When Aoife McNamara first started studying fashion at the Limerick School of Art & Design, she often shopped at Zara and other high street retailers, unaware of the impact fast fashion can have on the environment and garment workers .
Her interest in sustainable fashion was awakened in her third year of study The true cost Documentary and the wardrobe crisis Podcast examining the environmental harm and labor rights violations inherent in the global textile industry.
“I was naturally curious about these subjects because I’m obsessed with nature and the sea,” she says. “I started to understand the impact the industry was having on the planet and I wanted to do something to protect it.”
When the Limerick woman was just 23 and had completed a design internship at Marc Jacobs in New York, she launched her eponymous sustainable fashion brand, using Irish materials like linen, wool and tweed – and even seaweed cellulose fibers – Garments used according to a made-to-order model that avoids overproduction.
Since launching the brand in 2019, McNamara has had two pop-up stores in Kildare Village and opened her own flagship store in a quaint thatched cottage in the affluent Limerick village of Adare.
But McNamara’s label is a luxury label and most of her clients are business women or women who dress for events like the Cheltenham Festival and many of her friends can’t afford sustainable designs.
“Gen Z is all about eco-friendly products and they want to do better, but there’s also a big disconnect because they can’t afford the clothes that feed the fast fashion industry,” she says.
From the outset, it seems like the days of fast fashion are numbered as Gen Z — those born in the late 1990s and early 2000s — turn to sustainable fashion, a growing number of clothing rental platforms like Rag Revolution and Rent the Runway and resale apps like Depop.
Online retailers Asos and Boohoo, which have thrived during lockdown, reported falling sales last month, with Asos issuing a profit warning and Boohoo recording the first UK sales slump in its history as Gen Z clothes were returned faster than pre-pandemic normals Shopping trends resumed, and as shoppers were hit by rising inflation, they reduced non-essential items.
On Tuesday, Penneys unveiled new research pointing to the rise of what it’s calling “ReGeneration Z,” saying 77 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds have repaired clothes in the past 18 months — compared to just 36 percent of those 25 to 34 year olds and 45 percent of 35 to 44 year olds – as their interest in sustainability
behavior increases.
And in May, Missguided – once a Gen Z darling – went into administration and was saved from the abyss in June when Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group snapped it up for just £20million.
Four years ago was Missguided Love Island’s first integrated fashion sponsor, with attendees wearing his barely-there fashions and viewers shopping direct from the island of love apartment But this summer the ITV2 show has instead teamed up with eBay and contestants wear beloved items of clothing chosen from a shared wardrobe at the Mallorcan villa.
But when it comes to fast fashion and its TikTok-hungry Gen Z audience, there’s a dichotomy that’s becoming more pronounced: on the one hand, research shows that the generation personified by climate activist Greta Thunberg is environmentally conscious and socially progressive, but on the other hand, this demographic is also a voracious consumer of fast fashion, one of the most polluting industries in the world.
And while some online fashion retailers falter, others are thriving. Last month, Associated British Foods, the owner of Primark (which trades as Penneys in Ireland), reported that Primark sales rose 81 per cent to £1.7 billion in the 12 weeks to May 28 compared to the same period last year , as it benefited from a rest in shopping for going out and for holidays.
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Aoife McNamara, sustainable fashion designer. Photo: Don Moloney
However, the often predicted death of fast fashion has been tested most severely by the rise of Chinese giant Shein, which has become the must-have app for Gen Z shoppers looking for the latest budget trends.
Shein has gone from relative obscurity to become the industry leader in ultra-fast fashion, a brand capable of launching up to 10,000 new products a day, all destined for more than 150 countries – including Ireland. It was valued at $100 billion in April and had sales of $15.7 billion in 2021, compared to $2 billion in 2018.
McNamara says: “I was at the Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen recently and the big topic was how we thought we had come this far in terms of sustainability just to have Shein there. You can see a lot of consumers want that, and we all thought the industry was going the other way.”
