To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out the World?. Lucy Siegle
their Developing World suppliers at all hours of the day and night with tweaks and changes from the UK design team.
A few years ago, a factory supplying a major retailer would have expected to manufacture 40,000 garments across four styles for twenty weeks. Today it will be lucky to get commitment from the retailer to manufacture four styles at five hundred garments per week for just five weeks. The remaining 30,000 will be ordered at the last minute, when the design team has worked out whether the mainstream consumer has been inspired by Taylor Swift , Daisy Lowe, Lindsay Lohan or none of the above.
While Topshop managed to slim its production period from nine to six weeks, H&M cut its lead times from design to rail to just three weeks. In fact, according to the revered fashion journalist Hilary Alexander, it was H&M that launched fashion that was effectively ‘disposable’, and you don’t get faster than that. Even back in 2003 she had reservations: ‘I’m not entirely convinced that that is such a good thing,’ she said, referring to the fact that some garments were so cheap ‘that literally you’d be lucky to get two to three wears out of it, and then you’d chuck it away’. This new money-spinning way of working the rag trade was based on a rather dry notion of ‘lean retailing’ that subsequently achieved near-doctrinal status in business schools. The new model held everybody’s attention – analysts, economists, the press and of course fashionistas. After all, if you fitted into the latter category, what was there not to like? For starters, there was a surfeit of choice. Topshop for example would bring in 7,000 lines43 each season.
If Topshop and H&M were consciously after the youth vote, with cut-for-teen-frame styling and sequined hook-ups with of-the-moment celebrities, they weren’t the ones that brought the ultimate revolution. That was left to what seemed like a slightly staider, more grown-up name on the high street: Zara. On the surface Zara represents a conundrum for me. I remember looking at it early on – the Spanish brand owned by Inditex arrived in the UK in 1998, but has been a fixture in its native Spain since 1975 – and thinking it looked like a range for a generic type of European yummy mummy. It wasn’t long, however, before I found myself visiting with decreasing gaps in between, despite the fact that I didn’t aspire to dress like a Zara woman. It was as if I was being taught to like it.
Legend has it that when the first Zara store opened in Britain, on Regent Street in London, shoppers were a little mystified. The prices seemed high, and I’m told (perhaps apocryphally) that if consumers said they would come back when there was a sale, the assistants would tell them that come sale time the pieces would not be there. In fact, even if the tentative shoppers were to come back next week the pieces wouldn’t be there. That was not the Zara way.
The Zara way – the one that broke all previous rules – had several defining characteristics, but number one (and sacrosanct) was that the Spanish retailer manufactured only relatively tiny quantities of each style. This sounds a small deal, but effectively it turned fashion retail on its head. Instead of focusing on quantity, Zara’s cadre of around two hundred designers44 in Spain come up with around 40,000 new designs each year, of which 12,000 are actually45 produced (that’s 5,000 more than Topshop). Years ago, when I worked in a shop as a Saturday girl, we were forever phoning up customers when new deliveries came in (or at least we were supposed to). Not any longer, because in Big Fashion stock replenishments are for wimps. How does this affect the consumer? Well, as a shopper, if you hesitate at the point of purchase you’re probably going to miss your chance. This creates a terrible hunger in the consumer, creating what Harvard researchers have referred to as ‘a sense of tantalising exclusivity46’, a pervasive fear that if you pause for thought, the opportunity to bag that affordable version of a catwalk sensation (Zara is known as ‘interpreting rather than creating afresh’, as retail and fashion analyst Davangshu Dutta sensitively puts it) will be snatched from you forever.
Both Zara’s ability to take ‘inspiration’ from hot catwalk pieces and the hunger engendered by small, fast-changing product lines are in evidence from press coverage around the time Zara opened its largest European store in London, ‘a 3,000-square-metre temple to consumption’, as journalist and design expert Caroline Roux described it: ‘Among the bewildering selection of clothes, I spotted a passable interpretation of a Christian Dior embroidered Afghan on the rails (£95), a Pradaesque brocade waistcoat (£45) and a black wool coat (£65) that was enticingly similar to something by superchic Italian label Costume National (£565). An assistant even pointed me in the direction of what he called “the Anna Sui collection”, an up-to-the-minute assortment of patchwork, denim and boho chic (Sui is a veteran New York designer who shows on the catwalk).’
Roux suggested that a reason for Zara’s appeal was the short amount of time each line was given to prove itself (absolutely no longer than four weeks). The only way you could be a Zara groupie was to pop in as often as you could manage. Whereas a typical retailer could expect its customers to visit four times a year, Zara could bank on an average of seventeen visits47. This explained my frequent sorties, equally frequently resolved by exiting the store with the distinctive blue paper bag. ‘The girls in the office48 know that new stock comes in on Tuesday and Thursday, and off they go,’ Julian Vogel, Managing Director of fashion PR company Modus, told Roux. ‘It’s a guilt-free high.’
‘This business is all about reducing response time. In fashion, stock is like food. It goes bad quick,’ said former Inditex Chairman José Maria Castellano, who many credit with coming up with the Zara blueprint for blink-and-you-miss-it fashion. The whole point was to take the risk out of fashion for the retailer (as we’ll see later, it’s arguable that the risk gets pushed down the supply chain, onto those whose lives are already unbearably uncertain). Zara had no truck with discounting 35 to 40 per cent49 of its merchandise (the normal figure for fashion retailers) because it had ordered skinny jeans in the wrong wash, or a jacket with last week’s lapel size. Instead it set up a system that means it only ever discounts around 18 per cent50 of its products, according to analysts.
Rather than trudging along taking nine to twelve months to decide on a style, using forecasters and analysts to advise on upcoming trends a year in advance, then taking a risk on ordering and choosing colours and fabrics, Zara turned the process on its head. Instead of the usual phalanx of style and colour forecasters poring over industry reports, it set up a relatively large production team at Inditex’s Spanish HQ in the distinctly non-fashionable Arteixo-La Coruna, and relied on them to liaise with trendspotters on the ground, constantly emailing and phoning in with suggestions to get a highly reactive consumer-led view of what’s hot and what’s not. If the hipsters suddenly develop a thing for vampires, or swing away from brogues and Victoriana, the Inditex office will know about it.
The result was that 163 Zara stores across Europe (sixty in the UK) received new fashion pieces twice every week. There were a number of ways by which this was achieved, including some very technical processes. These included buying semi-processed, uncoloured fabric, known as ‘greige’, that could be finished and dyed at short notice, depending on what hot trends the cool hunters were texting in. There were systems, often enthused over by logistics professionals, of underground tracks that moved finished garments to hundreds of chutes to make sure each store was sent the right packages at the right time. But the big thing Zara did was to produce 50 to 80 per cent (estimates vary) of its lines in Europe, so that it became famous for identifying a trend and having the resulting fashion in store within thirty days51. To be that fast requires the heavy use of air freight, and commentators have described the dizzying pace of twice-weekly air shipments with Air France and KLM cargo, as planes from Zaragoza land in Bahrain laden with stock for Inditex stores in the Middle East, fly on to Asia, and return with raw materials and half-finished clothes. In common with other industries that aren’t exactly addressing sustainability head on, this is