The Problem: Unsustainable “Fast Fashion”
The fashion industry is slowly killing the planet. So said Lucy Siegle in her hard-hitting book, To Die For, studying the sociological ware caused by what we choose to wear. Since then the chokehold has only gotten tighter.
Every year shoppers are succumbing to the temptation of buying on-trend clothes they simply don’t need. Such is the pull of ‘fast fashion’, whereby the latest designs are rushed from catwalks to shops in a bid to capture constantly changing trends. Ultimately, this process is unsustainable.
The expense of producing garments that have a diminishing shelf-life is as costly and wasteful as the rapid way in which they are eventually discarded. For instance, in America — where people on average now purchase five times as many clothes compared to the 1980 level –some 10.5 million tons of clothing is sent to landfills every year, reports Elizabeth Cline in The Atlantic.
“In 1930, the average American woman owned an average of nine outfits,” wrote Cline in Overdressed, her 2012 book about the fashion industry. “Today, we each buy more than 60 pieces of new clothing on average per year.” When it comes to clothes, it seems that being “built to last” is a just a forgotten advert slogan.
Indeed, the global apparel industry has been expanding at a rate of 4.78 per cent every year since 2011, according to MarketLine. Sales in 2017 were forecast to hit $1.4 trillion, and fast fashion is only speeding up, with the market on course to experience almost six per cent growth per year over the next three years. By 2020 the overall market size will expand to $1.65 trillion — 60 per cent up from the 2011 figure of $1.05 trillion.
Jack Ma, Founder and Executive Chairman of Alibaba Group, descibed the problem succinctly in a 2015 interview. “My grandmother has only one shirt in her wardrobe,” he said. “My mother has three. [Those in] my daughter’s generation [have] 50. And 48 per cent of them, she never wears.”
Decades of incessant advertising and celebrity worshipping have conditioned consumers around the global to buy many more clothes than they will ever require. What can be done to reverse this worrying trend, for the sake of the planet?
The Solution: Slow down fashion, from the bottom up
Ryan Mario Yasin, 2017 James Dyson Award’s UK victor, is deeply concerned about the distressing amount of money and resources squandered in the fashion industry. Yet, he acknowledges that fast fashion a “multifaceted problem”.
“Consumers are now able to access so many different fabrics and items of clothing that would not be available years ago, because it would only be on offer in a high-fashion outlet,” he starts. “In a sense that is good, because it has given people the freedom to completely customise what they wear. However, that freedom comes at a great cost to other people in the supply chain, and also our environment.
“One store will always try and undercut rivals, so the value of clothes is constantly being driven down. Fashions change and that poses a problem because you have pieces that become outdated and people no longer want to wear them. It is a vicious cycle of spending and wasting.”
Ryan, who boasts an aeronautical engineering degree from Imperial College London and completed his Masters in Global Innovation Design at the Royal College of Art in 2017, asks, rhetorically: “Who do you blame? For fashion organisations to become more ethical they need to change their business models totally, but that would make them uncompetitive on the high street. If they are not selling, then all the good that they are trying to do will be for nothing, because they’ll go bust. So the change has to come either by all of those fashion companies working together to improve it, which is very hard, or from the products. The goal for us is to nudge consumer behaviour to value quality over quantity in fashion, and we’re starting with the next generation.”
McKinsey’s most recent Global Fashion Index suggests that sustainability is one of 10 key trends in 2018, evolving to become “an integral part of the planning system where circular economy principles are embedded throughout the value chain”.
It posits: “More fashion brands will plan for recyclability from the fibre stage of the supply chain and many will harness sustainability through tech innovation in order to unlock efficiency, transparency, mission orientation and genuine ethical upgrades.”
The report also points out, though, that in 2017 only 42 per cent of 100 large fashion brands disclosed their supplier information, while flagging that global millennials, in particular, are interested in more-sustainable solutions: “[Some] 66 per cent are willing to spend more on brands that are sustainable.”
In a bid to halt fast fashion, from the bottom up, Ryan has created gender-neutral clothing line that grows with a child, from the age of nine months to four years. It is the first product the origami-obsessed 25-year-old has offered through his organisation, Petit Pli — French for “little fold” — which will be available to buy from late 2018.
