A Stitch in Time Can Save Nine

It was Friday evening and I was busy in planning my weekend when I got a call from friend apprising me about the get together planned at Sunday evening. The first thing that came to my mind was, I have to look good and stand out after all we are meeting after 6 long years, and we would be sharing our images in social media. In a jiffy, I browsed through the shopping app available in my mobile phone and added 3-4 dresses in my collection, I was not sure about whether they would be delivered by Sunday but to my surprise express delivery option was available and the dress could be delivered by Sunday morning, if I place the order by 9:00pm, I was confused which one to order, so I shared my collection with my 2-3 friends and got their reviews and hurriedly ordered a red dress by Mango and a burgundy gown by H&M both available at 40% discount with an additional cash back of 5%.

“Wow, I got a great deal”, I said lively to my husband,

“Yes, But don’t you think, you already have so many dresses, and this time you needed just one”, he replied sarcastically.

“Ohho, you always have problem with my shopping, nevertheless I’ll return one of them, after all returning policy is too cool”, I replied promptly.

Though I have already ordered two dresses, I found the never ending collection so indulging that I went on scrolling down the dresses in the app and kept on adding them in my collection till 10:00 pm.

The next day, it was 8:00 am of Saturday morning, my mobile phone beeped, ah !!there was a notification quoting, the blue gown by Zara, now available at  60% discount, how could I put down the mobile phone without catching a glimpse of the blue gown.

As I clicked the notification, “It is elegant and you could get it at 60% discount, the label would be added to your closet”, yelled the fashion freak inside me and inspired me to add it to my cart, but wait there are other colours too, and something with the different neck line and different flare too, in no time I was carried away by the suggestions and ended up adding few more dresses in my collection and this time in my cart too”, what about accessories, the matching accessories are also available, but I couldn’t find accessories matching to the red and burgundy dress I ordered, let it be I shall order this blue gown with boat neck and matching accessories. I have ordered all, now all I needed was a haircut and a dinner outside with my husband.

In the evening, we went the newly open mall just a kilometer from our home, while strolling through the mall in our neighborhood, we caught a glimpse of creative sign boards citing words like “Exciting offers”, Buy 2 Get 2 Free, 20% Cash Back etc. Unconsciously, we are already allured towards the brightly lit store decorated with perfectly displayed garments and before we could realize we’re checking out from the store with 3 bags of reasonably priced clothes we never planned to buy.

“We are getting late, it’s already 10:30 pm, we will miss dining out hurry up” cried out my husband.“We will order it online”, I said flaunting my mobile phone.

We all must have experienced that fashion retailing is expanding steadily in India. And with the help of technology, it has probably created a country wide retail revolution by offering wide range of choices at the affordable prices through the joint efforts of organised and unorganised retail. It is imperative to mention here that the fashion retail industry has come a long way in meeting the ever growing customer demands through innovative business models and practices and has been proved to be a catalyst in inculcating the culture of consumerism based on the economy of mass production.

Proliferation of shopping malls and fashion outlets coupled with seasonal sales promotion activities has encouraged more consumption. Moreover, advancements in production logistics, timelines and scale – much of which increased output further fueled mounting desires of shoppers’ to have everything in their closets. With globalization, manufacturing facilities were moved to places with minimal or no regulations in terms of labour welfare requirements, people were happy that they were getting to wear imported fabrics labeled as “Not Made in India” and had no idea about where and how these clothes were made.

Just 5 years ago, when the e-commerce sites has just started popping up in India, many did not believed in the idea of online purchases of fashion apparel due to the requirement of trials, fit issue, fabric etc. Further, there was a wave of fret across the brick and mortar format regarding the impact of online businesses on their market share. However, it is really an irony that online fashion industry has befitted than any other online industry. Fashion retail has gained a lot of traction from the sellers as well as consumers and it has become fairly easier to purchase outfits with the click of a button. This is primarily because of innovative strategies in terms of user friendly interfaces discounts and promotional activites, visualization tools, hassle free payment and return policies, feedbacks etc.

