Tara Maurice, Caroline Zhang, Baitian Yu
BACKGROUND
Amid all the anxiety about sustainability within the Fashion Industry, an idea that is getting a lot of interest as a potential driver for positive change heaped on it, is transparency. The theory goes that if Brands are radically transparent with consumers and one another, the next logical conclusion is that we will reach net zero. Block chain will save us all, the theory goes. Lets take a look, and see if that logic holds.
OBJECTIVE
We began by pulling data from “Fashion Transparency Index”, data assembled by Fashion Revolution a self described global fashion movement of designers and industry professionals committed to reducing the impacts of fashion on the planet. The Transparency Index analyzes self reporting data from 200 brands on five metrics, Governance, Know Show & Fix, Policy & Commitments, Spotlight Issue, and Traceability. Data is self-reported and covers the entire range of the industry from big box discounters to luxury, and a dose of everything in between.
If the theory holds one would expect that Brands that show up towards the higher scores of the index would be more “sustainable” Brands. Scores ranged from 0–100%, only five Brands scored higher than 60% with not a single Brand above 70%. Radical Transparency = Sustainability we are to believe.
PROCESS
We began by finding our way onto the back end table of Fashion Revolution’s Index. We first cleaned the data by knocking out the “noise” by isolating the range of fashion Brands, keeping Luxury and Fast Fashion at the extreme ends of the spectrum of consumer choice. We know that Fast Fashion has created an environmental catastrophe all on it’s own since it’s emergence in the market, and by influence has reorganized the delivery and product cycles of the majority of the industry. On the other end of the spectrum is Luxury, traditionally noted for premium materials, hand craft, smaller production at higher prices, and “slower” fashion cycles. As a note we are including luxury in category as part of our definition, therefor Patagonia is the high end in the category of sports and outdoor Brands, even though it does not compare at a price point level with traditional luxury like Celine or Hermes. After that cleaning we looked at some comparisons of the 5 metrics between “Fast” and “Slow” Fashion, expecting to see some distinctions.
OUTCOMES
Surprisingly, or not, the differences between “fast” and “slow” were unremarkable using the Transparency data. More accurately they are essentially the same, and that should be remarkable because we know that the impacts of Fast Fashion on the environment is dramatic.
We took at deeper look at two brands that are both structurally and ideologically at opposite ends of the fashion and sustainability spectrum. Patagonia, a luxury outdoor sports apparel and gear company with a commitment to nature and the environment baked into the company from it’s origin, famous for advertising one of it’s products “Don’t Buy This Jacket”. Compared to H&M one of the behemoth of Fast Fashion, who came under scrutiny in 2018 for sitting on a staggering 4.3BN$ in unsold product. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/business/hm-clothes-stock-sales.html
Based on the results of the Transparency index Patagonia scores 64%, and HM 61% essentially the same score for the sake of this argument. H&M is one of the world’s largest fashion Brands, sitting on roughly 70 Million square feet of retail globally.
LESSONS
Based on the data from Fashion Revolution it appears that we don’t actually learn much from a focus on Transparency. There is a high level of interest in the notion of block chain, and reporting across the spectrum of fashion, particularly as the business tends to be challenging overall. The question that we are left with however, if Brands that we know have wildly different impacts on the environment can score virtually the same, then what have we gained in by being “Transparent”? It would seem that this is not the meaningful metric.
