While it’s no secret that fast fashion brands have been found to have poor working conditions as well as environmental practices, high fashion brands have long hid from that spotlight. They’ve dodged being included in the conversation of companies and brands at fault for the ever growing issue. The amount of waste that the fashion industry produces almost rarely crosses consumers’ minds. The industry is known as one of the biggest pollutants and in high fashion, much of that stems from wanting to maintain an image of exclusivity and prestige. For example, Burberry made around $3.6 billion in 2017 but destroyed $36.8 million worth of unused merchandise. Once they were caught doing so and people were gearing up to boycott the brand, they announced that they’d no longer practice the destroying of runway or unused product. The scary part of this is that Burberry is only one of the many companies that does this. Other heavy hitters like Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Prada, and even Nike have all been known to destroy products in order to promote the limited stock which then drives up demand. In 2018, Richemont, the owner of Cartier, Piaget, and Baume & Mercier, admitted to destroying $563 million worth of watches in two years just to preserve the exclusivity of the brands.

In a 2018 article by writer Chavie Lieber for Vox, the harmful practices of high fashion brands was discussed with Timo Rissanen, a professor of fashion design and sustainability at Parsons. The core of what drives the idea of a high fashion brand is the fact that its pieces are made to seem impossible to access to the majority. If it were easy to buy high fashion clothing, there’d be no interest or demand because everyone would be wearing it. The idea of exclusivity has only gotten worse over time as people are starting to be less and less impressed with things because we’ve seen it all. Rissanen touches on this, saying, “The simplest answer across the board is that today, quantitatively, there’s more stuff than there ever has been before. Fashion cycles have also gotten shorter because of the internet and fast fashion, so there’s a push to constantly put new merchandise out on the market. So when you combine these two, we are now literally at a place where we no longer have anywhere for this stuff to go other than up a chimney,”. The influence of social media has created the surge of trends which drives every industry, not just fashion. Because everyone in the world can now find out about any product, more has to be made due to the higher demand. Tik Tok, for example, is a huge source of information for people of all ages. One of the trends in the world right now is “Tik Tok Fashion”. Essentially it’s styles of dressing that are derived from what people see and deem to be “cool” on Tik Tok.

The problem with this is that social media trends rarely last more than a day. You’re the talk of the town until the next overnight sensation takes your spotlight. This - and I say “forces” very lightly - forces these brands and companies to have to constantly pivot to keep up with the new demands. It’s also changed how the fashion industry is even structured now. Rissanen says, “The underlying business model now includes immense pressure to constantly replenish merchandise. When I was a fashion student 20 years ago, we had four seasons, as well as [specialty ones like] Resort and Cruise. Now the turnover is faster than ever. Global population has gone up too, and so has the number of garments that a person buys per year. A couple years ago, we were at 20 garments per person each year. Today, in the United States, an average person buys about 68 garments per year,”. Keeping in mind that this interview was conducted in 2018, this has only gotten worse in the last four years. While there are still the four main seasons, the amount of fashion weeks has increased to the point where even major fashion houses have to choose which fashion week they’ll actually show at. There’s the constant need for creating something new for people to look at and this only drives up the amount of materials and products made. You can imagine that as a major fashion house, being pushed to make more pieces than you’re used to would also lead to you trying to find a way to still make your brand seem out of reach. Social media has also created the need for content - always having something to post in order to stay relevant. There’s a lot of pieces that brands will create just for runway and social media, but never actually release. If it does get sold, it’s only to a select clientele so that, again, to the public the brand seems only accessible to the few.

The question of why these extra pieces or at least the fabrics aren’t recycled or donated arises. As the 2021 article by Rachel Cernansky says, the answer is that it’s much cheaper to just destroy them. Often clothing gets recycled by shredding it and repurposing it, whether that be as insulation, mixing it with another fabric, or to add to another piece. The problem with that is the more you mix fabrics, the harder it is to keep recycling because the fibers change. Even though brands like Burberry have taken steps towards “circular design” methods it’s still an additional cost that these companies would love to avoid. “...held product disassembly workshops and funded research by the Hong Kong Research Institute of Textile and Apparel to design a recycling system for post-consumer leather goods. (The fashion industry has been slow to invest in and adopt recycling technologies and infrastructure for textiles in general, and for leather in particular,)” (Cernansky, 2021). Technology like this is going to cost a lot of money because you have to keep in mind the amount of buttons, zippers, and other pieces of a garment that have to be removed before it can be put through a shredder or incinerated. This process would also take a high form of technology or manual labor and both of those add to the costs of production. Rissanen raises a good point about the environmental impact of these poor recycling habits. He says that we should avoid burning the fabrics, “Polyester now accounts for about 60 percent of the total fiber market, and it comes from oil. So you could make the case that when we burn polyester, we are burning oil. There is a contribution to CO2 that is happening there, and there’s also a ton of chemicals and finishings embedded in clothing and textiles through the dyeing. When this stuff is burned, it filters into the air,”.

While there are brands that continue these extremely harmful practices, there are also a lot of both well known, and younger brands that are taking on environmentally friendly fashion.

Sources

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/9/17/17852294/fashion-brands-burning-merchandise-burberry-nike-h-and-m

https://www.scoopwhoop.com/fashion/here-s-what-luxury-brands-do-to-their-unsold-products/

https://www.voguebusiness.com/sustainability/why-destroying-products-is-still-an-everest-of-a-problem-for-fashion

https://goodonyou.eco/fashion-brands-burn-unsold-clothes/

https://www.fashionrevolution.org/usa-blog/7-fashion-brands-that-are-designing-out-waste/

https://thisisplastics.com/innovation/high-fashion-brands-are-creating-luxury-with-recycled-plastic/

https://www.thegoodtrade.com/features/luxury-eco-friendly-designers