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Global Fashion Agenda (GFA) and The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) recently released the 2018 edition of the Pulse of the Fashion Industry report, an annual in-depth assessment of the fashion industry's environmental and social performance.
According to the report, the pulse score of the fashion industry in the past year improved from 32 to 38 (out of 100), confirming that sustainability is rising on the corporate agenda.
Of the executives polled for the Pulse Survey, 52 per cent reported that environmental and social targets acted as a guiding principle for nearly every strategic decision they made - an increase of 18 percentage points from last year.
Morten Lehmann, Chief Sustainability Officer, GFA, commented, "I'm excited that sustainability finally has been taken out of the lab and into the boardroom. To find out that the topic influences decision-making at a strategic level leaves me with optimism."
The British Fashion Council has recently announced that 39 year-old Stephanie Phair will be its new chair, replacing Dame Natalie Massenet, who stepped down from the role in December.
Phair is the youngest person to ever be appointed into the role and, while her name may be not be as immediately familiar as Massenet’s, her influence in the global fashion industry is not to be underestimated. In fact, you could consider her to be a protege of both the Net-a-Porter founder, and another of fashion’s most powerful businesswomen, US Vogue editor Anna Wintour.
Currently the chief strategy officer for Farfetch and an independent board director for Moncler SpA. Phair’s experience covers the realms of fashion business, PR, marketing, technology and entrepreneurialism - a potent mix for someone who is set to lead the sector through an era of fluctuating economic situations and Brexit trade negotiations, and one where the internet is changing the way all types of fashion businesses are run.
Dame Natalie Massenet stepped down as Chairman in December 2017, following a successful five-year term in which she led the organisation to focus its activities through strategic pillars, engage in digital innovation and focus on building the global profile for British fashion.
According to the Association of Exporters (ADEX), textile exports in Peru reached $ 99,685 million between January 2018 and March 2018, an increase of 15.9 per cent, while apparel grew by 7per cent.
The exported goods mostly included cotton T-shirts for men and women, knit shirts for men, baby clothes and others. Exports of the textile-clothing chain reached more than $ 323,788 million in the first quarter of the year, registering an increase of 9.6% over the same period in 2017.
For the first three months, the main destinations for Peruvian Clothing included the United States and Brazil with a growth of 4.5 per cent and 80.3 per cent, respectively. Both countries accounted for 73 per cent of the total exports.
The ranking was followed by Germany, Argentina, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Japan; the countries with declining rates, however, were Chile and Colombia.
During the first quarter Pakistan’s denim apparel exports to the US were up 24.52 per cent.
Denim trouser was the topmost product of all denim apparels exported to the US. Earnings from Men and Boys (MB) denim trousers were up 2.75 per cent. Exports of Women and Girls (WG) denim trousers posted a staggering growth of 40.32 per cent.
On the other hand, denim jackets and skirts could not see any revolutionary turnaround and the shipment values remained considerably low despite seeing some surge over last year’s shipment value.
Earnings from denim jacket exports were up 101.68 per cent whereas earnings from skirts shipment were up 3.54 per cent.
Markedly the surge in denim trouser exports since the start of 2018 is one of the few positives for Pakistan as in the last six years overall textile and apparel exports from the country plunged ten per cent.
Pakistan’s denim industry has crossed a billion dollars. This includes export of denim fabrics and denim garments. Pakistan is the second largest exporter of denim in the world after China.
Pakistan’s denim is on an upward trend, despite the larger textile industry being in trouble. Unlike its regional competitors, Pakistan houses a huge benefit of homegrown cotton which it can exploit.
According to a study by AT Kearney, National Retail Federation, the lack of the North American Free Trade Agreement would cost shoppers $16 billion and result in 128,000 retail jobs being lost.
Many Los Angeles brands manufacture their blue jeans in Mexico and rely on duty-free imports to keep costs down.
According to the study, retailers imported $128 billion worth of merchandise from Mexico and $54 billion from Canada in 2017. Their textiles and apparel imports totaled $4.8 billion from Mexico and $1.3 billion from Canada.
