Business Studies
After reading the case study “Fast Fashion,” write a one-page memo articulating the decision to a specific problem and providing reasons in defense of that decision.
Case Study:
At one point in The Great Gatsby, Gatsby explained to Daisy and Nick that he had a man who sent him new clothes each season, spring and fall. He then started pulling shirts out of a cabinet and tossing them on a table, “shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray….[H]e brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher—shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue.” Daisy suddenly buried her face in the pile of shirts and sobbed, “They’re such beautiful shirts.”
This memorable scene captures a common fantasy about what unlimited wealth would mean: to have so many fine clothes, one couldn’t wear them all in a lifetime. Catering to this daydream the fast fashion industry seeks to make Daisy’s tearful swoon come true for many people of humbler means than Gatsby.
The approach to fashion called “fast fashion” has compressed the buying cycle for clothing by increasing the number of buying seasons from Gatsby’s two (spring and fall) to as many as eight or nine per year. At fast-fashion stores like Zara’s, Forever21, and H&M, one can expect a new line of clothing to appear every six weeks. And these new clothes are both trendy and affordable. With such rapid turnover of inventory, some retailers have cut costs by shifting advertising dollars away from media to in-store promotions. This has the added benefit of forcing customers to physically enter the stores more frequently to keep up with new lines of clothing as they arrive.
In order to compress the buying cycle, the fast-fashion concept requires producers to both compress the production cycle and to keep prices low. Accordingly, producers seek out the cheapest materials and labor as well as seeking the most efficient means of distribution.
The results seem to be a win for all players: manufacturers, retailers, and customers alike. Countries like China, Bangladesh, and India provide an enormous number of textiles as well as ready-made garments for export.
There are, of course, downsides to fast fashion. Retailers dispose of unsold inventories and customers clean out their closets. Fast fashions, however, are neither sturdy nor timeless, so they tend not to find their way into any secondhand markets. According to Elizabeth Cline, in an article in The Atlantic, “Where Does Discarded Clothing Go?
(Links to an external site.)
” Americans send 10.5 million tons of clothing to landfills every year because many of these fast-fashion clothes are made of synthetic materials that can’t be recycled. The production process involves dyes and caustic chemicals that pollute the environment. And, most obviously, the ready and cheap access to ephemeral fashions pushes us to buy and discard
Articulating Decisions
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
ANSWER
A Decision on the Problems of First Fashioned Clothe Wastes
The textile industry faces the challenge of managing wastes, especially those associated with fashion. This memorandum identifies a case study of First Fashioned clothes in reporting possible solutions in defense of handling the problem of fashion wastes. Numerous strategies can help alleviate the menace of fashion waste. For instance, putting more emphasis on the circular innovation within the fashion industry is key in using recycled materials to produce the next range of product lines. This will alleviate the problem of retailers being forced to dispose of the unsold inventories (Young, 2020). Producers will also not need to compress their production cycle instead of considering any waste for the next round of fashioned designed clothe production and keep their prices steady throughout the production periods.
The larger society must also embrace a new shift of thinking towards supporting brands working to improve the environment in reducing the dumping of fashioned clothe waste materials. The American textile industry must consider companies founded in the pretext of conserving the environment to manage fashioned designed clothing wastes instead of charities and for-profit groups and companies like Viltex (Cline, 2014). The textiles must be recycled in their smallest portions into modern rugs, insulation, and carpet padding materials, among other forms of recycling clothes before they form vast piles of unwanted products.
Innovating the manufacturing of fashioned clothes to reduces waste and protecting the environment from the toxicity of manufacturing chemicals is another way of managing fashioned wastes. Shifting advertising methods from media to in-store promotions create a backlog of the fashion designer clothes at the retail stores (Cline, 2014). Technologically designed fashioned garments displayed on the social media platforms for customers to check out the trending fashioned dresses are waste-reducing as clients order for production based on electronically displayed fashioned designed clothes. Moreover, this approach provides producers ample time to seek the cheapest material, labor, and means of distributing their products to customers.
Another approach is to consider slowing down the fast-fashion consumption to reduce the negative impacts on the environment other than emphasizing entirely on the fancy looks of fashioned clothes. As a result, the consumers of fashioned designed clothes will find few clothes to buy and are less likely to discard them at an increasing rate. Finally, taking an individualistic behavior pattern of recycling fashioned clothes is key in reducing the disposal of such clothes. Emphasizing an individual responsibility will help consumers of fast fashioned clothes avoid unnecessarily cleaning out their closets. Reducing the wastes associated with Fashioned clothes must, therefore, consider a holistic approach to the role of manufacturers, retailers, and consumers of such products in reducing their threats to the environment.
References
- Cline (2014). Where Does Discarded Clothing Go? Retrieved from: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/07/where-does-discarded-clothing- go/374613/
- Young (2020). Fashion Waste Is Rubbish – Yes, But This Is Not The Issue. Retrieved from: https://wtvox.com/sustainable-fashion/fashion-waste/
