From Asos to Ashes: the Speedy Decline of Fast Fashion
By Foivos Dousos and Shze Hui Tjoa
After a month of poor sales, the online retail giant Asos has just issued a profit warning out of the blue, and put all of brand-world on edge.
Most analysts were caught off-guard by Asos’ announcement of bad news. This is because popular belief holds that online companies are, in general, immune to the problems faced by traditional brick-and-mortar stores: unlike their high-street counterparts, digital brands like Asos are presumed to be agile and optimised for the modern age.
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But a closer look at the world of consumer fashion reveals one very important way in which Asos is lagging behind, rather than leading, the category: namely, in its continued promotion of a fast fashion ethos. It is true that the brand recently launched an ‘eco edit’ collection, which is touted as having a lower environmental impact. But at its core, Asos continues to encourage the never-ending consumption and production of new garments — in 2017, its website stocked up to 85,000 styles at any given moment and introduced 4,000 new styles per week.
In a fast-fashion company like Asos, cheaply-made garments are churned out en-masse — only to be worn a few times and then thrown into the landfill, to make more wardrobe space. But consumers are increasingly starting to turn away from this business model, as they discover how it devastates the environment and hurts lowly-paid factory-workers. Many younger consumers are now turning to clothes-resale services — upcycling old garments through peer-to-peer shopping channels like Depop so as to access new styles, without generating waste. Insofar as they make new purchases, moreover, many of them turn to apps like “Good on You” to track the eco credentials of the brands that they purchase from (Asos’ rating on the app, incidentally, is a dismal “not good enough’)
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More broadly speaking, this change of consumer mentality speaks to a wider shift in how we have begun to perceive fashion, in these changing times. Previously, new fashion trends could differentiate the rich from the poor, as the latter were not able to buy into new trends every few months — access to the hottest, latest trends was exclusive to socio-economic elites.
But today, the democratisation of fashion has made these standards irrelevant. Everyone can potentially participate in the latest trends, as cheap versions of the latest high-fashion couture are now produced and disseminated almost instantaneously to the high-street. In this new context, being stylish — and more importantly, appearing affluent– is not about following the latest trend, but about having the time and means to upkeep ‘good’ clothes, thereby resisting the wasteful cycles of fast fashion.
Consequently, what we are now witnessing is a change in what people think of as ‘aspirational’ wear. Sustainability, durability and waste reduction have themselves become trendy; wearing old, but well-maintained, clothes have become today’s new form of conspicuous consumption.
Think, for example, of the marketing campaigns around sustainability launched by Stella McCartney — who was recently announced as UN’s representative for sustainable fashion! Her brand’s new selling point is durable clothes that defy trends; additionally, she invites her consumers to keep their garments for years, and be proud of wearing the same clothes multiple times. But what, you might ask, is the economic demographic being targeted by this campaign; who can really afford Stella McCartney’s expensive clothesline, and who, by contrast, is implicitly shamed for being wasteful?
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In summary, perhaps we can understand why a fast-fashion brand like Asos is struggling, by turning to the playful ‘boots theory’ once articulated by the British writer Terry Pratchett:
Take boots, for example. [A man] earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots [he] always bought…
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
Pratchett’s ‘boots theory’ illustrates an important lesson about how the tide of aspiration is turning today, in the world of fashion. In a society wracked by scarcity, living luxuriously now means being able to don a few, good things on your person, rather than wading endlessly through an abundance of bad ones.