In: Economics
“It’s Collapsing Violently”: Coronavirus Is Creating a Fast
Fashion Nightmare
Dana Thomas, the author of the fast fashion deconstruction
‘Fashionopolis,’ explains the severe impact of coronavirus on
Bangladesh’s garment export industry.
By Rachel Tashjian
April 2, 2020
Could the coronavirus pandemic bring a reckoning to fast
fashion? Many fashion industry insiders have posed the question
over the last few weeks, imagining a silver lining to the
industry’s forced pause. If fashion is forced to operate at a new,
slower pace, even temporarily, might fast fashion, which epitomizes
the industry’s obsession with speed and novelty, come to an end? Or
at least...slow down a little?
But the reality of the virus’s impact on fast fashion is far from
positive. Earlier this week, the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers
and Exporters Association (BGMEA), which represents factory owners,
reported that $2.81 billion worth of work orders, made to 1,025
factories, had been canceled. And if fast fashion is facing a
disaster, it is the workers in Bangladesh, which is the largest
exporter of garments in the world after China, who are bearing the
brunt of the crisis. A survey of factory owners by Pennsylvania
State University’s Center for Global Workers’ Rights released last
week stated that the canceled orders—which many Western companies
are refusing to pay for—have left millions of workers, many of whom
are women from rural areas, without wages owed or severance. Nearly
all Western buyers have refused to contribute to worker wages, the
survey found. “Our situation is apocalyptic,” Rubana Huq, president
of the BGMEA, told the New York Times.
Fast fashion experts have seen this coming. Late last year, writer
Dana Thomas released Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and
the Future of Clothes. Thomas traveled to factories in Bangladesh
to see the fast fashion factory system up close, and to measure its
impact on human life, speaking to workers who survived the Rana
Plaza factory collapse, which resulted in the deaths of 1,134
people, with more than 2,500 injured. If you read her book, you
will never look at your closet the same way.
I can’t even imagine. I’ve been to Bangladesh. I saw how poor it
was. I [went with people] and saw the shanties that were their
homes; they aren’t even going to get their $95 a month now, which
is half a living wage. [Note: economists calculate that the living
wage, or the amount needed to cover essential needs such as
housing, food, and clothing, is $214 per month in Bangladesh.]
There’s just going to be no work for months. I just can’t begin to
imagine the poverty, the illness, the malnutrition. It’s going to
be so profound.
When I was there, I thought, This country is relying too much on
one industry to support the entire economy. Eighty-four percent of
its exports is garments, and it’s an export country. You have a new
crew of young executives [at major fashion companies] who all just
counted on the Chinese consumer for the luxury industry, and young
consumers in the U.S. and Europe for the fast fashion industry, and
it was just: volume, volume, volume, and pushing us to buy more and
more and more, not ever thinking something could happen like 9/11,
like SARS, like this, where boom—we just stopped shopping.
It never occurred to them because it hadn’t happened in a
generation, and they’re getting clobbered with the way they set up
the supply chain. Countries like Cambodia, Vietnam, and Bangladesh,
were so dedicated to making all these clothes to fill that [demand
for] volume. It’s a gigantic house of cards, and it’s so delicately
balanced. One thing goes and it’s just all collapsing. And it’s
collapsing violently.
But is this the end of fast fashion?
We may not see the end of fast fashion. I was reading this really
interesting piece by David Chang, about the restaurant industry,
and he said, What I think you’re going to see is that it’s the big
chains that survive. I think H&M, LVMH [the luxury
conglomerate, which does not operate fast fashion companies], and
Zara—they’re going to be fine. It’s going to be smaller companies,
or ones that were already teetering, that were putting into place
turnaround plans…that won’t survive.
The incredibly inhuman and demanding structure of these factories
suggests that even if they close because fast fashion brands stop
placing orders, they can very quickly open up again and produce
stuff as soon as a brand snaps their fingers.
