Global Apparel Industry Research Articles

An Exploratory Discussion of a British Apparel Brand in Relation to New Markets: Developing Actionable Recommendations Based on Network, Relationship, and Collaboration Perspectives

Marks and Spencer (M&S) is a leading UK fashion retailer. However, the organisation is struggling to improve its domestic operation and to achieve its international objectives, most notably manifest through its withdrawal from China. Through conducting a critical analysis and an evaluation of the supply networks of M&S, the global apparel industry and the Chinese market, this discussion paper aims to propose a new set of strategies for M&S’s re-entry. Based on an analytical discussion, the following actionable recommendations are proposed for the company: (1) to seek suitable network partners in China, (2) to build sustainable relationships with relevant partners to build business strategies based on Chinese consumers’ perspectives and behaviour, and (3) to focus on a new value chain to enhance profitability and sustainability in the new market.

The use of 3D virtual fitting technology: comparison between sourcing agents contractors and domestic suppliers in the apparel industry

ABSTRACT This study provides insight into the use of 3D virtual fitting technology and different perspectives from the domestic suppliers and sourcing agents/contractors in the global apparel industry. A total of 213 participants from the apparel industry in South Korea responded to the set of questionnaires, pertaining to the industry’s current garment fitting process, the use of virtual fitting technology in the industry, and the industry’s viewpoint of the importance of utilising virtual fitting technology in the future. Descriptive statistics, one-way ANOVA, t-test, and chi-squared test were used to identify different perspectives of the virtual fitting technology use between domestic suppliers and sourcing agents/contractors. In findings, although the garment industry anticipates the use of virtual fitting technology in the near future, sourcing agents/contractors working with U.S. companies and domestic suppliers have significantly different viewpoints and uncertainty of virtual fitting software use in the current industry.

An exploratory research among fashion business leaders and neuromarketing company executives on the perception of applied neuromarketing

Purpose- In the last two decades neuromarketing is considered to be an evolutionary concept within marketing that makes use of neuroscientific tools in order to measure human related factors such as attributes, emotions, memory and perceptions which influence the consumer decision making. The application of neuromarketing to various industries brings up new opportunities as well as new challenges. This purpose of this exploratory study is to shed light upon neuromarketing literature and to investigate the perception of neuromarketing and fashion executives towards applied neuromarketing in global and Turkish fashion industry. Methodology- Following the up to date literature review about theoretical and applied neuromarketing, in-depth interviews with Turkish neuromarketing executives and fashion leaders are executed. Findings- The findings show that there are discrepancies and similarities between the usage of applied neuromarketing in the globe and Turkey. In-depth interview findings show that the perceptions of Turkish fashion executives about neuromarketing differ from previous literature and different priorities exist to apply neuromarketing in fashion. Conclusion- The findings are expected to help developing the collaboration of applied neuromarketing in fashion industry and support managerial decisions in marketing related resource allocations.

The Political Economy of Private and Public Regulation in Post-Rana Plaza Bangladesh

How do public and private labor governance regimes intersect in global supply chains and with what effects? Based on fieldwork in Bangladesh, including interviews with garment industry stakeholders, this article examines the main public and private regulatory reforms instituted in post-Rana Plaza Bangladesh: the Sustainability Compact and the Bangladesh Accord, respectively. Despite the Accord’s substantial achievements in improving workplace safety, particularly relative to the progress achieved under the Compact, findings show that government and industry actors in Bangladesh have resisted the Accord’s efforts to empower workers for fear that improved labor standards would threaten managerial control over one of the global garment industry’s largest and cheapest labor forces. Rather than being an example of complementarity between private and public governance, or an effective substitution of one by the other, post-Rana Plaza Bangladesh represents an undermining of effective private regulation by a state opposed to pro-labor reforms.

