Yes it’s true. A customer complained after wanting to purchase ‘Boy Stuff’ for her daughter for Christmas. Welcome to the power of social media in the twenty first century. Marks & Spencer, the mega retailer, totaling $16.3 billion in revenue in 2013, has some mega news, and it all started through Twitter.

After a call out from a customer who wanted to purchase a marble run for her daughter as a Christmas present, she was halted by a marketing label that read ‘Boy Stuff.’ She called out Marks & Spencer via Twitter, and the company quickly responded that they would be canceling gender specific marketing for toys by spring 2014. Toys have a long history of being geared towards a specific gender, but for Marks & Spencer that is all about to change.

The company said in a statement: “’Boy’s Stuff’ will be rebranded to use a simple graphic logo, whilst the ‘Little Miss Arty’ range will become Poppy and Blue – which will use character based branding.”

As the first major UK retailer to be carbon neutral, Marks & Spencer is no stranger to innovative initiatives. During an internal assessment of the company, they found aerodynamics of transportation trucks can account for 50 percent of fuel consumption. The company responded by redesigning their vehicles for lower ‘drag’ and more fuel efficiency. The redesign rather serendipitously increased the truck’s carrying capacity by 16 percent, allowing more merchandise to be shipped by one truck than the previous designs.

In September 2012, Marks & Spencer released the ‘most sustainable suit ever,’ made from reclaimed material and GOTS certified wool. The suit claimed to be the first intricate garment made entirely from sustainable material, and was another large step forward from the company’s innovative initiatives.

Other big projects have included their Shwopping events, a collaboration with London College and Oxfam, which encourages a customer to give one article of clothing for each one purchased.

By now, corporations know, acknowledge, and act on the importance of providing options that keep sustainability at the forefront. And by sustainability I am not simply referring to environmental sustainability but, as important, social sustainability–which can truly be translated to responsibility.

From inside intel I know some of the largest corporations are taking steps towards more responsible practices, and listening to consumers, as is shown through the Marks & Spencer case. But most companies aren’t bringing information on their initiatives out to the public because they are in the midst of deep research around best marketing strategies–probably similar to why Marks & Spencer kept their gender neutral plans under wraps until the Twitter incident.

Whether a large corporation can actually be sustainable is another debate, for another time, but what is important to mention now is their efforts towards a better way of business–a triple bottom line approach, for people, planet and profits–should not be ignored.

What do non-segregated toys have to do with sustainability? A lot. The efforts of Marks & Spencer are exactly what is needed from a billion dollar multi-national corporation to try and sustain themselves in the local maker market of the twenty first century.

See Also:

7 Clues To Tell Your Garment Is Really Sustainable: Eco Fashion Dissected 

Will The Fashion Industry Ever Attain Sustainability?

Fostering a Responsible Fashion Industry: The Sustainable Apparel Coalition

image: geir tonnessen

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British retailer Marks & Spencer and charity Oxfam create a giant Union Jack from unwanted clothing as part of their new scheme to get customers “shwopping.”

It’s quite a banner year for the British—the Olympics and the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. Lots of reasons to celebrate with the Union Jack and now, thanks to a campaign by British retailer Marks & Spencer and charity Oxfam there is one more.

To raise awareness for their new shopping scheme called “Shwopping,” they have created the world’s largest Union Jack flag from unwanted clothes. Using 2,100 unwanted items of clothing that was donated to the initiative, pieced together by local volunteers and school children who put together the clothes mosaic – measuring 65’ by 33’ – in East London in under 2 hours (see video below). All the contributed garments will be recycled by Oxfam.

So what exactly is shwopping? The idea is to encourage consumers to adopt a “buy one, give one” mentality when they are shopping, rewarding customers with gifts and prizes for donating an item of clothing to charity whenever they purchase something new from the store.

Old items are dropped into “Shwop Drop” boxes located inside Marks & Spencer stores and are then directed to partners Oxfam. The clothing is then resold in one of their stores or forwarded on to those in need in the Third World, or recycled into fibers to make new material. Absolutely nothing goes to the landfill. Oxfam will use the money raised to help people around the world overcome poverty.

The initiative is part of the Marks & Spencer Plan A program that was launched in 2007 in partnership with Oxfam. Since its initial launch, Plan A has already collected over 10 million garments. Aiming to create a new retailer culture beyond throwaway fashion where reusing, recycling or reselling old clothes becomes the norm. Their goal is to become the world’s most sustainable retailer by 2015 and to recycle as many clothes as they sell, currently more than hundreds of millions of items each year.

Find out more by visiting Marks & Spencer.

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“The more ephemeral fashion is, the more perfect it is. You can’t protect what is already dead.” – Morand

In a recent blog post, Consumerist fashion: Innovation Repressor, author and fashion pioneer Kate Fletcher wrote that “consumerist fashion not only damages the resource base, workers, consumers, etc., but also – and perhaps more insidiously – represses innovation; stifling anything other than that which benefits those invested in the status quo.”

