Agrarian Design Inspiration #7

Fast fashion as a net positive

I hope this finds you well. This week we’re breaking down the fashion industry, and highlighting the biggest regenerative opportunity.

Permaculture Principle #7: Design from Patterns to Details

Yeah, yeah.. top down design. What a revolutionary concept.

In order to understand this principle, you need to invert it. What often happens is people build for one specific outcome, or try to take the micro and fit it into the macro. What this principle really tells you is you need to understand all the patterns in order to find the high leverage details. Premature optimization is the enemy of success.

When thinking about growing food, if you lack understanding of even one cycle, your yield will be affected (in either the short or long term). If you don’t know that soil nitrogen is important, you’re not going to be able to design a good system. Understanding all the forces and processes involved is vital for good design.

Regenerative Fashion: The Opportunity

You’ve probably heard something about fast fashion being terrible.

It totally is, from despicable working practices to dumping micro plastics, fashion contributes to most of the climate and pollution problems we face today.

But here’s something people probably don’t think about: people buying a lot of clothes can be an advantage. In order to understand why I think fast fashion is such a high potential area, you need to understand the landscape of the fashion industry.

You can think of fashion as a cyclical process, almost like debt cycles. The reality is, there are only so many ways to put clothes on humans, and we’ve been doing it for a long time; ideas will repeat.

Fashion has a couple different cycles that occur within it. There’s the macro ‘era’ wherein certain looks and fits are popular (think skinny-jeans, sneakers, athleisure, etc.)

Then there’s the micro trends which bubble up for very short periods of time and then people move on to the next thing (think t-shirts that go to your thighs, FILAs, whatever Kylie Jenner wore last month, etc.)

Think of fashion trends along two axes, longevity and price. For the purposes of the graph, inexpensive means relatively low cost, not necessarily cheap ($100 Levi’s are inexpensive compared to $3000 Amiri’s). Here’s a quick sketch of the axes with some brands thrown in (just based on my perception, I could be wrong about prices or how trendy certain things are, I clearly don’t know much about women’s fashion). The scale (especially on price), is far more qualitative than quantitative.

Fast fashion exists in the lower left corner, where it’s replaced very quickly and costs very little. On the upper right (polar opposite), you have expensive things that have been around forever (Rolex, engagement rings, suits). Then you have inexpensive timeless, like (Levi, Nike, the white t-shirt, little black dress). Finally you have expensive and trendy, mostly high-fashion houses and events. Mixing types of clothing with brands adds some noise, but hopefully you get the point.

Most sustainable/eco-conscious fashion brands try to make things that compete with Levi & Nike in the lower right. They take something fairly timeless, and then focus on making it sustainable. Here’s the problem: the lower right corner has by far the most brand loyalty, and people don’t replace those items very often. Chances are, you already know where you’re going to buy your next pair of jeans or shoes from. Further, the people buying tons of fast fashion aren’t just going out and buying a bunch of basics. They aren’t even competing in the right market.

Sustainability is fundamentally incapable of solving the fast fashion problem, because fast and sustainable are antithetical. People want to buy new clothes, you can’t just tell them no.

What if you could fill the need for fast fashion with regenerative products? Then you’d have regenerative clothing out-selling everything else, and whatever feedback loops were built around it would move incredibly fast.

The real opportunity for regenerative brands is being more expensive than H&M and Zara, but less expensive than top fashion houses. Clearly the market is willing to try new things, buy often, as long as it’s not very expensive. There’s an incredibly powerful engine just waiting to be unleashed.

Even better, you could go to the houses and tastemakers who create the hype that fast fashion fills, and design products that require regenerative practices to knock-off. The leverage point is huge, because the problem that exists is opposite to most business problems: people want to buy too much clothing. It’s a dream sales scenario, all of the work that has to be done is just on the manufacturing side, which is inherently high leverage.

There’s no brand loyalty or market inertia to overcome - people want to buy tons of clothes that look cool and don’t cost much. People will buy knock-offs, which means they value looking cool over owning powerful brands.

Where regenerative brands should be going is very trendy (low-longevity), and slightly more expensive than fast fashion. It’s a lot easier to push prices down than it is to compete with incumbent long term brands. It’s much easier to be like “hey spend that money you were going to spend this season on this new cool thing (that also happens to be regenerative).”

Obviously the challenge is on the design/business side, quite a lot goes into making fast fashion possible, but if you solve those challenges you’ll build a very successful regenerative company. On the other hand, it’s easy to be performative and “sustainable” and lose to Levi every quarter.

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Hopefully you found some inspiration in this email. As always, feedback is deeply appreciated.

Until next week,

Dev