Environmental impacts associated with the production, use, and end-of-life of a woollen garment

PurposeThe textiles industry is a substantial contributor to environmental impacts through the production, processing, use, and end-of-life of garments. Wool is a high value, natural, and renewable fibre that is used to produce a wide range of garments, from active leisure wear to formal wear, and represents a small segment of the global fashion industry. Woollen garments are produced by long, global value chains extending from the production of ‘greasy’ wool on sheep farms, through processing to garment make-up, retail, consumer use, and end-of-life. To date, there have been limited life cycle assessment (LCA) studies on the environmental impacts of the full supply chain or use phase of garments, with the majority of wool LCA studies focusing on a segment of the supply chain. This study aimed to address this knowledge gap via a cradle-to-grave LCA of a woollen garment.MethodsThis study investigated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, fossil fuel energy, and water stress associated with the production, use, and end-of-life of a lightweight woollen sweater (300-g wool), together with inventory results for freshwater consumption and land occupation. Primary datasets were used for the wool production and wool processing stages, while primary datasets relating to consumer garment use were supplemented with literature data. Impacts were calculated and reported per garment wear event.Results and discussionImpacts per wear were 0.17 (± 0.02) kg CO2-e GHG, 0.88 (± 0.18) MJ fossil energy, and 0.96 (± 0.42) H2O-e water stress. Fossil fuel energy was dominated by wool processing, with substantial contributions of energy also arising from retail and garment care. Greenhouse gas emissions from wool production (farming) contributed the highest proportion of impacts, followed by lower contributions from processing and garment care. Contributions to water stress varied less across the supply chain, with major contributions arising from production, processing, and garment use.ConclusionsOpportunities to improve the efficiency of production, processing, and garment care exist, which could also reduce resource use and impacts from wool. However, the number of garment wear events and length of garment lifetime was found to be the most influential factor in determining garment impacts. This indicated that consumers have the largest capacity to influence the sustainability of their woollen garments by maximising the active garment lifespan which will reduce overall impacts.

The effect of attribute evaluation and consumption value on the purchase involvement in the global luxury fashion brands

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the attributes of consumers global luxury fashion brands and to find the impact of consumer value, meaning the social and pleasure values derived from brands on product purchase involvement. The method in this study was analysis of a total of 298 responses to a questionnaire. The results indicate, first of all, that among the attribute evaluations of global luxury brands, traditionality and splurge affect purchasing involvement. However, prestige and originality were found to have no influence on purchasing involvement. Second, the responses to the questionnaire indicate that social and pleasure values had a statistically significant effect on purchase of luxury brands. Third, the value of cross-group attributes evaluation and consumption value to differences in purchase involvement has had statistically significant results. In conclusion, the traditional and Splurge natures of the luxury global fashion industry’s brand, social consumption value and pleasure consumption value affect the level of purchase involvement. This underscores the importance of attribute Evaluation(traditional and splurge) and consumption value(social and pleasure) when planning consumer marketing strategies for global luxury fashion brands in the future.

Contested Understandings in the Global Garment Industry after Rana Plaza

ABSTRACTThis Introduction synthesizes the key themes of this special cluster of articles and explores the implications of the three contributions on garment supply chains after the Rana Plaza disaster. The three articles examine the perspectives of key stakeholders in garment value chains — global buyers, managers of garment factories in Bangladesh, and workers at these factories — and analyses their responses to the new governance initiatives that emerged in the aftermath of Rana Plaza. Placing the contrasting perspectives of these stakeholders alongside each other starkly reveals how their different positions within hierarchically organized global value chains form the particular lens through which they view post‐Rana Plaza initiatives. This special cluster scrutinizes the particular understandings of these stakeholders and reveals the very different capacity for voice and influence that they bring to bear in shaping outcomes. It reflects on the contradictory imperatives faced by actors in the garment industry caught between a logic of competition on the one hand and global labour standards norms on the other. The Introduction concludes by examining the prospects for a re‐embedding of the market in global value chains via the activation of civil society.

