MADE BUT UNSOLD CLOTHING
Why are there so many unsold clothes?
I'm not talking about the clothes that we've made as individual sewers, but about the billions of clothes that retailers have ordered to be made but then chosen not to sell!
Yes, another issue from the fast fashion world!
The short story: It costs a business more when they sell out of a product, than the cost of having unsold products. So when businesses predict a trend, they will just order excess amounts rather than risk not having enough.
Once the brands receive their stock, trends will have shifted, and they end up with garments they won't put on the market because they think those products will not sell / are not in season with the current trend.
What happens to unsold stock?
Unfortunately, all these garments are now waste products. You may remember recently, luxury brands made headlines about destroying these items so as not to risk any unauthorised sales of the items. This practice still happens, though is now banned in France. The majority of these waste products are shipped off globally in the hope of resale/donations, but the reality is that these items will be incinerated or buried in landfill.
"Given that an estimated 150 billion garments are produced every single year, we know that the fashion industry produces far too many clothes. But did you know that a staggering amount of those garments – between 15 and 45 billion, according to one report – are never sold in the first place?"[1.]
We need to slow down. The planet cannot heal itself as we are destroying it too quickly. Fashion used to be four seasons of the year. For fast-fashion retail chains, it is now pretty much a weekly occurrence with new stock being replenished quicker than ever.
For further information read: "Why Are Billions Of Clothes Never Even Sold" by Emily Chan for Vogue.
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1: https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/overproduction-fashion?_kx=Y_snJpdqkYg6ALgnxQBj6SgYynNGkMppDWk1-LCLAJM%3D.Rr88wj
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