2019 Fashion Keywords: Sustainable Development

If a few key words are used to summarize the characteristics of the development of fashion industry in 2019, "sustainable development" must be one of them.
In November 18th, the 2019 fashion report of the famous fashion search platform Lyst was officially released. By tracking the search of 104 million users over the past year, combining sales data from 1.2 000 online shops and 6 million reports from global media and social media, Lyst found that consumers' search volume related to sustainable fashion increased by 75% over the same period last year, and more and more consumers were searching for sustainable materials, such as recycled nylon yarn, organic cotton, recycled polyester and Tencel fiber.
This trend has created huge potential market space for sustainable fashion, and it also poses new challenges for every participant in the fashion industry chain.
Sustainable fashion is becoming more and more popular.
China Sustainability Tribune
A large number of studies show that the concept of consumers has gradually changed, and the sustainability of fashion brands is becoming an important choice standard for consumers. Therefore, for the fashion industry, the practice of sustainable development is not only a public welfare action to protect the environment and reduce waste of resources, but also an important business strategy to promote industry innovation, value creation and impress the new generation of consumers. It is an inevitable choice for itself to adapt to the tide of sustainable development. To this end, in the face of increasingly serious ecological crisis and the growing demand for consumers, many fashion brands and luxury brands have made a positive response.
Take the sustainable action of the past year as an example, it may be the fashion industry climate action charter signed by 43 brands of fashion and luxury industry in December 2018. The initial goal is to reduce the total emissions of greenhouse gases in the fashion industry by 30% by 2030, and achieve zero net emissions in 2050. This will set a sustainable development tone for 2019's fashion industry, announce the supply chain from Gucci, achieve "carbon neutral" to Prada, start the regenerated nylon project, then use Converse to make shoes with old jeans, and Erdos launch the environmental protection "good SHAN series". In 2019, sustainable development has changed from an avant-garde topic to a consensus and trend in the industry.
Looking at the 2019 media coverage, we can see that global fashion brands are accelerating the pace of sustainable development. For example, in response to the climate crisis, about 150 brands of 32 fashion companies have signed the fashion convention. Timberland is committed to planting 50 million trees in the world in the next five years.
In terms of recycling economy, Prada officially launched the reclaimed nylon project, which made marine waste plastics, fishing nets and textile fiber waste into bags. H&M Tmall official flagship store added the entrance of "old clothes recycling" and opened online recycling services.
In terms of environmental packaging, Burberry cancelled the plastic lamination of the retail bags, and also planned to recycle the disused retail hangers. Weekday and the packaging providers of Electronic Commerce jointly launched recyclable packaging bags.
In terms of corporate social responsibility or public welfare behavior, Kai Yun group has launched the most comprehensive "animal welfare guidelines" for luxury and fashion industries so far. Zara parent company Inditex plans to achieve 100% sustainability of raw materials in 2025; UNIQLO launches "Miao new" Miao embroidery project, and encourages consumers to donate old clothes to pay attention to traditional skills.
In the aspect of inventing environmental protection materials, DTRT, the largest garment manufacturer in West Africa, CO worked with suppliers to produce a polyester fabric. Its dyeing water consumption was 80% lower than that of the traditional fabric dyeing process. Chanel invested in Evolved by Nature, a green chemical company, to explore more environmental friendly materials.
In addition, a number of sustainable e-commerce platforms emerged in 2019, becoming one of the largest areas of sustainable consumption. Like the German fashion retail platform Zalando, the new sustainable fashion brand section is compiled, and the fashion brands that meet the requirements are aggregated. The e-commerce platform Canyon Goods, which focuses on sustainable brand and antique apparel, sells sustainable products that meet the screening principles of organic, recycled materials and fair trade, as well as the antiques clothing trade. The US high-end department store Nordstrom launches a sustainable commodity column, which has more than 2000 kinds of merchandise to facilitate consumers to find and buy.
In addition, there are also a group of fashion start-ups specializing in environmental protection and sustainable development.
Much remains to be done.
China Sustainability Tribune
Although the fashion industry has stepped up its action in the past year and adopted various meaningful sustainable development initiatives, in May this year, the fashion summit in Copenhagen drew a worrying conclusion that the fashion industry is not fast enough to solve the problem. Although more and more brands have promised to increase their efforts to mitigate environmental and social impacts, the speed of these changes is still unable to offset the negative impact of business on the earth.
Pulse of the Fashion Industry, the latest report on the assessment of the social responsibility and sustainable development of the fashion industry, shows that in 2019, the process of sustainable development of the fashion industry has slowed down.
