A solution to fashion textile unsustainability

Today, polarisation of the fashion textile industry has already begun as smart, intelligent and conscientious fashion emerges as a backlash to the experience of choice fatigue, poor quality, dumb design and greenwash. But the process, development and manufacture of fashion textiles is complex. And the demand, both customer and industry driven, for new integrated product policies,2 designed to minimise environmental impacts by looking at all phases of a product's life cycle, is problematic due to complexity and a lack of networking tools. This article explores these issues through the construct of the department store of the future.

Fashion manufacturing in New Zealand : can design contribute to a sustainable fashion Industry?

In the late 1990s New Zealand fashion gained some international recognition for its dark edginess and intellectual connection due to its colonial past (Molloy, 2004). In the years since, this momentum seems to have dissipated as local fashion companies have followed a global trend towards inexpensive off shore manufacturing. The transfer of the making of garments to overseas workers appears to have resulted in a local fashion scene where many garments look the same in style, colour, cut and fit. The excitement of the past, where the majority of fashion designers established their own individuality through the cut and shape of the garments that they produced, may have been inadvertently lost. Consequently a sustainable New Zealand fashion and manufacturing industry, with design integrity, seems further out of reach. The first question posed by this research project is, ‘can the design and manufacture of a fashion garment, bearing in mind certain economic and practical restrictions at its inception, result in the development of a distinctive ‘look’ or ‘handwriting’?’ Second, through development of a collection of prototypes, can potential garments be created to be sustainably manufactured in New Zealand?

Pass the scissors : consumers close in on the fashion industry

The fashion ecosystem is at boiling point as consumers turn up the heat in all areas of the fashion value, trend and supply chain. While traditionally fashion has been a monologue from designer brand to consumer, new technology and the virtual world has given consumers a voice to engage brands in a conversation to express evolving needs, ideas and feedback. Product customisation is no longer innovative. Successful brands are including customers in the design process and holding conversations ‘with’ them to improve product, manufacturing, sales, distribution, marketing and sustainable business practices. Co-creation and crowd sourcing are integral to any successful business model and designers and manufacturers are supplying the technology or tools for these creative, active, participatory ‘prosumers’. With this collaboration however, there arises a worrying trend for fashion professionals. The ‘design it yourself’, ‘indiepreneur’ who with the combination of technology, the internet, excess manufacturing capacity, crowd funding and the idea of sharing the creative integrity of a product (‘copyleft’ not copyright) is challenging the notion that the fashion supply chain is complex. The passive ‘consumer’ no longer exists. Fashion designers now share the stage with ‘amateur’ creators who are disrupting every activity they touch, while being motivated by profit as well as a quest for originality and innovation. This paper examines the effects this ‘consumer’ engagement is having on traditional fashion models and the fashion supply chain. Crowd sourcing, crowd funding, co-creating, design it yourself, global sourcing, the virtual supply chain, social media, online shopping, group buying, consumer to consumer marketing and retail, and branding the ‘individual’ are indicative of the new consumer-driven fashion models. Consumers now drive the fashion industry - from setting trends, through to creating, producing, selling and marketing product. They can turn up the heat at any time _ and any point _ in the fashion supply chain. They are raising the temperature at each and every stage of the chain, decreasing or eliminating the processes involved: decreasing the risk of fashion obsolescence, quantities for manufacture, complexity of distribution and the consumption of product; eliminating certain stages altogether and limiting the brand as custodians of marketing. Some brands are discovering a new ‘enemy’ – the very people they are trying to sell to. Keywords: fashion supply chain, virtual world, consumer, ‘prosumers’, co-creation, fashion designers

Spinning a sustainable yarn : environmental sustainability and brand story in the Australian fashion industry

In the Australian fashion industry, few fashion brands have intervened in the design of their products or the systems around their product to tackle environmental pollution and waste. Instead, support of charities (whether social or environmental) has become conflated with sustainability in the eyes of the public. Thus it is difficult to assess with any accuracy fashion brands’ response to sustainability. This article aims to address this through proposing a categorization system to structure the various interventions that a company may make. This system is applied to two case studies, analysing campaigns that respond to environmental sustainability by two established Australian brands, Country Road and Billabong. The case studies demonstrate how the interventions employed by a company, at least in the Australian context, are carefully developed to align with their brand story, revealing the interplay between the intangible aspects of a brand’s positioning and the tangible, measurable impacts of their garments.

Protective legal regulation for home-based workers in Australian textile, clothing and footwear supply chains

Supply chain outsourcing has posed problems for conventional labour regulation, which focuses on employers contracting directly with workers, particularly employees. These difficulties have been exacerbated by the traditional trifurcated approach to regulation of pay and conditions, work health and safety and workers’ compensation. This paper analyses the parallel interaction of two legal developments within the Australian textile, clothing and footwear industry. The first is mandatory contractual tracking mechanisms within state and federal labour laws and the second is the duties imposed by the harmonised Work Health and Safety Acts. Their combined effect has created an innovative, fully enforceable and integrated regulatory framework for the textile, clothing and footwear industry and, it is argued, other supply chains in different industry contexts. This paper highlights how regulatory solutions can address adverse issues for workers at the bottom of contractual networks, such as fissured workplaces and capital fragmentation, by enabling regulators to harness the commercial power of business controllers at the apex to ensure compliance throughout the entire chain.

Open and closed-loop recycling of textile and apparel products

Textile waste is a significant contributor to landfill yet the majority of textiles can be recycled, allowing for the energy and fibre to be reclaimed. This chapter examines the open-loop and closed loop recycling of textile products with particular reference to the fashion and apparel context. It describes the fibres used within apparel, the current mechanical and chemical methods for textile recycling, LCA findings for each method, and applications within apparel for each. Barriers for more effective recycling include ease of integration into existing textile and apparel design methods as well as coordinated collection of post-consumer waste. The chapter concludes with a discussion of innovations that point to future trends in both open-loop and closed-loop recycling within the apparel industry.

Evolutions of an Online Generation: Education, Industry and IMC

This paper traces the evolutions of a new generation of students who are predominantly the ‘online generation’; explores the emerging impact of this generation on industry; identifies the changing role of education from traditional classroom to an online environment; and explores the contribution related to integrated marketing communications (IMC). Educational requirements from a business perspective must incorporate global business demands; virtual learning environments progress the online generation towards a post-modern learning state. The central proposition of this paper is that the emergence of IMC in evolving industry practices is influenced by student generations who are producing a new paradigm of alignment between education and industry. This is purely a conceptual exploration using limited examples to provide some context and illustrate the questions raised for consideration.