Fashion’s Regime Gap: Brands’ Role in the Material Transition of the Industry

Abstract

The textile industry is in the beginning of a systemic change as the importance of environmental sustainability grows in the domain. The industry regime will undergo a sustainability transition, which affects business models, design identities, and material flows. In this transition, materials play an important role, since most of the industry’s environmental footprint is related to how textile materials are produced and used in products.

This thesis studies the contribution and role of fashion brands in the transition to more environmentally sustainable material production and consumption. Through qualitative interviews with 16 fashion brands, the study identified how brands implement their material sustainability strategies and respond to the current and emerging changes in their business environment.

The interview data implies that in the short-term, brands are upgrading their sustainability performance through supply chain governance and joint development. Furthermore, they are facilitating an evolution in their material portfolios, shifting from conventional raw materials to more sustainable existing alternatives, and beyond raw materials considering an increasingly holistic approach to sustainability that places emphasis on full product life cycles.

However, short-term improvements do not create the needed radical and systemic change to reach significant transition to a new regime. Long-term improvements in sustainability performance are therefore sought from changing industry’s material flows by creating and building circular business models, design capabilities, and supply chains alongside the conventional ones. Further, novel innovations are required to enable such shift, however new material innovations, recycling and sorting technologies, and more sustainable textile processing technologies are scarce and lack scale.

This research concludes that here exists a supply gap between the supply of sustainable solutions and interest towards them, which contributes to a more major transition gap between the upgraded regime and a new significantly more sustainable regime. This results in discontinuity in the transition. Brands need to create niches for the innovations to develop, as well as to integrate sustainability into the core objective function of their business to bridge this transition gap.