Death by waste: Fashion and textile circular economy case

In a circular economy model the way we use the textiles needs to change at a fundamental level. A circular economy is an alternative to a traditional economy (fabrication, use and dispose) in which we keep resources in a loop for as much time as possible, try to maintain their value while in use, and repurpose for generation of new products at the end of utilization. The value of the global fashion industry is 3000 Billion dollars that accounts for more than 2% of the world's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) (https://fashionunited.com/global-fashion-industry-statistics/). In the last two decades not only the textile industry has doubled the production but also an average global annual consumption of textiles has doubled from 7 to 13 kg per person and reached to the threshold of 100 million tonnes of textiles consumption. More than two thirds of the textile goes to landfill at the end of their use and just around 15% is recycled. Various scientific studies confirm that the disposal nature of fast fashion and throwaway culture is resulting in a serious environmental, health, social and economic concern. One of the global environmental challenges arising from micro-plastic and micro-textile waste entering into the oceans that can end up in fish and eventually food chain. Herein, through a systematic literature review, the significance of circular fashion and textile is highlighted and various approaches for reuse, recycle and repurposing of the textiles waste as well as disruptive scientific breakthroughs, innovations and strategies towards a circular textile economy have been discussed. Looking into the future, remarks have been made in regards to tackling the key challenges in recycling of textile materials in different stages of their manufacturing process.

Establishing authenticity and commodifying difference: a social semiotic analysis of Sámi jeans

This article investigates a semiotic phenomenon within the global fashion industry: the branding of designer jeans as ‘authentic’ and ‘genuinely local’, focusing on the Swedish brand Sarva. Drawing on a social semiotics approach, the authors see authenticity as a discursive construct and look at the ways in which Sarva authenticate their jeans as Sámi in multimodal texts. The aim is: (1) to reveal how places and narratives are commodified in texts that accompany the jeans; and (2) to explore how authenticity is materially instantiated in the jeans by using different resources. The article focuses on the connotative provenance and affordances of different semiotic materials for the rendering of authenticity. The analysis of the jeans as semiotic entities reveals how the thickness of the garment, texture and leather details, and the choice of materials, languages as well as iconography, evoke ideas about historical and local ‘Sáminess’, whilst at the same time indexing a global ideology that regiments what quality jeans are. The analysis shows how authenticity can be reinvented and relocated in ways that allow a commodity to travel between the local and the global. It also shows how this movement is not neutral or straightforward, but rooted in power relations that underlie globalization and advanced capitalism.

Disrupting the Fashion Archive: The Serendipity of Manufacturing Mistakes

Literature has documented how designers use fashion archives as explorative inspiration for designing and cutting fashion collections. (Clarke and De La Haye 2014; Rhys 2011; Riegels Melchior and Svensson 2014; Murphy 2011). This derivative research can inform choices of fabric, silhouette, shape and the skills and technologies employed in the execution of the collection. This paper describes a case study that asked design students to identify mistakes in manufacture, in selected garments from the Yorkshire Fashion Archive held at University of Leeds. It explores the potential for accidental or intentional mistakes to be a source of inspiration for fashion design. There is a lack of literature that describes how fashion designers have been inspired by manufacturing mistakes in archive garments, which the research seeks to redress. A broader literature review emphasised how definitions of human mistakes have stimulated ideas and resulted in innovation in different disciplines and contexts and these ideas are transposed into a fashion context within this study. Some of the manufacturing mistakes identified in the archive garments included: sleeves sewn in the wrong way, incorrect stitch tension, using patterns that were unsuitable for a design, cutting fabric without making sure pattern pieces were straight, using the wrong interfacing or no interfacing at all, etc. These findings informed the design and eventual manufacture of a collection of contemporary garments. The documentation of this process provides an important reference point for garment creators to disrupt conventional approaches to fashion design and technology and supports the development of innovative skills. These can be utilised to create new and novel clothing designs with which to enrich the global fashion industry.

Finding International Law in Private Governance: How Codes of Conduct in the Apparel Industry Refer to International Instruments

Multinational enterprises increasingly use Codes of Conduct to govern the conditions of labor and production among their suppliers’ operations around the globe. These Codes of Conduct, produced unilaterally by companies as well as by multistakeholder bodies, often include references to public international law instruments. This article takes a closer look at thirty-eight Codes of Conduct from the global apparel industry and uses social network analysis to identify the patterns in these Codes and how they refer to international legal instruments. Although some international legal instruments stipulate rules that can be directly transposed into the private context of supply chains, this study instead finds that the global apparel industry’s Codes of Conduct are more likely to refer to instruments that only stipulate rules that pertain to public authorities. The findings call into question the legitimizing role that international law plays as it is transposed into transnational private governance.

