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| Fashion for Relief 2018 |
Personalised outfits will soon be stitched in milliseconds by machines, and the Cher Horowitz digital-wardrobe of dreams will be issued as standard.
OK, so we’re not quite there yet.
But we may well be heading in that direction and ELLE is here to find out what role robots might have to play in the future of our daily wardrobes and whether this could have a positive outcome for the planet.
The Millennial Mindset
As consumers, we’ve reached a deadlock. As we watch those viral Instagram videos of plastic debris clogging up the oceans and the eternally growing landfill sites ruining the rest of the natural world, our appetite for throw-away purchases is waning.
Millennials are by far the most ethical consumers, making our parents look like mean-spirited monsters. This is at least according to analytics company, Nielsen, who when looking at our shopping habits found that 73% of us favoured buying from brands where sustainability was key.
Our consciences are, apparently, steering most of what we buy. Opting for fairly traded coffee or checking how our favourite skincare is made has become the new normal, and not just the preserve of hand-wringing middle-classes. Consumers earning £15,000 ($20K) or less are 5% more likely than their better paid counterparts to buy from companies with 'social and environmental impact.'
The 'Fast Fashion' Behemoth
Yet it seems the fashion world is still lagging behind.
In January, Oxfam reporting that some of fashion’s top CEOs earned a Bangladeshi garment worker’s lifetime pay in just four days.
Meanwhile, our appetite for ‘fast-fashion’ has only increased.
Fast-fashion - a term coined when the high street went into overdrive over 'boho-chic' in the early 2000s and shops like Primark started clambering to churn out affordable celeb copycats of furry gilets and peasant skirts.
Today, online retailers such as Pretty Little Thing have taken the baton, replicating Kim Kardashian’s cycling short collection for a fraction of the price of Yeezy the minute Kim K was photographed in them.
In short, 'fast fashion' refers to a incredibly fast moving, mass production line of clothes that are designed to be worn once or twice and discarded as quickly as they were made.
While it allows us to dress like our favourite tabloid heroes, it also puts huge pressure on the warehouses making the clothes and creates the most monumental amount of waste as we regularly discard the garments.
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