Shein, which has no official European headquarters, is establishing a senior team in Ireland and has incorporated a limited company here business mail reported last weekend.
The company spent €65,000 on bus shelter and digital advertising here in May alone, according to figures sourced to GroupM by Nielsen and outdoor media contractors, but that amount likely doesn’t cover all of Shein’s digital spend in Ireland.
And when Shein opened a pop-up store on Dublin’s Wicklow Street in May, Eddie Shanahan, one of Ireland’s leading fashion retail consultants who had worked with Penneys and Brown Thomas, noticed that there were “queues around the block”.
But just four months earlier, Public Eye, a Swiss advocacy group, discovered that a number of workers at Shein suppliers at six manufacturing sites in Guangzhou, Hong Kong, were working 75-hour weeks, often with just one day off per month. with staff under tremendous pressure to get jobs done.
“I’ve always been suspicious of the noise coming from younger generations about sustainability because I’m not sure if the number of people who are against fast fashion equals the number of people who don’t buy fast fashion,” says Shanahan, who is also Chair of the Council of Irish Fashion Designers.
“When Shein came onto Wicklow Street and people were queuing up, they didn’t really think about sustainability.
“There is a fundamental problem here, and that is education.
“You can’t expect people of a certain age to realize that their consumption is just as important as everyone else’s and that quality is the absolute key to sustainability.
“And it’s not about affordability – this young demographic has no problem shelling out hundreds of euros for Balenciaga sneakers.
“They’re the people who buy the expensive streetwear.
“Their subcultures and lifestyles are heavily influenced by expensive goods – Canada Goose isn’t cheap, Kenzo isn’t cheap, Balenciaga isn’t cheap, but these kids are wearing them on the street.”
Less than one in five Irish consumers always consider sustainability when shopping online, with younger shoppers being more ambivalent, a study published by Digital Business Ireland in March found.
While 25 percent of those over 55 prioritize sustainability when shopping online, only 17 percent of respondents aged between 18 and 24 do so.
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Shein advertisement in Dublin
Donna Marshall, a professor at the UCD School of Business who specializes in supply chain management, says: “There seems to be a polarization among young people.
“There are millions of young climate activists, like Greta Thunberg supporters, so immersed in sustainability and climate justice, horrified by a company like Shein and watching The true cost Documentary. Then you have that other demographic that doesn’t know what’s going on in the fashion industry and is blindsided by the fun, creative side of it all.
“Unless they are involved in certain parts of TikTok or Instagram, they never hear about it, especially if they are more heavily influenced by Shein-paid influencers.
“But I think and hope this activism page is loud and growing.”
According to a study published last year by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Irish used about 263,000 tonnes of textiles in 2019 – most of it clothing – and 170,000 tonnes were disposed of, such as through incinerators and landfills.
About 64,000 tons of textiles were disposed of in household bins, and 9,000 of the 17,500 tons of clothing donated to charity shops were sold to commercial textile recyclers for export overseas or recycled as rags and fibers.
But modern garments are often made up of multiple fibers and are heavily decorated, making recycling extremely complicated.
About 40 percent of the 15 million used garments from Europe, North America, Australia and Britain that flood into Ghana each week – one of the world’s largest net importers of used garments – are deemed worthless and disposed of, according to a report by Greenpeace Germany in May .
According to Shanahan, increasing returns of clothes bought online exacerbate mountains of waste like in Ghana.
“The industry has known for some time, but doesn’t admit, that returns are severely unbalanced,” he says.
“Now you’re seeing great success from some retailers because the cost of reprocessing these returns is just so high that they choose to discard some of them, compounding the sustainability issue.
“This will come as no surprise to anyone who sees a member of their household receiving a delivery of five items of clothing on a Friday only to return four of them the following Monday.
“Now these companies are paying the price.”
https://www.independent.ie/business/irish/generation-z-and-the-fast-fashion-paradox-41806549.html Generation Z and the fast fashion paradox