zara offers 24 a year, but also H&M, together with other fashion multinationals, offers from 12 to 16 with weekly updates.

Next Step in Fashion

Among all European clothing companies, the average number of collections has more than doubled, from two per year in 2000 to around five per year in 2011. And when the unsold piles up, the problem arises of how to dispose of it. A topic that will be dealt with in more detail in the following chapters : one of the most common practices is that of burning excess clothes to make room for new collections. It is estimated that the equivalent of a garbage truck full of clothes is burned or sent to landfill every second, for a total of about 85 percent of the fabrics per year.

Fashion Sector

The fashion industry, as reported by the World Economic Forum, is the second most polluting sector in the world after the oil one, each year it is responsible for 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions (CO 2 ) and contributes to the waste of water resources for 20 percent of the total, necessary for different processes such as dyeing, printing and finishing, but also to maintain the cotton plantations.

In Short

The sector has a turnover of 225 billion euros, employs more than 300 million people around the world and contributes significantly to global wealth. It also has a huge impact on the pollution of the oceans : about 60 per cent of the clothes are made of polyester which, with washing, releases about 500 thousand tons of microfibres into waterways every year, the equivalent of 50 billion plastic. Businesses providing international flower delivery are helping to cut and reduce the waste from their industry whilst assisting the fashion industry.

United Nations Report

According to a United Nations report, the fashion sector is estimated to consume more energy than air and sea transport combined.

Almost 30 years after 1989, which marked the beginning of fast fashion, Forever21, the historic American low cost brand, went into crisis, declaring bankruptcy in September 2019, while H & M’s profits fell for the first time after 44 years of history.

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