Positive Feedback Phenomenon

I spend a ton of time (maybe an unhealthy amount of time) thinking about the culture of “sustainability”, and most of the writing I do here covers big picture cultural issues around the way we think about the environment, or about people, or about consumption. There are AMAZING things happening in “sustainable” materials, particularly in fashion, but the audience literacy level is generally low and therefore they are very easy to deceive, and the barrier for entry for small companies with new IP is so high, because all investors typically want to see aggressive growth even in alternative “earth-saving” materials, and in order to meet aggressive growth many sustainable materials will not scale in a way that improves their impact on the environment, or their overall contribution to the fashion landscape.

To be clear, it is imperative that brands - especially big ones with lots of production units - invest in alternative materials urgently, because we all have a critical responsibility to decrease our footprint, and some of us - privileged, living in the Global North and with access to wealth or power - have more of a responsibility than others.

But additionally, none of those changes matter unless an additional focus is gained, and that focus is on DEGROWTH.

Prior to the 2008 recession, an event which can be directly credited with creating the influence and accessibility of Direct to Consumer (DTC) business, wholesale was the ruling entity of fashion. Unless you were a long-established brand with a healthy and profitable retail footprint, your fate each season was determined by the whims and directions of your buyers at Barneys (RIP), Neiman Marcus, Saks and others. Wholesale feedback determined what went to production, what the end customers saw of the brand, where the product was available, et al.

Buyers also held an outsized influence on the way a brand developed itself, because wholesale was 80-90% of many brands businesses, social media did not truly exist yet, and so your understanding of the end customer was reliant on your relationship with, and the perceptions of, your buyers. A number of buyers may one season say “we need little black dresses!”, and I have seen many brands, even those whose aesthetics are diametrically opposed to that item, pivot their production to appease that feedback.

Then, next season, your buyer says, “we need more frequent deliveries!”, and suddenly, small brands with decent sell-throughs to start start dividing up the collections, which means pumping up the SKU offering for each of those deliveries so that they can be “well-rounded”, even though they will ultimately live on a poorly-tended rack possibly mixed with other brands deliveries. Your semi-annual offering goes to quarterly, then each of those quarterlies get pumped up to two or three deliveries, and then presto, you have deliveries twelve times a year.

Was this based on demand? No. It was based on your wholesale accounts need to have fresh product on the floor at regular intervals in order to continue attracting customers, so that they can stay in business. So in addition to the number of rather small brands building their collections up beyond the realm of what they feel truly madly deeply great about, I have also seen many designers then confronted at the next seasons buying appointment with slow sell-throughs or poor performance, something that is always ultimately blamed on the brand.

This rapid percussive delivery scheme remained as the emerging designer market grew out of the recession, and additionally, as social media and accessible e-commerce platforms proliferated, brands retained that rhythm as they expanded into their own DTC businesses. The pace never stopped. And, to replace the “little black dress” feedback of 2005, designers now have the entire internet of feedback, complete access to what everyone else is presenting, and absolutely no insight into the true success or resonance of any of it.

When Millennium Bridge was completed in London in the year 2000, it was open for one half day before it had to be unexpectedly shut for two years of mitigation work. On opening day, crowds stepped onto the bridge, and the bridge reacted to the natural swaying motion of people’s steps by oscillating back and forth a bit. When something sways back and forth, people will step into that sway all at the same time to keep their balance and prevent falls, which reinforces the effect and increases the amplification of the sway, which means people step even further into the sway, etc etc. By midday the bridge had to be shut because the last thing you want from a safety or longevity standpoint is a footbridge whose hips don’t lie.

But actually, if we’re honest, the bridge had to be shut because the engineers who designed this pedestrian-only bridge did not design it to be used by pedestrians.

Many attempts have been made to apply degrowth to the fashion delivery cycle, and by extension the cruel and batsh*t crazy markdown cycle, one of which I highlighted some months ago as an early pandemic effort made by Dries Van Noten and Shira Carmi (among others) to rally the industry around pumping the brakes on this full-speed ride toward our demise, but after retailers reopened and found that many of their customers were sitting on months of unused expendable income, this effort flew out the window, only to be replaced by a further insatiable demand for new product and now, inexplicably, Black Friday-style markdowns on November 1.

The markdowns have to happen now so that retailers can make space for the new product cascading in, much of it early deliveries from Spring 2023, which makes perfect sense, because Halloween was Monday.

This is Part 1 of a 2 part piece, and what I wanted to talk about in this Part is the logistical/systemic pieces of the fashion industry that create some of the elements of our Culture, because out Culture ends up being what dictates much of our behavior. If there are endless deliveries and they get earlier and earlier every year, naturally the marketing system designed around those deliveries is going to aim to create a language of lack to inspire potential customers to eat what this system is offering. You are not enough, you don’t have enough, you haven’t done enough, you aren’t cool enough, you’re definitely not pretty enough. Lack lack lack. You must keep consuming new things in order to reach those just-out-of-reach standards, which no one really fully understands the breadth of, because they can never be reached.

The collateral damage of that Culture is consumers with unhealthy relationships to consumption, but also a huge, distinct, overwhelming amount of overproduction, both from a unit-standpoint as well as brands producing things that nobody wants from that particular brand, with increasingly nowhere to go.

So you see, even if all of those overproduced, unbought, unneeded items were made of mushrooms trimmed in recycled polyester and packaged in FSC certified kelp, it doesn’t matter because there would still be too much.

Part 2 is about Us.