A short article in La Libre suddenly reveals to me the mechanism behind the system of fast fashion. (I most certainly could have realised that before, but I never gave it very much thought.) The idea behind the big chains such as Zara, Massimo Dutti, Uniqlo, Primark, H&M, etc. is that consumers should always be able to find there what they want (= what the same companies have made them want) in sufficient quantities. This idea requires huge stocks, and therefore huge production.
On the other hand, in order to compete with the other brands in the same market, you have to differentiate yourself by constantly introducing new trends and models – not four times a year for the new season, but almost weekly. All this continuous mass production needs to be made, packaged and shipped at very low cost in relation to the very low selling price. This constant stream of cheap new products means that the chains simply destroy their overstocks of clothes that have never been worn in order to make room for the new models of the week.
Chains such as Inditex (Zara, Massimo Dutti, Oysho, …) or H&M are said to have a gross price margin of 50 to 60% in relation to production costs. This means that an item sold for €10 has cost around €4 or €5 in total. It is therefore not very expensive to throw these things away, and it is certainly less expensive than the possibility of selling a new item that would bring in at least as much money as the cost of the thrown-away item.
Everyone knows that the fast fashion system is unsustainable, not only economically, but above all morally and environmentally. The European Union is apparently working on a regulation to ban the destruction of new, unsold clothes – and thus the export of these products to the massive dumps in Africa or South America. Would this mean that those poor people down there in the South would be denied decent clothing? Well, not really. I have already referred before to The Nest Collective’s installation at Documenta 15: “… the enormous amounts of waste (including textiles and computer parts) that are sent from the rich West to Africa ‘because there they can still be used or recycled’. Nonsense. More than seventy percent of all that junk is also unusable in Africa, which means that Africa is simply used as a garbage dump for the Western world. But you already knew that, don’t you?”
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