Sustainable clothing: perspectives from US and Chinese young Millennials

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to understand US and Chinese young Millennials’ perceptions of and consumption behaviour towards sustainable apparel products.Design/methodology/approachQuantitative research was conducted, and empirical data were collected from 590 US college students and 379 Chinese college students.FindingsFor both US and Chinese young Millennials, this study provides consistent empirical results of the positive and significant effects of young Millennials’ apparel sustainability knowledge and personal values on consumer attitude towards sustainable clothing, which in turn positively and strongly impacts purchase intention. In addition, a cross-cultural comparative analysis reveals similarities and differences regarding apparel sustainability knowledge and values between young Millennial consumers in the US and China.Originality/valueThe scale of environmental and social impacts from global apparel production and consumption makes sustainability increasingly important in the contemporary business environment. Young Millennials in the US and China represent large and influential consumer segments for sustainable consumption. This study contributes to the literature by surveying young Millennials in the US (developed market) and China (emerging market) in a cross-cultural context. The study offers insights into the global apparel industry in developing strategies for expanding sustainable apparel markets in the US and China.

Attentional Social Media: Mapping the Spaces and Networks of the Fashion Industry

In this article we use big data methods to analyze the attention paid to the fashion industry on social media. The article argues that for the fashion industry, like many industries, the core product is a form of knowledge that is dependent on gaining and holding people’s attention. To understand this attentional economy, social media offers a unique window because it is increasingly a central space within which fashion knowledge is created and shared. Using long-term, geotagged big data from Twitter, we analyze the hitherto difficult-to-explore spaces and places of the global fashion industry. The article suggests that the data confirm the ideas that there are a series of global fashion capitals that are especially important to the industry and that attention paid to fashion is highly uneven and varied across industry functions, national origins, and companies. Evidence is presented that attention to fashion is a global phenomenon that does not always directly link to where fashion products are sold. Attention to fashion is both a market-making mechanism for the industry as well as an indicator of wider social and cultural processes of tastemaking and identity formation within which fashion is entwined. The article concludes by suggesting that such data offer geographers new ways of looking at and linking economic, social, and cultural spaces and geographies and that social media analysis can help bridge boundaries that divide geographers. Key Words: attention economy, big data, economic geography, fashion industry, social media.

‘Be creative’ in Bangladesh? Mobility, empowerment and precarity in ethical fashion enterprise

ABSTRACTThe rise of creative, ethical entrepreneurship within the global garment industry promises new kinds of empowerment and mobility for Asian workers. ‘Ethical fashion’ brings alternative ways of valuing cultural commodities by imagining South Asian textile workers as potentially creative, entrepreneurial, and empowered. However, ethical fashion enterprise also brings particular forms of instability and risk. Through an analysis of two ethical fashion brands in Bangladesh – Aarong and Bhalo – this article demonstrates the disconnect between an idealized discourse of empowerment, and the material conditions of precarity and immobility that characterize fashion enterprise, especially in its ‘ethical’ forms. The apparent mobility of notions of ethics and empowerment championed by ethical fashion brands are shadowed by the ‘predatory mobility’ of global capital. While transnational flows of capital, creativity and ethics can bring about productive connections and exchange between designers, workers, and consumers in and around Asia, these take place in a context of ongoing economic insecurity.

Sustainability Policies for the Fashion Industry: A Comparative Study of Asian and European Brands

Sustainability has become an increasingly important value in the business of the global fashion industry. All leading brands have been taking initiatives in promoting notions of environmental and social sustainability. This article discusses the similarities and differences in sustainability-related approaches, activities and collaborations of selected fashion brands. It does so as part of a comparative study of typical Asian and European brands. The European brands analysed here tend to take a holistic, structured and goal-oriented approach towards marketing their links to environmental sustainability. In contrast, the article proposes that a typical Asian brand approach seems to be more fundamental in terms of social sustainability. This is the larger context that the global fashion industry continues, embracing the concept of sustainability in terms of how businesses should not just be concerned with profits but also with commitments to society and the environment.