The fashion industry sustainability process score "Pulse Score" (percentage system) rose from 38 to 42 points, compared with the 6 point increase in 2018, the growth rate slowed down 1/3. At present, sustainable development has become a global consensus without doubt. However, the fashion industry is still facing a very complicated problem as to how to achieve better goals.
First of all, the fashion industry lacks the tools and funds needed to move towards a more sustainable business model. Kai Yun group has publicly stated that although they had set a goal of reducing their environmental impact by 40% by 2025, the existing solution can only achieve half of the target. Fashion companies need to move towards a new and more circular direction of operation and invest more capital in the technology needed to achieve this goal.
At present, some enterprises have begun to use technology to solve the problem of sustainable development of the industry. For example, Stella McCartney and Google have begun to work together to solve the environmental data gap in the fashion industry. In the use of financial means to help solve the industry problems, Prada and the French agricultural credit group also signed the first luxury related industry related loans for sustainable development. However, in the face of ambitious sustainable development objectives, these innovations are far from enough.
Secondly, the fashion industry is facing more practical problems. For example, in order to protect animal rights, most luxury brands including Gucci, Versace, Michael Kors, Burberry and so on have declared the use of animal fur. However, some people have pointed out that animal fur is more sustainable than artificial fur, because a lot of fiber in artificial fur is also derived from non renewable resources, and it takes millions of years to completely degrade. In contrast, animal fur can only be degraded in a few years.
Therefore, it is a great challenge for the luxury industry to announce the specific measures and tools to reduce carbon emissions in order to offset the environmental impact caused by the use of animal fur. Perhaps the only way to solve this problem is to make material innovation.
In addition, organic cotton is considered to be a more sustainable fabric choice. However, because of its low yield and high cost compared with traditional cotton, organic cotton farmers lack resilience in scale economy competition with enterprise farms, thus hampering the popularization of organic cotton.
Third, there is a gap between customer purchase intention and purchase decision. According to the online survey of more than 2000 consumers in the United Kingdom and the United States on the basis of the April 2019 electricity supplier personalization and retail AI platform Nosto, 52% of consumers want the fashion industry to become more sustainable. But if the brand produces products in a sustainable way and charges higher prices, only 29% of consumers are willing to pay for it.
Therefore, although consumers are increasingly demanding brands to be more sustainable, this is still not a factor that drives them to make purchase decisions. In fact, the most important consideration for ordinary consumers is style and price. Although sustainable development is the trend of the times, to make consumers change their purchase decisions, we need to change people's recognition of sustainable fashion, and also require enterprises to reduce manufacturing costs through technological innovation.
At the same time, the survey also shows that 45% of consumers are hard to tell which fashion brands are truly committed to sustainable development, which is also one of the factors hindering consumers from making purchase decisions. For this reason, the report suggests that fashion brands should strengthen information disclosure and enhance communication so as to support consumers to identify sustainable products easily and conveniently.
Fourth, fashion brand's sustainable action is determined and ambitious. Take the fast fashion industry as an example, although many brands have already carried out old clothing recycling, sustainable procurement and other initiatives, but still face many doubts. The reason is that many fast fashion brands are advocating the recycling of old clothes while they are still producing more clothing on a large scale, generating more energy consumption and wasting more resources. There is a conflict between fast fashion pursuit of new and fast business mode and sustainable development.
Moreover, the fast fashion brand's old clothing recycling rate is usually not high, and a large part of the recycled old clothes will eventually be destroyed and landfill, which also makes many environmentalists doubt whether the brand's "motivation" is for marketing propaganda or for sustainable development.
In addition, there are many brand sustainable projects that only stay in the conceptual stage, or only limited edition products. They are small in scale and limited in environment and society. They are more like a brand promotion strategy. In short, facing the downward trend of demand and the unsustainable factors of business mode, the quick fashion of self-help will undoubtedly be a painful and lengthy process.
Fifth, there is a lack of systematic understanding of sustainable fashion. Sustainable fashion is not a single link choice, but an ecological circle that needs to be actively constructed. Sustainable fashion involves the whole life cycle of materials, such as source, design, production, transportation, consumption and recycling. At present, the cognition of sustainable fashion system is still insufficient, and many people even misunderstand.
In addition, fashion, as a closely related industry, also needs to innovate in the promotion and dissemination of sustainable consumption. It needs the cooperation of more organizations outside the fashion industry. Therefore, promoting the sustainable development of fashion industry needs systematic consideration and multi party cooperation.
In the future, in order to truly realize the sustainable development of the fashion industry, fashion brands need to break the rules, show greater ambition and determination, and find a sustainable development way suited to the characteristics of the fashion industry.