Author: Dana Thomas

Publisher: Apollo

What: A panorama of the sustainability initiatives from production to selling steps, with a didactic approach enabling everyone to understand what is at stake

Why it is important: Written in 2019, Thomas refers to brands, labels and organisations that either pivoted or disappeared since then. Moreover, the pandemic in 2020 has changed a lot of things and now sustainability is much more a must-have for all value chain players than at the time of writing. However, her insights are still very much valid as Fashion is slow to reform, and such books help to diffuse among general public ideas about sustainable initiatives and the reason why consumption patterns and attitude towards garments (especially in the West) should change, after 20 years of so of fast fashion domination.

Dana Thomas, who lives in Paris, has been the fashion and style columnist for many newspapers and magazines: The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post. She has also written books about legends from the fashion world, Alexander Mc Queen and John Galliano. Prior to this book, her best seller was Deluxe: how Luxury lost its luster, a deep dive into the mechanisms of the luxury business models.

Dana Thomas starts her book by reminding us of the Zara jacket Ms Melania Trump wore in Texas in 2018, with “I really don’t care, do you?” written in the back. Leaving aside any political comment, Thomas recalls that Zara, in 2017, produced 450 million pieces, each of them being worn on average seven times before being thrown away. The rise of fast fashion over the recent decades has accustomed customers to think that garments are perishable and cheap products, a mindset which has some severe consequences:

• The system is unsustainable on the long range (in 2018, 80 bn garments were bought in the world, and it is expected, if the growth rate stays the same, that this value will grow by +63% within 2030, from 62 to 102 million tons of garments a year). Fashion as an industries represents a quarter of total carbon emissions worldwide during the production process, not even taking into account the fact that unwanted clothes are generally thrown away without any circularity.
• Due to the competitive production costs in emerging economies, it has destroyed vast areas of the production capabilities in developed countries: in 1991, 56,2% of all garments sold in the US were made in USA, a portion that fell to 2,5% in 2012, leading to the loss of 1,2 million jobs,
• Factory workers from emerging economies producing the clothes are not protected, often subject to harassment, overexploitation and human rights abuses. 98%of them are paid less than the minimum vital salary according to Thomas.

Thomas conducts a journey through the fashion system by interviewing, and explaining what is at stake, various brands and production units. This allows her to dive progressively, along with the reader, into the secrets of the industry.

The case of Mary Katranzou allows her to explain the seasonality process and how collections are produced, leading to an historical perspective on how the worldwide production evolved. Thomas ends this part by explaining the competitive advantages of Zara which led to its rise, before also describing to what extent the business and industrial model of fast fashion is not sustainable on the long range.

The study of some factories in LA lead to a focus on the working conditions in the industry. Thomas provides with an historical perspective, explaining what was at stake and giving a glimpse of the negotiations and fights that happened in the past to improve working conditions in the “west”, which,  unfortunately, did not trickle down in emerging countries such as Bangladesh, leading to major catastrophes such as the Tazreen building fire in Dhaka in 2010, and the Rana Plaza in 2013. Thomas explains how this affected western brands and how they had to deal with the situation while also preserving their sales, leading to unsatisfactory solutions.

The author uses the case of the blue jean to explain the rise and fall of major brands such as Levi’s, going through an industrialisation and a de-industrialisation process all along the 20th century, and the solutions found more recently for the blue jeans producers to produce differently (locally and more sustainably). She then explores the initiatives on various topics such as cotton production (Chanin), “rightshoring” (bringing back the production centers) (Cornejo, Theory), slow fashion ventures (Momotaro jeans in Japan), and, above all, initiatives to make the new system profitable.

Stella Mc Cartney is taken as an example of commitment at a large level (at the time of writing, Mc Cartney was still part of the Kering group), along with the Higgs Index (see our Exclusive article on the topic here),and technical initiatives: Modern Meadows (lab-grown leather), Bolt threads (lab-grown silk), Evrnu (artificial cotton 100% made from used garments), Worn Again and Aquafil (circular initiatives to infinitely recycle garments), Iris Van Herpen and her collaboration with Daniel Widrig (the first couture dress to be 100% printed in 3D), Unmade (made to request knitwear). Ultimately, she also explains that there are different ways to sell fashion, with initiatives such as Modaoperandi (order straight from the fashion show), matchesfashion (local showroom), le Bon Marché, Selfridges (including its sustainable commitments and the fact that it is part of IGDS), Amazon, the Real Real, runt the runway, Panoply (closed since then).

She concludes by hinting that there are many initiatives to change the way garments are made, but ultimately, the responsibility is shared with the customer, who should review its consumption needs and attitude towards clothes.

Buy it on Amazon here: <https://www.amazon.fr/Fashionopolis-Price-Fashion-Future-Clothes/dp/1789546060>