Material world
Can fast-fashion labels hope to create sustainable business models in the face insatiable consumer demand? Jing Zhang investigates
Sustainable: capable of being maintained at a steady level without exhausting natural resources or causing ecological damage.
A major challenge to sustainability in fashion is the global nature of a garment's life cycle.
Take, for example, a striped button-down shirt you may have bought in a Bali boutique. It could well have been imported to the store from the brand headquarters in Italy, perhaps via a Las Vegas showroom, but it could have been produced in Guangdong, Turkey or Bangladesh, with cotton farmed in Brazil. Finally, it is worn in Hong Kong.
The process involves various companies with differing policies in a number of countries; it is a journey undertaken by most fashion garments today. The process is unwieldy and the carbon footprint, inflated by all that travel, is large. Almost insatiable consumer demand and the mass production employed to try to satisfy it exacerbate problems such as competition for arable land, pollution and the exploitation of labour.
Nevertheless, one of the world's most successful high-street fashion companies is out to prove that a degree of sustainability and a high-turnover retail model can go hand in hand.