Reconciling the local and the global in the Brisbane independent fashion sector

The humid, sub-tropical city of Brisbane is Australia’s third-largest and one often regarded as culturally inferior to its southern counterparts Sydney and Melbourne. However, the city has supported a small but active independent fashion scene, and this article examines three of these businesses, exploring how they positioned themselves in relation to the global fashion industry. It contributes to literature on local fashion industries in New Zealand, Scandinavia, Canada and the United Kingdom. Challenges and opportunities presented to local fashion businesses are considered, and ways in which these have changed over time is also discussed. Case studies are drawn from a period between 1950 and 2018 and were purposively chosen so that contemporary case studies could be contextualized with historical examples. Research was conducted through archival research at the Queensland Museum, semi-structured interviews with participants and on-site observations. Findings confirm those of existing studies in the field that suggest local fashion businesses outside of large cities and dominant fashion centres may struggle to remain relevant in a fast-paced global industry, but have an opportunity to develop and foster close bonds to local cultural scenes and to contribute to place-making in the cities in which they are located.

Sustainable dressing: Consumers' value perceptions towards slow fashion

AbstractSlow fashion that improves with an increasing awareness of sustainability has changed consumers' value perception and purchasing behaviours. The aim of this study is to determine slow fashion dimensions that influence consumers' value perceptions for slow fashion products and to reveal the effects of the perceived value on consumers' intentions to purchase and willingness to pay higher prices. The sample includes 725 students pursuing higher education in Turkey and Kazakhstan. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used to specify the factor structure of the variables used in the research, and structural equation modelling was used to test the hypotheses.Data analysis showed that authenticity, locality, and exclusivity aspects in Turkey and equity, functionality, locality, and exclusivity aspects in Kazakhstan contributed to perceived customer value. Perceived customer value in both groups positively affects the intention to purchase and the willingness to pay higher prices. In addition, consumers who intend to purchase slow fashion clothing are willing to pay higher prices than other products.The results suggest that consumers in different countries have different orientations that influence their perceptions of value. From this perspective, this study can provide designers with insights on the importance of making sustainable designs that are appropriate to the target market beyond the trends imposed by the global fashion industry.

Outsourcing Beneficiaries: Contract and Tort Strategies for Improving Conditions in the Global Garment Industry

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Explaining the Popularity of Cultural Elements: Networks, Culture, and the Structural Embeddedness of High Fashion Trends

When organizations strategically adopt cultural elements—such as a name, a color, or a style—to create their products, they make crucial choices that position them in markets vis-à-vis competitors, audiences, and other stakeholders. However, although it is well understood how one specific cultural element gets adopted by actors and diffuses, it is not yet clear how elements fare when considered within an industry choice-set of elements. Their popularity depends on idiosyncratic features (such as the category they belong to), or on structural factors such as their embeddedness (through connections to producers, audiences, or even other cultural elements). We develop an integrated perspective on the popularity of cultural elements in markets. We use a network perspective to show that the popularity of elements is fostered by being structurally embedded among many unconnected elements, in addition to not being affiliated to actors widely exposed in the media. We develop our study by using a unique data set of fashion stylistic elements in the global high-end fashion industry from 1998 to 2010.

FASHION INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENT AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: DIFFERENT DIRECTED VECTORS

In a modern society, characterized as a “consumer society” (J. Baudrillard), the tasks of reducing the environmental consequences of economic growth are actualized. According to experts, the second largest industrial polluter today is the fashion industry, which is second only to the oil industry. The article examines the mechanisms of influence of fashion as a factor in stimulating consumption in modern society. In the context of the growth of the fashion industry, the threats to sustainable development arising at the stages of production, consumption and utilization of fashion industry products are investigated. The conclusion is made about the need forself-determination of the place of belarusian producersin the global fashion industry, taking into account increasing environmental threats.