One of the most obvious manifestations of this is in the immense speed of the fashion cycle, a system so rapidly changing that opportunities for “real innovation” are extremely limiting. The speed of change in fashionable dress is an old grievance of cultural observers. “Ah! Quelle Antiquité!” exclaim the couple in Carle Vernet’s etching dressed in the height of 1793 French fashion – “Oh! Quelle Folie que la Nouveauté!!!” replies the couple dressed in fashionable 1778 dress. The exchange roughly translates to  “Ah! What Antiquity!” and “Oh! What Madness of Innovation!” illustrating the rapid changes occurring in fashion in post-revolutionary France – and as a result the remainder of the fashionable world.

Carle Vernet

This “Madness of Innovation” is what still compels the fashion industry onward today. Author Barbara Vinken describes fashion as “the empire of the ephemeral,” in her book Fashion Zeitgeist and French writer and early Modernist Paul Morand claimed, “The more ephemeral fashion is, the more perfect it is. You can’t protect what is already dead”. Such musings are all well and good, but when the ephemeral nature of fashion leads to seemingly mountainous deposits of undesirable fashion items relegated to landfill – perhaps another attitude needs to be encouraged.

Fletcher describes consumerist fashion as a system that continually needs to “self-justify” itself, creating new styles in ever-faster cycles to replace old ones, which inevitably wear out quickly and were never intended to be mended. The phenomenal speed of this cycle relies on the ability of fashion houses large and small, from the high street to fashion week to copy and be influenced by the existing design work of other designers, either contemporary or historical. I say it “relies on it” because for fashion houses at all levels the development time for collections is growing ever shorter, leaving minimal time for true innovation and the pressure to meet deadlines and profit margins necessitates a degree of copying.

A homage or just plain knocking off? From left to right: East West Musical Instruments Co., Balenciaga, and Urban Outfitters

A good friend who was working for a fast fashion producer in London replied to an email I had sent her about my own work addressing sustainable fashion design, production and consumption systems. Describing the design process in the company she worked for she wrote “I don’t actually design them. But, in the loosest sense of design, I ‘adjust.’ Are you laughing??? I do most days. I correct appalling fit, I decided on length/print/colourways. I rip out a Lacroix skirt (out of Vogue) that I love with loads of lace and send it out to the factory with a line drawing and basic spec, cross my fingers and hope that something nice comes back.”

Current international law regarding the protection of fashion designs in theory allows designers to protect their designs, usually through the application of design patents or “trade dress,” and in the case of copyright automatically protects the patterns, textile design and sketches relating to any design and long as it is original. But what is original? The fashion zeitgeist can be described as a continuous line, a progression of ideas for which most are traceable through a cyclical lineage which marries other contemporary designers work with historical dress and often street fashion. As a result the difficulty in proving originality of idea in its entirety is immense.

An added complexity is the evolution of the fashion industry from being a relatively simple “trickle-down” procession of ideas to the non-linear system we have today where fashion ideas appear to come from anywhere. When writing about and discussing Zero Waste Fashion Design with others, I often need to point out that what I do also isn’t new. Zero-waste pattern cutting has been around for thousands of years in the form of Kimono and other historical costume, and more recently many designers worldwide such as Issey Miyake, Timo Rissanen, Mark Liu, Yeohlee Teng and Zandra Rhodes have been engaging with it.

Writer and designer Holly McQuillan at the traveling Yield Zero Waste Exhibit she curates

Miucci Prada famously said, “We let others copy us. And when they do, we drop it”. This altruistic attitude only works when the copied designer is already desirable to fashion consumers and the designer has generated income from being the first to produce the design. However since the advent of the Internet and improvements in manufacturing, the translation from high fashion to high street now only takes weeks, explaining why copying is so much more of a problem now.

Previously high fashion and couture houses were relatively unconcerned by copies as they would only be on the market after the original designs had had their moment and they had made a return on their investment. Indeed the copies indirectly drive later sales due to the obsolescence they induce. The Internet, whilst making fashion more accessible to consumers worldwide, has also made it very easy for fast fashion houses to translate consumer interest into new variations.

Anna Sui spring 2007 RTW on left and Forever 21′s Maven Top on right

Once styles are gleaned from the internet and processed by the design room, manufacturing advances mean that fast fashion firms such as Zara can take as little as 14 days from design room to retail floor – consequently taking income away from the designers that invested in developing the idea in the first place. Contemporary fashion moments pass by so quickly as to negate much of the need to protect individual designs – by the time designers patent their work, the fashion value of that piece is likely to have diminished if not dissolved completely. The result is that the majority of the fashion world treats their outputs as Creative Commons – “shared resources that can be freely reused, recreated and recombined” with a mostly self-governing “shame-police.”

