The Secret World of Fast Fashion
psmag.com
psmag.com
Some attributes of this dynamic: Acceleration of efficiency via new forms of risk-offsetting. Improvement of manufacturing process and distribution. Finding edge through creativity and understanding the needs of who's buying.
And the progress is clear: a more sophisticated cultural environment that can be enjoyed by more people than before.
Of course there are trade-offs; progress does not arrive on your doorstep without some nasty side-effects. In the case of fast fashion, apparently: IP theft. Environmental damage. Widening gap between the classes.
So why should this corner of the economy be judged any differently than the layers of hyper-competitive tech companies in SF and SV, reacting to trends, improving their manufacturing process, and pushing design new limits?
Sophisticated in terms of overall manufacturing process but not so much variety, IMO.
I think the trend helps to dish out more of the same (as "cool" has now become easily attainable, both in access, timeliness and affordability), which makes a far higher percentage of people (especially under 40) look more alike.
I agree. I'd even say that this article describes the point where economic progress starts diverging from the reasons we want to have it.
> Of course there are trade-offs; progress does not arrive on your doorstep without some nasty side-effects.
There's a moment when we should stop and ask ourselves if the side effects are worth it, 'lest we humans get optimized out of the economy, which will continue to run by itself on automation, without us being present, or alive.
> So why should this corner of the economy be judged any differently than the layers of hyper-competitive tech companies in SF and SV, reacting to trends, improving their manufacturing process, and pushing design new limits?
I don't think it shouldn't; SV nowdays is a fashion-driven industry after all ;).
The sense of aesthetic, style consciousness and 'agility' makes it much easier for startups like Frank & Oak or Everlane to exist. Arguably, you could consider these companies Fast Fashion too. And then you get a company like John Elliot + Co, a company that would be seen as a luxury line that says:
> “We can pull the trigger at a moment’s notice and get the wheels turning so that we can produce garments that are needed at a relatively quick turnaround time. That gives us a tremendous advantage.” [1]
Although garment manufacturing has by and large moved off shore, there's been a little bit of a trend to bring things back here. Even if it is a race to the bottom, there are still opportunities.
[1] http://www.businessoffashion.com/2014/08/cult-menswear-brand...
My only beef is that they offer limited-editions a few times a year and I receive the email notice too late to get one.
The TLDR here is that an explosion in low cost labour (Korean immigrant garment makers) destroyed the established system by providing higher quality goods for cheaper prices, but essentially in limited stock.
It's basically like Discount Flooring. I can buy Hardwood flooring for $6 a sqft and I'm guaranteed I can buy enough to floor my whole house, better yet I'm guaranteed I can come back in 6 months and get more. So I can buy enough for my main floor and come back later for my second floor. This is how clothing used to be. You could find a pair of jeans that fit you perfect and 6 months from now you could find the same pair.
Or I could go to a discount floorer, I get it at an amazing price $1.25 a sqft. That's fucking phenomenal... max 150 sqft because that's their entire stock. I can't floor my living room with 150 sqft. So to floor my entire house I'm going to have 8 different styles of hardwood? No. But that's what my damn dresser is. I've got jeans that are a dozen different styles and a dozen different fits.
I've sworn off retailers because I can't wear their jeans for certain activities. I've got a pair that I should have thrown out two years ago because they fit great, but whenever I go to crouch it feels like I'm going to hulk them because they're poorly tailored. So as long as I remain standing in them, I'm golden.
It's even worse in shirts. I have a long torso for my height, which means I can't let anyone buy me tshirts as gifts. My mum sent me a shirt for my birthday, it hits my bellybutton.
The new trend of fast fashion isn't an improvement, it's turned it into a race to the bottom. Gone are the days you could get quality clothing from any store at any time. Now it's bargain hunting in big box stores. You have to get lucky to even find anything worthy of paying that double discounted price.
One thing I am concerned about is that the predominance of Koreans in the market will keep other nationalities/races out. But I think the article addresses this as well: the children of the immigrants, future leaders of that industry, are pretty 'Americanized' and perhaps won't be so cliquey.
It's the kind of thing ultra smart, automated meta data collectors would be looking at and predicting futures.
Will we see this sort of change across all industries and how will it effect global markets.
I think people really underestimate the complete networks the internet makes possible and how it will change global business.
How long before one month is too long.
Increasingly, I'm seeing it as yet another form of market manipulation to try to squeeze ever so much more money out of citizen's wallets.
Used to be I could identify a brand or style of clothing, find items which fit, and return reliably to the same vendor repeatedly. This was my habit in my teens, it remains my preferred mode in my 40s. And while I'm rarely accused of being highly fashion conscious, I'm also not a slob (it really doesn't take much to have a sense of style).