Further, as the cost of owning smartphone and internet acess via mobile data and Wi-Fiis being diminishing drastically, most of the E-commerce websites hare embracing mobile app-only shopping platform. The mobile users are driven to install the mobile application for online shopping through a host of promotional activities.  This allows the e-tailers to expand their user base by customizing and personalizing the user experience and increase their sales by analysing search and location history, purchase preferences and patterns etc. and responding to them. Today billions of people visit online and get best shopping experience by means of a smartphone which they carry in their pocket.

In the era of dynamism, typical fashion supply chain is very complex and vast with millions of people and metric tons of raw material in the form of crops, chemicals, water, and oil involved in the process of satisfying the desires of the most sophisticated consumers. Lucy Siegle in her book To Die For, has written that “according to fashion theory, there are 101 stages in the supply chain, the first being ‘designer attends fabric show’ and the last, ‘order ready for shipment’.



Fashion is a multi-billion dollar industry – and is growing continuously fueling on the culture of consumerism. The current trends in fashion retailing appears to be very appealing supported by favorable demographics, government policies, urbanization, rising incomes etc. however, the long-term outlook of the growing fashion industry doesn’t seems to be sustainable enough.

But how can fashion be related to sustainability? Many people think that Fashion is not an industry typically associated with sustainability. However, with the given level of consumerism, it is not a surprise to know that Fashion is the second most polluting industry in the world after oil and sustainability issues persist throughout the supply chain in the form of significant wastage of water and energy, waste generation in the form ofplastic, paper and cardboard used for packaging, potential exploitation of home-based workers and workers in developing countries who supply fabrics. Thus there are immense negative impacts of the fashion supply chain which are rising with the growing tidal wave of low-quality product that falls to pieces and ends up on a landfill.

Mc Quillan has quoted “in 2015, the fashion industry will produce 400 billion meters of fabric just for apparel. This is roughly the amount of fabric it would take to cover the entire state of California. Fifteen percent, or 60 billion meters, will be wasted during the production phase (extra fabric, itself a finished product, that ends up on the cutting room floor), before the garments even reach a consumer. Also, the number of garments created each year is the equivalent of everyone in the world having 20 new items annually.”

For example: the whole process of denim manufacture is implausibly water-intensive, as denim is made from cotton which is picked, made into fabric, sewn, and dyed, treated with chemicals and washed intensively with detergents. Then there’s the additional impact of plastic packaging which is trashed. A single pair of jeans however doesn’t pose threat but imagine the scale of concern given that 1,240,000,000 pairs of denims are sold worldwide every year and more than 2,500 gallons of water and approx. pound of chemicals are used in manufacturing one pair of jeans. Almost, all of the mass-produced fashion stuff has a like convoluted story which point out that fashion is inherently an unsustainable industry.

The impact of fashion industry, is not merely about single process or product rather it’s the scale of production and an immense infrastructure which has been devised to shore up a culture of hyper consumerism, where most fashion businesses make bulk purchases at lower cost per unit in anticipation of higher profit per unit which if remain unsold is ‘pushed’ towards consumers with more promotions and special offers. Consumers are encouraged to buy more products and more often in such a manner that they end up buying stuff that they will rarely use and as a result their closets get piled up with heaps of things and they find it easier to buy a new product rather than digging into their existing stuff. Given the limited resources and the environmental consequences of waste production, the present level of consumerism is surely unsustainable.

As a lover of fashion, I believe that the current trends in fashion industry coupled with the need of addressing social, economic and environmental issues has accentuated the need to ponder about how the fashion industry could become more sustainable. This calls for devising innovative strategies, imbibing the tenets of sustainability and reinventing the business models within the existing bottom lines and resource envelope to guide businesses in saving our people, planet and prosperity from catastrophe.