Instead of legislating the rights of designers, fashion savvy consumers and observers can spot, and through blogs, out an overt copy, or as it is more euphemistically labeled “homage.” The loss of reputation can be damaging so most high-end designers try to avoid intentionally referencing other designers work too heavily. The situation becomes much more complex when well known designers copy little known players in the industry. It has been argued that this “referencing” aids the original designer, by giving them publicity which they may have otherwise never received, a convenient viewpoint for those with power in the fashion industry.

Feral Childe Teepee Print

Forever 21 Knockoff Print

Despite the potential benefit to society there appears to be little motivation from either designers or consumers to slow down the rate of change and so-called “innovation” in the fashion industry. The financial benefit from the current system is great. The specter of the derivative-driven fashion cycle is however something that should concern sustainable fashion designers. Indeed if the fashion industry as a whole aims to eventually be sustaining and follow best practice then the rampant excesses of consumption need to be addressed, something that companies such as Marks & Spencer who, whilst making great leaps forward in providing organic product ranges and other sustainable initiatives, fail to address. There are few design companies who actively encourage their consumers to buy less.

There are other ways to measure success. The fashion industry could protect and nurture up and coming designers, it could develop better pay and working conditions for the millions of its workers, it could move toward being an industry which values truly innovative design and prevents the proliferation of so-called “new or innovative” products purely for the sake of a quick return.

The more often that products are released to the public, the more often the consumers feel the need for change, and the faster that consumers get bored with current offerings. This could be attributed to the idea (as French provocateur Jean Baudrillard stated) that we consume as we lack any other real purpose in our lives. So we need alternatives.

Kate Fletcher writes: “To this, the response of those of us who love nature and the creative and cultural power of fashion and design can only be to invigorate innovation of these alternatives and develop a different plan of action.”

Image: Fashion Bomb Daily

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A few years ago, “eco fashion” became the hottest buzzword. The media in particular loved it and used every opportunity available to position it as the hottest trend. Recall those “Green is the New Black” headlines everywhere? Fast forward to today, and we know that eco fashion is definitely not a trend. It is a movement, and one that is taking the world by storm.

How so? Well for starters, a growing number of designers are now sourcing more sustainable fabrics than a few years ago, and the variety and quantity of those fabrics has grown out of this demand. An increasing number of brands and retailers are now engaged in ethical sourcing, and are working with their suppliers to create benchmarks and standards. Many companies now understand the benefits of corporate social responsibility (CSR), even if their product or service is not “green”.

Organic Exchange (OE) offers more evidence of this eco fashion movement. According to their Organic Cotton Market Report, global sales of organic cotton apparel and textiles has grown by $1 billion in 2009, which amounts to a 35 percent increase over 2008. And at the same time that organic cotton sales have grown, overall cotton clothing and home textiles sales have shrunk by seven percent.

However, the rise of organic cotton has been steady for nearly a decade – on average by 40 percent each year since 2001. You just didn’t hear much about it because it wasn’t deemed important enough by mainstream media and industry. But that seems to be changing.

Organic Exchange estimates that the organic cotton market will continue to grow at this steady pace of 20-40 percent – both this year and next, to about $6 billion; and that the organic cotton market has been driven largely by consumer interest in “green” products, and by retailers and companies looking to offer more organic options.

So just who are the top organic cotton buyers from 2009 according to the OE report? You might be shocked to learn that it’s some of the biggest names in retail, including Nike, Walmart and Adidas.

But really, this isn’t all that surprising when you consider the report Exporting Textiles: March to Sustainability, that recently profiled the top brands and retailers who are implementing environmental sustainability throughout their global supply chains. Among the 19 companies profiled are once again, Nike, Walmart and Adidas! So what exactly are these companies doing to be given such accolades? Let’s take a look.

Adidas adheres to the ISO14001 standard and has an internal environmental benchmarking assessment that they use to collect data from their suppliers. Their top three sustainability priorities are embedding environmental sustainability across the business, effectively managing business risks and social compliance in the supply chain, and extending engagement internally and externally.

Walmart, as we all know, has issued their Sustainability Index, which asks their suppliers a series of questions as they relate to social and environmental practices. They also carry GOTS certification on organic textiles (although questionable to what degree) and their focus on energy efficiency is now shifting toward their suppliers.

Nike uses a few internal tools such as Material Analysis Tool (MAT) and Considered Index to evaluate its life cycle impacts. They have a water program, and have integrated energy efficiency practices at supplier factories.

According to this report, which focuses primarily on energy efficiency, carbon emissions, water and chemical footprint as well as logistics, these three companies rank in the top 5 (Levi Strauss & Co. and Marks & Spencer round out the list).

And so the evidence is mounting. It becomes clearer every day that eco fashion is a movement, and one that is gaining solid ground. I look forward to actively watching as more and more of the big brands and retailers move toward increased sustainability, motivated by people like us who demand quality and ethics from the products we choose to buy.

Image: adifansnet

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