The first time I encountered a wholesale change in fashion was when the Gap discontinued a line of jeans in the late 1980s. Being naturally gifted with large thighs, an aviator cut worked exceptionally well for me (and yes, I also miss parachute pants and Zoot Suits, thanks for asking).
After a bit of casting around, I turned up another store which carried a consistent cut of jeans and wore those through the 1990s and most of the 2000s. For casual office wear, I'd discovered a few department and men's clothing stores which carried reliable fits.
I had a line of black t-shirts with a nice cotton fabric and a subtly off-black color which became a fave. Much as Steve Jobs bought a lifetime supply of black mock-turtlenecks, I'd found my shirt for life (but failed to secure a lifetime supply of them at the time, an error in judgment).
Pretty much all of that came to a crashing end in 2010. Numerous vendors changed their sizes -- same brand and size which had previously fit (as evidenced by what was in my wardrobe) now didn't, and in ridiculous fashion. Virtually everything suddenly went "skinny", which is to say, less fabric, and fabrics became very noticeably cheaper.
I first discovered this on one of my grab-and-dash shopping visits: walk into store, pick up a few pair of jeans and shirts of proven reliable fit, pay, head home (I'm pretty much the antithesis of a recreational shopper, malls are torture palaces).
Pulling on the new duds for work the next morning I discovered I couldn't breath. Everything felt 2-3 sizes too small. I double-checked sizes, they corresponded with what I'd bought in the past, pulled existing clothes out of the closet, and returned to the store with my purchases for a full refund as they no longer produced items which fit me.
It took over a dozen stops to find jeans and shirts which fit.
And given the "fast fashion" fad, I've got absolutely no assurance that I'll be able to rely on those vendors in future.
Oh, and for those of you suggesting online shopping: SRSLY? For clothes, which you wear next to your skin, for which fit, cut, finish, and feel are absolutely crucial? Thanks, but no. Worse, with present levels of quality control (and I suspect: highly variable producer sourcing), it's not even sufficient to find a style which fits and order a count of those: you've got to individually try on and examine every last damned item.
The result is I've gone from being a reliable customer happy to return to a store repeatedly to one who treats every encounter as a hostile and frustrating experience for which I'm not likely to achieve anything remotely resembling satisfaction.
I've considered custom tailoring, though I've not gone that route yet, for shirts and slacks. Though as I mostly wear t-shirts and jeans, the additional cost is tremendous. It's actually not so bad for some tailors I've explored, though the one I'd earmarked for future items appears to have gone out of business, and of course, I'd have needed to first see what they'd produce (with ~6 weeks turnaround) rather than simply buying something off the rack and having it altered (which has worked in the past).
What I don't understand is why with all the supposed advances in personalization, there isn't an affordable and readily accessible, brick-and-mortar service by which people can specify the clothes they want, have measurements taken, and receive (with a satisfaction guarantee) clothes which actually fit. There've been some noises about this in past, and there are "made to measure" (which is not the same as bespoke) "pop-up" tailors such as Indochino -- the one time I'd found them in real life it was an absolute zoo with ~60 minute wait simply to get into the storefront for measurement.
I'm not sure this is "ripe for disruption", but it's certainly rife with disappointment.
Or a tailor.
I've had varying levels of success w/ other communications, though the tailoring route (for business wear at least) is probably where I'm headed.
That being said, I had large thighs from my soccer days, so I get to experience the bad side of the situation as well. I still don't have a very good solution for jeans :(
I finally found that a cheap pair from Target worked vastly better for me than $200+ fashion styles from high-markup retailers.
+1 for Uniqlo - they are in the UK too and you can go in there and get things you already own, as in shirts exactly like the ones in your wardrobe back home but not as faded.
However they did change their jeans sizes a couple of years ago so the waistline area is no longer quite right and the thighs are a bit tight.
Although there is this thing called fast fashion, it really is for women who want others to think 'what is she wearing?' on a daily basis. It is an entirely separate market to 'predictable'. 'Predictable' is well catered for in the UK, there is the likes of Uniqlo, and, for an even older generation, there is Marks and Spencer.
Maybe such a retailer needs to invest some effort into 'slow fashion', where fit and finish is guaranteed, you can get 'replacement parts' for your wardrobe and maybe even get emailed every year or two to be reminded that it is time to refurbish the sock collection etc. With everything done online and sizes determined by initial purchases the 'hell' of the High Street could be avoided.
What immediately came to mind was high end leather shoes, where you can replace the soles, maintain the leather, and have them last for 10+ years. It's the polar opposite of fast fashion.
Something that hasn't been said is that this fast fashion is absolutely unsustainable from an environmental and energy perspective. Low quality clothing that is designed to literally not last more than a couple wears; versus a Patagonia jacket that not only is made well enough to last a decade, but also carries a lifetime warranty and a recycling guarantee... I'll take the latter, please.