All these brands have canceled their orders, [and] they’re going to
have all this leftover inventory because no one’s buying anything.
And when they finally run out of the inventory, they’re going to
say [to factories], We need clothes fast. So they’re going to make
everyone work. And the workers are just desperate for anything, any
kind of work. They’ll come running back, and they’ll probably be
paid less.
And they don’t have unemployment, and they don’t have health
insurance, and they don’t have maternity leave, and they don’t have
paid vacation.
The price of eggs, ground beef, gasoline, a house, the price of a
car, the price of gasoline during the Depression: it’s all gone up
since that. But the price of clothes is the same.
What happens a lot of the time, as you explain in your book, is
that a big brand might have a contract with a factory, but that
factory outsources some of the labor to a semi-legal factory or
sweatshop, and the brand is totally unaware that their apparel is
being made so unethically. We saw that in the recent New York Times
exposé on Fashion Nova, for example, where the brand said they had
no idea their clothes were being made [in Los Angeles] by underpaid
workers.
I went to see those factories in LA with someone who said, ‘I come
in here and I see Forever 21 [on a label],’ and then [the company
will] say, ‘Well, we had no idea.’ It’s like, wait a minute. You
lose track on the other side of the planet—I get that. You have
your contractor, you trust your contractor, but he does things
behind your back. But you are not in Dhaka—you’re an LA-based
company, producing in LA. You can’t keep track of your supply
chain, and they’re making things just around the corner from your
headquarters.
It’s a shady thing that goes on because [brands] are trying to get
the cheapest prices possible. Fast fashion is ridiculously, wrongly
cheap. [If you look at] the price of eggs, ground beef, gasoline, a
house, the price of a car, the price of gasoline during the
Depression, it’s all gone up since that. But the price of clothes
is the same. And that’s because [these brands] keep paying less and
less and less. ‘Can you do this for 10 cents? We want it for
eight.” And then the only way they can do it is to find somebody
who’s off the books, who’s got illegal workers, who can do it for
five cents a piece. So then the middleman makes three cents, and
he’s delivering it at eight cents.
The pyramid that I was talking about is a very fragile pyramid: if
Forever 21 stops calling the first guy, the rest of it falls
apart.
So because of this very interdependent pyramid structure, this
house of cards, that you’re talking about, what does reform of this
system or radical change look like? Who could lead that?
I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about this since the book came
out. I’ve been thinking about it since I went to Bangladesh and I
was like, This is just so wrong.
First, it takes integrity, and courage, and conviction, and there
isn’t a lot of that—not just in fashion, but in general, these
days. Those things went to the wayside in the age of globalization.
And that’s why we’re all being squeezed, and yet other people are
getting really rich. We need a dash of Marxism, to be sure. I don’t
think you need a complete Marxist revolution, but sort of like
Tabasco—we could use a dash of it, right?
[Fast fashion] just needs to be regulated, seriously regulated. And
then you go, well, who would regulate it? Would we have the
equivalent of WHO [the World Health Organization], or the East
European Commission in Brussels, or the FAA?
Maybe we need something that’s non-political, like the Federal
Communications Commission, that establishes some basics in garment
and apparel production, and also sets standards for imports, and
then you have to meet the standards. And if you don’t meet the
standards, your clothes can’t come in. But, I mean, there are
always people who are going to find ways around it.
One can only hope for a huge Democratic sweep, but then
everything’s going to be such a mess. The last thing you’re going
to think about is the clothing industry, even though it’s so
important to the economy.
I’m also curious about the creativity supply chain, as it were. You
trace in one chapter how a dress is developed over a period of
months by the designer Mary Kantrantzou, and how
quickly—instantaneously—it is knocked off, because of social media
at the shows and the speed with which factories can produce these
clothes. What do you think happens to a fast fashion brand when
fashion week is canceled? What do they have to copy?
