Fashion brands came out for reasonable consumption - why do they need it?
"Garbage is what most brands today produce. The mountains of unsold goods are sent to drains and outlets, with scanty chances that someone will ever buy them. Overproduction is the scourge of the modern fashion industry, which it diligently tries to disguise by presenting fake reports and growth data to the public. "Here are excerpts from the emotional manifesto that Vetements brand has accompanied one of its latest Instagram publications - it captured a showcase with their logo created by a special order of the American department store Saks Fifth Avenue. In the showcase is a mountain of piled things, which serves as a metaphor for the decadent consumer culture of our society today. Everything would be fine if it were not for a brand that is most overconsumption stimulates - intentionally or not.
In the last lookbook of Vetements 67 bows - multiply this figure by about three and get the number of items shown in one collection. Of course, not all of them will eventually end up in stores, but an approximate amount can be imagined. Remember the “smart” marketing campaigns to which the brand team occasionally resorts: then, in conjunction with the British retailer Matchesfashion, will arrange a sale of their own fake items, or release an official collaboration with DHL. How much all this contributes to the promotion of reasonable consumption is not very clear.
According to the Lyst research platform, in the first quarter of 2017, Vetements was the best-selling fashion brand, ahead of even Gucci and Yeezy. In the second quarter, however, small castling occurred: Vetements was only in fourth position, and Balenciaga was ahead of him, where Demna Gvasalia feels quite good at the post of creative director (and creative, among other things, branded lighters at a price of 10 euros per piece). And in May of this year, Vetements released a democratic line of Staff T-shirts "for fans of the brand who cannot afford things from the main collection." And do they seriously say that other brands are releasing too much garbage today?
Vetements is one of the clearest examples of the dubious struggle against overproduction, but, of course, far from being the only one. Brands every now and then try to appear before the public with an innocent face: they say, they are those other bad, and we care about the environment and reasonable consumption. Conglomerate Kering, which owns Gucci (the most popular brand in the world today), Balenciaga (third place according to Lyst) and Saint Laurent (their shoes are also in the top sales), takes the initiative of humane production of goods and supports the program "Fashion for Good" . The goals for 2025 include reducing carbon emissions by 50%, reducing the amount of water used (which is known to require 20 thousand liters to get one kilogram of cotton), minimizing waste and so on. There is not a word about the reduction of production rates.
In the last lookbook of Vetements 67 bows - multiply this figure by about three and get the number of items shown in one collection.
His latest ad campaign, Stella McCartney, was shot against a garbage dump somewhere in Scotland. The message is obvious: "See how much garbage we produce by consuming too much." In an official press release, the designer reflects on the high: "The idea of the campaign is to show what we want to be and what ideology should be carried into the world. What kind of environment a person creates around himself goes against the natural course of things." For greater persuasiveness in the press release, impressive statistics are given: every year, 300 tons of plastic are produced on the planet, half of which is used only once and 8 tons of which are dumped into the ocean.
On the one hand, such rhetoric is very much to the face of Stella McCartney’s philosophy: the brand produces 53% of its collections from recycled materials, does not use natural fur and leather, practices ethical cashmere production from storage residues in factories (they gave it the name Re.Verso) most recently merged with the biotech company Bolt Threads to develop innovative materials. On the other hand, the brand still produces four seasonal collections a year, plus a children's clothing line and, more recently, men’s.
The funniest thing on the pitch of conscious fashion are performances from mass-market brands, the very nature of which is to produce a lot, sell quickly and motivate consumers to come for a new batch of things as often as possible. Since 2011, H & M has been releasing the Conscious ethical collection and inviting its customers to hand over old clothes to stores, receiving a discount coupon in return - to buy even more things. In 2016, Zara presented its first collection, Join Life, made from organic cotton, recycled wool and lyocell, a fiber derived from cellulose. It is curious that while in 2015 alone, its company, the owner of Inditex, produced a total of 1 177 784 343 (!) Units of goods. In February of this year, another mass-market brand, Mango, released a line of Committed - clothing made from organic or recycled materials, sewn in factories in Turkey, Portugal and Morocco. And you no third world countries with slave labor conditions.
Today, to stand aside, not to stand up for environmental and social initiatives is simply indecent.
Conversations of brands about reasonable consumption and ethical production are increasingly reminiscent of the rhetoric that businessmen speak of when it comes to charity: "I have always believed that it is important not only to receive, but also to give," "You need to share with those who got less good. " Nobody adds that charity gives certain tax breaks and many charitable funds were created for the purpose of more comfortable business. The good initiatives of fashionable corporations, especially when they really get to the point, are wonderful, but one should not forget that, in addition to humanistic tasks, they are also guided by quite commercial ones.
An effective marketing tool today is not advertising reversals in magazines and banners, but content. Someone creates it, publishing a selection of memes, and someone - appealing to the idea of reasonable consumption. The viewer gets hooked, thinking that he touches something special, and acquires a brand thing that assures him: "We want you to buy less, but better!" As a result, the number of units sold increases, as does the company's profit. According to the principle of almost neuro-linguistic programming, even the visual component of the “ethical” collections works: that H & M Conscious, Zara Join Life, Mango Committed - all of these rulers belong to a relatively premium price category, their design is calmer and not punctuated with quick trends, and the color gamma is restrained and refers to associations of closeness to nature. But if you remove the image shell, it will remain all the same mass-market-clothing, produced in about the same volume as the main line.
The modern buyer just does not let the golden dust in the eyes. In the comments to the very publication Vetements, in addition to enthusiastic responses and emoji with hearts, you can see much more skeptical remarks: “Excellent marketing. What does @vetements_official or Saks do, other than creating publicity, you can’t name a sweatshirt ($ 1900 ) at a price equivalent to thirteen salaries of a Cambodian factory worker ($ 126 per month), which means there are more serious problems in this world "," In my opinion, your attitude to the problem looks artificial and PR-oriented. Another way to sell more things ? "," Wow, a mountain of garbage in a shop window doesn’t look very good. But what’s funny is: to sell a Champion sweatshirt [x Vetements] for 900 bucks, you just need to sew a ribbon from the logo on the sleeve. This seems to be called reasonable consumption. "
And yet, during the last consumer boom of the 2000s, few people cared about the problem of overproduction and unethical conditions when sewing t-shirts and handbags with branded logos. Since then, public discourse has changed so much that today it is simply indecent not to stand up for environmental and social initiatives. It is always important for companies to offer the consumer not just a product, but the story behind it. So appeals to think about the future of the planet in this sense may sound quite convincing.
Photo: Vetements, Stella McCartney, Mango