If the United States withdrew from NAFTA, the retail imports would be subject to $5.3 billion in annual tariffs that would most likely be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices.
Food and beverages sold at grocery stores would be the worst affected at $2.7 billion, followed by apparel and footwear at $501 million and household goods at $498 million.
A new mini-documentary by sustainability ambassador Livia Firth, Founder and Creative Director of Eco-Age, highlights a selection of Australian wool growing properties, examining the ecological credentials of Merino wool.
The film tackles the issue of the growing use of synthetic fibres in fashion and the impact of that choice. Washing clothes made from synthetic fibres, causes tiny plastic fibres to shed, travel through wastewater treatment plants into public waterways.
It is projected that by 2050 an enormous 22 million tonnes of microfibres will end up as marine pollution.
Available in four languages, featured at premier events and on global news platforms such as Vogue USA, and highlighted on panel discussions in New York, London and Milan, Fashion-Scapes: Forever Tasmania explores woolgrowers' role in a landscape famed for both its biological and aesthetic importance.
Apparel exports in Turkey increased by 11.4 per cent in the January-March period of 2018, rising to $4.52 billion in value. During the same period, knitted apparel exports commanded the largest share at 50.6 per cent, while the share of woven apparel’s was 37per cent.
The country exported $3.2 billion worth of ready-to-wear garments to EU countries with Turkey exporting 71.4 per cent of all EU garment exports.
Exports of knitted garments increased by 9.8 per cent compared to the same period last year, rising by $2.3 billion. 21.8 per cent of Turkey's exports of knitted garments went to Germany, 13.1 per cent went to UK, 9.9 per cent to Spain, 5.8 per cent to the Netherlands and 5.5 per cent to Iraq.
The Kenyan government recently identified the textiles and apparels sector as a top priority for burgeoning economic growth in the country.
The Kenya Industrial Transformation Program has played a key role in making the textiles and apparels sector manifest as a priority for the country’s income generation.
The textile sector of the country not only boosts the cotton farming activities but also helps in reviving the textile mills. This creates a fully developed value chain, which has the capacity to absorb significant number of people in the workforce.
Besides, activities like cotton farming and apparel manufacture offer a lot of scope for employment by virtue of being highly labour intensive.
At present this sector happens to be the bread-winner or the crucial foreign exchange provider for Kenya.
India has been witnessing a continuous drop in its exports to the world in the recent past. Therefore manufacturers have now started exploring the domestic market more to maintain profit margins
The industry is battling against the overseas competitors as well due to the restrictions on exports imposed by the Government. Countries like, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Bangladesh have a simple gateway to export, and they don’t have to pay any duty on the products they send to other countries which with FTAs in place, which is not the case for Indian textile companies.
Introduction of GST (Goods and Services Tax) has reduced the raw material cost which is allowing them to provide benefit to the end-customers. In 2017, the Government reduced the GST on man-made yarns from 18 per cent to 12 per cent, notably.
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) has developed an intelligent 3D human modeling system by integrating computer graphic and vision technology to simplify and enhance the process of shopping well-fitting clothes online.
The system digitally accurately reconstructs the shape and size of a person from two full body photographs within 5-10 seconds.
Developed by Tracy P.Y. Mok, associate professor from PolyU’s Institute of Textiles and Clothing and PhD graduate Zhu Shuaiyin, the innovation allows a customised model in arbitrary dynamic poses to be created automatically within 5-10 seconds, according to a press release from Zhu’s start-up TOZI.
The system can reconstruct the 3D shape and extract over 50 size measurements of different parts of a person, including the girth of bust, waist, hip, thigh, knee, calf and neck, as well as arm length, shoulder slope accurately.
The discrepancies in tight-fitting and loose-fitting clothing are less than 1cm and 2cm respectively, which are precise enough to fulfill the specific requirements of the clothing industry for fashion applications and comparable to body scans.