We might just miss a whole season, and if we do, that’s okay. We
have enough clothing out there that we don’t need to make any more
clothes for decades and we’ll still have plenty to wear.
So what are H&M and Zara going to do? They’re going to just
keep recycling stuff. They kind of tweak things all the time
anyway. They have something in red? They make it in blue. And you
know, what in the end do we mostly wear? T-shirts and jeans. At any
given moment of the day, half the planet is wearing jeans. The
first table you see when you walk into [Uniqlo or Zara] is jeans.
That’s their bread and butter—it’s like when you walk into a luxury
store and you see handbags. So they’ll just keep making
jeans.
The way you lay out that production schedule makes me realize that
there is a dystopian possibility that clothes we saw at the men’s
shows in January, or the women’s in February and March, might exist
as knockoffs in stores right now but the originals may never go
into production.
Yes, absolutely. You could get things right now at H&M and Zara
and Mango that were on the runways in February and March, that they
banged out really fast, and the [originals] will never see the
light of day. [Note: here’s a $190 jacket at Zara that appears to
nod heavily at the sequin bomber shown on Celine’s fall runway in
Paris in February.]
It’s weird and heartbreaking. As Rana Plaza went down, I realized
that the clothes that those people were making, the day the
building went down, when thousands of them were crushed in that
building—those clothes still went to store floors, and people
bought them.
Oh my god. That’s horrifying.
What’s most frustrating is that when I was working on the book, I
was reading stuff from the early 19th century and except for the
language, which was far more formal, it was the same story. Oliver
Twist—it’s the same story. If you told Charles Dickens that in 2020
the sweatshop will still exist, but it will be in Southeast Asia,
he’d say, You’re out of your mind. Surely we’ll have evolved more
than that by then.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity
From the above article answer the question 1 and 2 in paragraph form and also with the graph
1. H & M, Primark, Zara and the like, are part of the ‘fast fashion’ industry. What industry structure do you think they operate in: perfect competition, monopolistic competition, oligopoly, or monopoly? Use the characteristics we have talked about: (# of firms, freedom of entry, differentiated products, shape of the demand curve, ability to earn a long-run economic profit) to support your assertion. One or two word answers will not do for example: Q. Number of firms? A. Lots. Use a little imagination in describing your reasoning. You could ever use a neat well organized table to help answer this.
2. In the short-run, what will these firms have to do to survive
the Coronavirus disaster. Think in terms of Total Cost, Variable
Cost, and Fixed Cost. The average cost structure of the firm may be
helpful ATC, AVC, AFC
I would like you to do in approximately 250 words is to read the
article and answer the above two questions. A graph is
helpful.
What I am looking for is how you think and use the tools of
economics to explain what will happen in this market keep your
answer short and succinct.
1. H & M, Primark, Zara and other clothing companies world wide operates in a monopolistically comapetitive industry structure. The main characteristics of this industry is large number of operators in the market. A huge number of producers from different countries of the world especially from Bangladesh, China, Australia, US and many other countries operate in the market. Clothing is one of the main production of many developing countries.
Another characteristic is differentiated products in garment and fast fashion industry. Profit margin in this industry depends on continuous product differentiation.
2. During the coronavirus disaster, this industry is facing a huge decline in demand from all over the World. Numerous workers engaged in this industry are in distress. The fear of joblessness push them to offer labor at a very cheap rate. Many firms have left over inventory, which they have to clear first.
When revenues fall, firms need to decrease their costs. Fixed cost cannot be changed. Therefore, they have to focus on cutting operational and other variable costs. Low cost structure (by lowering average total costs and average variable costs) with creative supply chain can manage the disastrous situation.
In the below figure, the shaded area is the amount of profit that a firm in this market can earn in normal situation. However, during Coronavirus disaster, total revenue and marginal revenue falls. Profit level falls due to cost of operation and inventory accumulation. If ATC or AVC costs can be reduced so that the firms can survive in the market.