Overproduction Is Ruining Creativity in Fashion. It’s Time Brands Got Honest About It

Courtesy of the Or Foundation

Being honest about overproduction will not end fashion; it will save it.

Overproduction is not an unintentional byproduct of fast fashion. Overproduction is a business model that has dominated our industry for the last 20 years. This business model impacts everyone along the value chain, including those of us who aspired to work in this industry because we love clothes, texture, color, emotion, and the art of fashion.

Before becoming known as a “sustainability person” working with textile waste, there was a time when I thought that I could escape the business model of overproduction. Enlightened by the likes of Hussein Chalayan, whose office I once walked into, uninvited, to hand deliver my portfolio after waiting (only a few weeks) for his team to return my very important email requesting an internship, I spent my design school years pushing the limits of the materials I had available to me – playing with magnets, trying and failing to make inflatable garments, designing silhouettes that were neither shirts, dresses, nor pants but something else entirely. I learned tailoring and corsetry, and I made feathers fly out of fabric and made garments that could stand up on their own, objects of integrity with or without a person inside. I was sleep-deprived, but not because I was anxious, but because I was inspired.

I was a fashion girl. Guilty as charged.

For those who think that fashion is frivolous and unworthy of serious study, I disagree. But I do understand, better than most, how fashion can feel silly when standing in a literal sea of clothes. And indeed, it’s been a while since I created garments that are so well constructed that they stand up on their own. More recently, I cobbled together what is called a “split panel” t-shirt which is when you take single-use t-shirts – that’s the marathon, conference, family reunion, and hen-do variety – you cut them down the middle and then you sew opposites together. One seam and you are done. And with how t-shirts are invaded by polyester and elastane these days, you don’t even need to cut and sew that one seam all that perfectly. It’s a mash-up, a wearable meme, more marketing than design – a simple trick to convince someone who never would have cared about your family reunion (no offense) that when your family is blended with the Guardians of the Galaxy, it is worth keeping that t-shirt out of landfill for just a little bit longer.

I don’t hate split panel t-shirts; they are a solution to an immediate problem, but these objects don’t exactly make use of my skill set, the one I spent five years paying to learn. Like many people working in the fashion industry, including garment workers, designers, and the thousands of tailors working in Kantamanto Market — the largest secondhand clothing market in the world — the business model of volume over value makes it feel as though the time it takes to craft a quality garment is a luxury we can no longer afford.

When I first started working in fashion I worked in the luxury space as a designer and as a stylist. This was around 2010 when Zara was loud and proud about pioneering fast fashion. Although they spent their lunch break at Zara, my colleagues, who worked at luxury fashion companies, thought overproduction and overconsumption was something that would never touch them. That was not the case. It didn’t take long for the whole industry to move from two seasons a year to five, then to monthly or weekly drops.

My friends and colleagues lost touch, literally. As designers or pattern makers, there was barely time to see, let alone experience, the clothing they were designing – less time to visit the production studio, to select the fabrics, to see the finished product in-store, and definitely no more time to talk to the people buying the clothing. One of my best friends, who was an amazing designer, loved to visit the department store where his clothes came to life. He took shopper feedback very seriously, but massive marketing budgets soon stepped in to replace these moments of human connection and education with glossy and appealing campaign messaging. Since then, the role of marketing has continued to expand because in an economy oversupplied with clothing, companies must figure out how to manufacture demand for products no one needs.

Regardless of whether my friends worked at companies that produced in high volumes, they all felt the transition to a business model of overproduction.

Whether you confront the tangible excesses of overproduction or not, if you work in the fashion industry today you no doubt feel the psychic pressure of excess piling up around you. When I returned to my alma mater to teach in the fashion program, many of the students in my classes felt guilty before they had made a single garment and long before they earned a paycheck for it.

In Ghana, my colleagues Sammy and Chloe, two incredible designers, put their creative careers on hold to work alongside me at The Or Foundation because the consequences of overproduction are impossible to ignore. Fashion’s waste crisis is in their backyard, literally piling up around them. My good friend Bobby Kolade returned to Uganda after working in European luxury fashion in hopes of launching a homegrown, farm-to-closet clothing company, only to find that this was not possible because single-use t-shirts are taking up too much physical, cultural, and economic space. These single-use t-shirts that a consumer or event organizer likely spent not more than thirty minutes “designing” have buried his dreams and the only way out is to upcycle those t-shirts until an alternative path is made clear. This is exactly what Bobby and his team are doing at BUZIGAHILL.

I will forever disagree with the sustainability narrative that says we do not need more brands or more designers. On the contrary, the problem is that we do not have enough. I am quite confident that there are fewer people alive today than ever before in modern history who know how to sew, who know their measurements, or who have ever had a garment with seam allowance that can be resized as their body evolves. We need more people who know how to sew because that equates to more people who understand clothing enough to come up with practical ideas for how to solve this waste crisis. Diversity is at the root of any healthy system, whether that be a lagoon, our inner gut, or an economy. But for overproduction to be profitable, companies have to scale a monoculture of ideas, a death wish for the industry. The problem is, therefore not that we have too many brands; the problem is that a few brands take up far too much space, consolidating power, wealth, innovation, and narrative.

What does creative freedom look like for all of the young designers like Bobby, Chloe, and Sammy who have no choice but to help solve fashion’s waste crisis? What does customer satisfaction look like for independent or medium-sized companies that strive to produce on demand or in small batches when their consumers have never had to deprioritize convenience in their shopping experience? What does dignified work mean for Kantamanto retailers who are stuck with piles of clothes they cannot sell?

We will not find the answers to these questions if the business model of overproduction continues to dominate. So here we are. If you love fashion, you probably feel so guilty that you cannot stomach making clothes. Conversely, seeing the levels of waste that I have seen, I find it hard to trust that the people taking charge of this industry care about clothes at all. If they cared, there would be solutions, not excuses.

For all the guilt so many of us feel, for the diversity of talent that cannot survive, how is there still so little honesty? Being honest about overproduction will not end fashion. On the contrary, if we stop overproducing clothing then garments become valuable enough to stimulate new services and technologies for the circular economy. We have a long recovery ahead of us and I believe that if those of us who work in fashion cannot be honest about something as simple as production volumes, then we are not ready for the colossal task of transitioning our industry from disposable to circular.

Enough is enough. Our creativity, resources and time are not well spent by pretending that overproduction is a viable business model for the future.

On September 9th, in the midst of New York Fashion Week, we launched a billboard campaign in Times Square, a space where citizens are bombarded with messaging that presents overconsumption as a form of entertainment. “Too Much Clothing. Not Enough Fashion” is one of the messages on our billboards because if fashion is going to thrive, overproduction can no longer be the unwelcome zombie in the room.

So for the love of clothes, if you work for a brand that produces new products as a designer, a stylist, a model, a graphic designer, in accounts, in sustainability, in shipping, in the boardroom, on the retail floor; you have the power to demand that the companies you work for #SpeakVolumes.

To learn more visit SpeakVolumes.org and to submit your production volumes please fill out this form.

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue

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