 Fashion Futures: Is New Zealand Ready?
(New Zealand) - June 2009
The fashion and textile industry is beginning to separate like oil and water, as smart, intelligent and conscience fashion producers and consumers usher in a backlash against choice fatigue, poor quality, dumb design, the churn and greenwash.
BY JOAN FARRER
FINZ Board Member
Associate Professor, Fashion & Textiles (AUT)
More than 30 million people are employed worldwide in the apparel industry, which yielded $1 trillion in 2006. The process, development and manufacture of traditional fashion textiles (from fibre-to-fabric, garments, distribution, sales and disposal) is complex. The demand for new, integrated, transparent product, to satisfy a more savvy 'green' consumer, is both a challenge and a huge business opportunity to those with vision.
In Europe, sustainable ethical products are a growth area in fashion and food. On the one hand, Fast Fashion has provided competitive differentiation and speed, where retailers can react to real-time sales information and get best-selling lines into stores before a particular style or trends moves on. However, Fast Fashion has also become synonymous with low-price, huge numbers and poor quality clothes, which no one really wants. Customers have grown to accept inferior quality products, which may not last as long as more expensive items, but they are loosing the desire to buy, making it harder to sell.
'Lesser quality' and 'bargain' mean shorter life spans and a throw-away mentality, leading to the new phenomenon of disposing of garments that may have only been worn a few times, when the fabric and design might last for decades. More importantly, the 'love' for the product and brand is being lost.
Market research overseas indicates that the 'new consumer' wants knowledge of the clothing they are buying, but this is currently limited to basic labeling - brand, size, fabric, care instructions, country of manufacture. Information such as 'where was the cotton picked', 'what dye processes were used', 'who made it' and for ‘how much’ are all unknowns.
Fashion and sports brands incorporating health, social, environmental, economic and technological information in their clothing and accessories are commanding high prices, and increasing market share. 'Information' is becoming a brand's unique selling point, linked to corporate social responsibility (CSR).
Opportunity for transparency and sustainability adding value at home and for export is emerging. Improved 'track-and-trace' technology will soon reveal global fashion-and-textile supply, consumption and disposal chains to the new consumer.
The market will support both those who do and those who don't ‘want to know', and business will supply accordingly. Inform the fashion textile consumer, designer and business in an environmental, social and economically positive way for the benefit of all.
‘Smart’ fashion and textile technology will create stronger emotional connections between consumers, makers and products, which will become more human-centric, individual and emotive, providing psychological well-being and feel-good benefits for the wearer. The days of pile it high and sell it cheap are numbered.
Where will you and your business be in the fashion’s future?
Email: joan.farrer@aut.ac.nz
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