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How can fashion tackle its waste problem if no one knows how much clothing is produced in the first place?
This is the question The Or Foundation is posing with its Speak Volumes campaign, which launched last month and calls on fashion brands — large and small, fast and slow, old and new — to publish their 2022 production volumes. “If we are going to clean up fashion’s waste crisis, develop data-driven policies and transition from a linear to a circular economy, we need to know how many garments are produced every year,” the campaign’s website says. “But this data is currently unavailable.”
The Or has gotten some response: Collina Strada reported producing 20,000 pieces in 2022, while Asket said it produced 231,383 pieces, Finisterre 450,643 and Lucy & Yak 760,951.
The major brands and retailers that dominate the fashion cycle have been far quieter. For Liz Ricketts, co-founder and executive director of The Or Foundation, what that says is that the industry is scared to disclose the information being asked of it. “There are many reasons for brands to be afraid of publishing this information, but one reason is how legible it is to the public,” she says. “The average person might not understand an LCA [lifecycle analysis report] or supply chain data, but any person can understand production volume numbers. It’s scary to put information out there that’s so transparently legible.”
If the campaign sounds gimmicky, it’s not because the call for production volume transparency is trivial but because the industry is so far from providing that transparency that it can seem unrealistic to even ask for it. That’s operating on the industry’s terms, though, and not those of the planet or the communities most affected by the fashion system. “The whole point is to point out how ridiculous it is that we can’t be honest about a data point that every company has,” says Ricketts. At a time when policymakers stepping in with regulatory efforts and brands are making promises about circularity and reducing their carbon and waste footprints, experts question how successful those endeavours can be without a full grasp of what is being made to begin with.
The extended producer responsibility proposal should make it more costly for brands and retailers to have unchecked textile waste pouring into countries like Ghana.
“We can’t get an honest idea about what the future of fashion should look like without measuring scale,” says author Aja Barber, who supports the Speak Volumes campaign and explains that we need brand-specific information in order to know what kind of change, and accountability, to demand from each brand, since their operations vary so widely. ”Some brands’ impact is a drop in the bucket, and some brands are the entire bucket. It’s important to understand whose volume has the impact to harm others.”
Vogue Business reached out to 20 companies from across the industry, echoing and expanding on the Or Foundation’s core question: how many garments did the brand produce in 2021 and 2022? How many garments is it on track to produce in 2023 and 2024? And if they are unwilling to share this information — publicly or with other companies, particularly those that are working collaboratively on industry initiatives — how can they be sure that their various environmental initiatives, whether it’s The Fashion Pact, the UN Fashion Charter or their own sustainability targets, will ever succeed?
Few responded.
Sustainable fashion is “stuck”
H&M, Prada, Gucci owner Kering and VF Corporation, parent company of The North Face, declined to share production data or comment on the campaign; so, too, did Uniqlo parent company Fast Retailing, citing competitive reasons, and LVMH, which said production volumes are “confidential and strategic information” that it doesn’t share externally. Asos, Gap, Mango, Nike, Marks & Spencer, Burberry, Patagonia, Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger parent company PVH did not respond to Vogue Business’s emails. Chanel did not respond with figures but said in a statement that it “pays particular attention to sustainability issues, including those related to production volumes”. Shein, which also did not share figures, said its on-demand production model allows the company “to test new products by launching them in small initial batches of 100-200 items”.
Chloé did not share total production figures but pointed to its environmental reports, where it publishes the weight of all materials purchased.
Adidas publishes its production volumes in its annual report, according to which the company produced 1,018,000,000 items across footwear, apparel, gear and accessories in 2022. However, the brand did not specify whether that includes licensee products, which could potentially send the total volume significantly higher. Inditex also shared its production volume, but by weight, not garments, as published in its annual report (it produced 621,244 tonnes in 2022). The company declined to share a number of garments or comment on the Speak Volumes campaign.
Advocates warn that silence won’t make the issue go away — and question why, for all the industry’s focus on transparency, it can’t publish a data point that, in many ways, should be the starting point for designing appropriate solutions, not just to fashion’s waste footprint but its environmental impact overall.
“There is a direct line between overproduction and the climate crisis. As Remake’s 2024 Accountability report will show, no major fashion brand is poised to meet their climate goals,” says Ayesha Barenblat, founder of Remake. “In order for us to make progress, we have to know what we are up against, which is what makes the Speak Volumes campaign so brilliant. Let's start with the simple disclosure: how much do you produce?"
It’s information that people are hungry for. The Or’s social media posts about the campaign, which asked its community which brands it most wants to publish their production volumes, have been shared more than anything it’s ever posted, according to Ricketts. H&M sits clearly at the top of the list, followed by Zara and then Shein.
It’s been interesting to watch, she says, because people want the information from the biggest fast fashion brands, but they also want to hear from their personal favourite brands, including small and sustainability-centric labels. “We got a lot of people reaching out saying how relieved they were [when a brand they liked published the information], how refreshing it felt. There’s something very transparent about reading that Organic Basics produced 182,714 items last year. It’s a very specific number, so it just feels true,” says Ricketts. “I think we’re all so tired of reading these big empty words that don’t have anything tangible behind them that when you can see something so raw and honest, it makes you feel relieved.”
In that way, she hopes, the call for brands to publish production volumes can also propel fashion’s initiatives forward and reinstate some integrity in the conversation; people have grown tired of listening to the industry’s talk about sustainability because it has yielded such few results. “The sustainability conversation has been stuck for quite some time. I think there’s a lack of honesty and a lack of trust, and I would hope that if brands can step up and be honest… it will allow us to trust one another and move forward,” she says. “Until we can have honesty about something so basic, I think it’s really hard for that trust to be there.”
Zombie in the room
While The Or engages with brands on social media and with executives behind the scenes, it’s also having some fun with a more public-facing aspect of the Speak Volumes campaign: a fast fashion “zombie” that has been making surprise appearances in stores throughout London during the holiday shopping season.
The zombie doesn’t necessarily do anything inside the stores — sometimes, it delivers a letter to the company explaining the demands of the campaign, but attracting strange looks is its main accomplishment. That’s exactly the role it should be playing, says Barber, because it fills a much-needed gap.
“People do know the problems are there, but nobody really knows how to engage it until the big corporations decide that they want to engage with it,” she says. “The fashion zombie was an amazing way of bringing people into the conversation who largely really want to ignore protests and signs. It’s one of those things that you can’t help but stare at.” That engagement is important because while the campaign is targeted at corporate leadership within brands, the public clearly plays a role in shifting the dialogue. “I think the general public needs to understand scale because then they can decide for themselves who is worthy of their patronage and who is not,” says Barber.
It also offers a bridge between where the problem starts, in the stores where clothes are bought en masse, and where it creates the biggest burden, in communities such as Accra and the Atacama desert in Chile, where the clothing pileup is so massive it is ruining ecosystems and can be seen from space. That’s where the waste crisis has become most visible, Ricketts explains — “but Kantamanto is not the cause of the waste crisis; the waste crisis is caused in the Global North, in shopping centres and corporate offices”, she says. The fast fashion zombie (which is actually British artist Jeremy Hutchison wearing a full getup of discarded clothes) is a physical manifestation of the problem that is typically out of sight, out of mind for the people who are now coming across it in the stores of London.
“They are forced to stare at the problem, to confront that the problem actually is in their backyard. They might not experience it the way we do here [in Ghana] — but they don’t have to come here to see the truth; the truth is in front of their face.”
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
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