Yasin, who was born in Icelandic capital Reykjavik in April 1993 — and is a “crazy mix” of half Lebanese, a quarter Italian, and a quarter English — explains: “In the UK there are 11 million children up to the age of 11, there are around 750,000 babies born here every year, and from birth to the age of three children go through seven clothing sizes. That equates to a lot of wasted clothing, or at the very least, clothing that remains in storage for years only to be used sporadically a couple of months at a time.
“At Petit Pli, we have identified that children are extreme athletes and they need garments that can accommodate a crazy amount of activity. We have designed two pieces of outerwear clothing — a top and a bottom — that children can wear from about when they walk up until the age of four. The garments are designed to be priced competitively, in the long run, with fast fashion retailers so consumers can choose an option that’s more innovative, ethical, sustainable without the cost trade-offs of today’s alternatives,” he explains.
An elegant engineering technique is at the heart of the solution, as the garments use a negative Poisson’s ratio, whereby a material becomes thicker perpendicular to the applied force when stretched. “An auxetic structure has been embedded in Petit Pli fabrics, giving the clothing a negative Poisson’s ratio,” clarifies Yasin. “When you pull it along its length it grows along its width.
“Petit Pli’s versatile waterproof shells are pleated in such a way that they can grow bi-directionally to custom fit a large range of sizes. The pleat system offers unparalleled agility, with the garment adapting in synchrony with the motion of a child.”
Ryan and his Battersea-based Petit Pli design team are hopeful that kids wearing Petit Pli’s clothes will teach their mothers and fathers a thing or two about fashion values. “We feel as though new parents will be really open to changing their consumption habits at such a crucial stage in their lives,” he says. “And we feel this is a really good entry point to be able to help raise new generations with better values of slow fashion, and also try and nudge parents to even start changing their consuming habits.”
Ryan has even grander plans. “When coming up with the name Petit Pli I was thinking about the future of the company. We don’t want to be limited to being a children’s wear brand. In the future we will use this technology in different products. Maternity wear seems to be a popular request, and so Petit Pli is literally just a description of the mechanics, of the structure. Ultimately, we want to clothe the future of humanity.”
Q&A with Ryan Mario Yasin, Petit Pli
How were you inspired by your time as an exchange student in Japan, as part of his Royal College of Art programme?
“I was exposed to the likes of Issey Miyake, and loved that I could see his work in art galleries and also being worn by people on the street. I admired that accessibility and functionality; it is not just pure art, but useful, too. In Japan I started to think about how you can manipulate fabrics and alter their mechanical properties simply by embedding structures within them.”
“I also worked on a project with the Harajuku fashionistas — they are named after their part of town in Tokyo, and dress in a unique style that is somewhat equivalent to punks in London’s Camden. Everything is quite out there. I was trying to understand what we could learn, because they are taking fashion to the extremes, and they have built a very strong community. Personally, I always just wear all black, so I definitely felt like an outsider, surrounded by all their amazing colours.”
And were you also influenced by Rapha, the high-end cycling clothing brand, and more specifically the sense of community it has spawned?
“Yes. I’m a keen cyclist — I took my bike out to Japan, and have wheeled it around the Alps, among other destinations I love how Rapha has brought together people with a similar, niche interest. It helped me to start looking at fashion as far more than a superficial industry. I realised that there is something that works psychologically that draws people together, gives them confidence, and empowers the community, just through clothing. I wanted to understand that human behaviour.”
How did Petit Pli come about?
“When I arrived back in London, after my Japanese experience, I was determined to channel my creative energies in to building something that could really live in the world and sustain itself within a business and do good at the same time. That’s when I began looking at fast fashion, and sought to address the problems. My sister was having a baby around the same time, and that inspired me to then look at children as extreme users of fashion because their bodies are so dynamic over time, compared with adults, whose body shapes are relatively static.”
Do you think enough people are thinking properly about sustainable fashion?
“Well, at Petit Pli we’re not only focusing on sustainability going into the future; we’re also focusing on just general problem solving. For instance, if some people have mobility issues and have trouble putting on their clothes, could we create clothes that make it a lot easier to dress yourself? Perhaps for the elderly who don’t have the physical dexterity to put on a jumper — how can we make their life easier? I don’t think enough people are looking at those problems, they’re looking at purely aesthetic problems. They are temporal, they change with time and go round in circles. We’re aiming to solve problems that benefit people’s lives, and at the same time we’re going to execute it to be in high fashion.”
Words: Oliver Pickup
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