Breakthrough, by Dr Camilla Pang
Fashion is an odd industry. Not much of how it works makes sense. Products are designed by people who don’t know how they’re made and made by people who have little influence over what they’re making despite being manufacturing experts.
Most fashion business models rely on outdated forecasting models and arbitrary minimum order quantities; winter products enter shops in summer and vice versa. A significant volume of clothes produced are never sold (due to overproduction, tied to minimum order quantities) and so are incinerated or shredded for low-grade material uses, like stuffing mattresses.
This business model has been economically sustainable for brands by outsourcing manufacturing to factories in developing countries (often based on third-party audits–not site visits). ‘Outsourcing’ means brands procure finished products from garment manufacturers, who conduct materials sourcing, product R&D and development on behalf of the brands. Brand involvement is typically the approval of samples, price negotiation and order placement. But this approach is no longer ‘sustainable’ in social, economic, or environmental terms, and procuring products without knowing where and how they are made is becoming more risky than ever. Just this week, the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) was adopted in Europe, and a facet of this will be a digital product passport (DPP) for every textile product sold on the EU market, containing detailed materials, design and production data, as well as recycling instructions.
Today’s fashion industry operates fractured, dividing the brand (the ‘creative’) from production (the ‘technical’). The arbiters of the industry–designers–have long been educated to uphold their ‘vision’ and aesthetic tendencies at the expense of all else, and they are at the top of the food chain when it comes to conceiving products that drive company revenue. But designers (and buyers) in the Global