There is L.L. Bean and Lands' End, both of which have been very consistent over time, though I've found quality and finish of their clothing to be somewhat variable in recent years as well. The fact that it's mail order/online also makes sizing an issue.
"I've considered custom tailoring, though I've not gone that route yet...the additional cost is tremendous."
Outside the US (S. America, and in Med. Europe), you can more easily and cheaply buy something that's larger than you'd normally wear and then bring it to a seamstress, having it fit to your size for cheap ($20 or less). The younger people in this kind of business charge US prices but older people with more experience will do it for cheap.
Jeans simply don't tailor well on account of seams and other factors. Slacks can be, but again, you've got to have the material to start with, and today's "skinny" styles don't.
Incidentally: I mentioned Zoot Suits above. They were actually strongly discouraged in the US by the War Production Board, for being overly wasteful of fabric. Wikipedia has a good history of the suit and the Zoot Suit Riots.
Are there no 'High and Mighty' shops where you live?
My body shape is athletic, not sedentary. This creates all world of problems.
The sizing was referring to shirts -- for slacks going up in waist size to allow for thigh fit eventually works. In shirts I simply run out of larger sizes to take in elsewhere.
> Jeans simply don't tailor well on account of seams and other factors. Slacks can be, but again, you've got to have the material to start with, and today's "skinny" styles don't.
I'm curious. What are the types of stores you shop at? Although I'm sure styles have been slimmed down across the board, there are plenty of stores I see with regular fitting clothes.
and FWIW, jeans tailor fine usually, you just need a tailor that knows what they're doing and obviously cost may not be worth it.
I also confirmed the sizing changes with multiple store managers at multiple retailers. It's possible they were lying, but comparisons with identically-sized earlier purchases showed that the sizes had been modified.
It's also become rather evident that numerous large retailers are in all sorts of hurt. Ironically it's the ones which are furthest behind the fashion curve which tend to have sizes that fit, but the in-store organization, stock, and staffing are abysmal at many of these.
It has to be said that I do this too. Last year I found a nice fitted t-shirt which look good, and fit wonderfully. The next day I went back and bought ten more.
I have varied clothing, but things that are really good - in this case small black calvin klein t-shirts - I just make sure I buy lots.
Of course you can't sell the some five or even ten year old cut because no one in their right mind would buy it. It would be complete doom for your company if you tried to. Tastes change, and they do so in complicated ways that's not at all trivial to model. They change in accordance to other changes in society, in music, and in the political climate. It's all interconnected.
I am pretty much a jeans-n-tshirt slob, but even I wouldn't want to wear the same clothes for a decade. Feel free to stock up on that lifetime supply of shirts, but don't expect any reasonable economic agent to cater to it. It's just not something anyone can blame fast fashion for. I mean, the DEC 21064 Alpha was a beautiful architecture, but it wouldn't have made sense to expect it to sell in 2005.
Some items are timeless though, such as certain coats, hats and boots, but jeans and shirts are not. Those things will work ten years on, but street fashion never will.
Here's a tip, kid: if you stay well back off the bleeding edge of fashion, styles are remarkably durable. Blue-jeans are little changed from the 1940s and 1950s, in basic styles, as are t-shirts, cardigans, cable-knit sweaters, flannel shirts, and a whole mess of clothing that's geared principally for comfort rather than style. And those are precisely the same looks which are renowned for being timeless.
It's the extreme cuts, fabrics, and finishes which date and age quickly.
As I said: Jobs had his signature look. Hemmingway's sweater is timeless. James Dean's leather jacket. Albert Einstein had the same suit (and no socks).
Sometimes simplifying your life in one area allows you to optimize others.
And when the entire fashion industry conspires to create clothes I literally can not wear, I owe it nothing.
If you believe the classic blue jeans are unchanged since the 40s you just haven't looked close enough. The cut change slowly over time. Look at the seams from that old pair from the 40s and you'll see it's not even cut from the same parts! Check out the inseam and it's completely different. That's because technology change, the sourcing of materials change, and finally tastes change.
Neither a jacket nor a suit is an example of street fashion. Those trends works very differently. But even a suit is cut different today. If someone walked in in an 80s suit you'd notice straight away, I promise. That may be something you desire, especially if you have the slighest bit of an hipster inside, but it's not something you could base your company on.
I'm probably the last person to understand these things. My clothes keep me warm, basically. What I like or dislike is neither here nor there. I'm just saying it's not true that jeans haven't changed in 50 years, and it wouldn't make economic sense to sell things that people don't want to buy. That was my only point. I don't think you personally owe anyone anything.