This chapter seeks to determine whether entrepreneurial technological innovation can mitigate the intrinsic contradiction between short-term fashion and the long-term fashion industry in the supply chain to achieve environmental, economic, and social sustainability. The current fashion industry is driven by the ephemeral nature of fashion and its associated wastes which are not very sustainable. Although literature has demonstrated that operations research can be used to reduce inventory wastes, whether emerging technologies can reformat the whole mode of production in the fashion industry to be more sustainable remains unknown. Through interviewing professionals who specialize in the three key stages in the supply chain, this chapter concludes that the transition to sustainability is possible if technology is not just regarded as a tool to reduce carbon emissions, but used to materialize the sustainable design philosophy and integrated into the sustainability rebranding process in the whole supply chain from beginning to end.
TopIntroduction
Fashion is a form of short-term social expression which lasts shorter than a season. The fashion industry, however, aims to secure long-term growth through continuous entrepreneurial technological innovation (Kaiser, 2012). This contradiction in timing creates a sustainability conundrum: how can entrepreneurial innovation commercialize a form of short-term social expression into a long-term industry to achieve sustainable growth? The sustainable growth here not only refers to economic sustainability, but more importantly, to both environmental and social sustainability as well. This chapter uses the lens of supply chain to discuss the possibility of using technology to turn short-term social expression-based fashion into a long-term mass production-based fashion industry to achieve sustainability.
The fashion industry is one of the biggest industries in the world. It is currently worth an estimated $2.4 trillion USD and has grown at an annual rate of 5.5 percent (Amed, Berg, Brantberg, and Hedrich, 2016; Brun, Castelli, RayeCarol, and Doris, 2015). The fashion industry’s boom is ascribed to the ephemeral characteristics of fashion. Fashion describes the social and temporal system that people are embedded into within a certain time and context (Kaiser, 2012). For example, after events such as New York Fashion Week, Paris Fashion week, and the Met Gala, consumers worldwide often get rid of clothing which, although physically wearable, fail to keep up with the new fashion trends. People use clothes as a form of social expression. When the world trend changes, consumer tastes change quickly as well. In this sense, it is exactly these short-term wastes caused by the ephemeral nature of fashion that enable the growth of the fashion industry.
This mode of development, however, is not sustainable in the long-term. With the increasing mass-production of consumer commodities at cheaper prices, wastes in the fashion industry coming from fabric waste, packaging waste, and gas emissions waste make the fashion industry one of the largest polluters in the world, second only to oil. The fashion industry contributes to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions due to its energy-intensive production (Edge Fashion Intelligence, 2018). In addition to their environmental impacts, these wastes also increase economic and social costs. Obviously, this short-term fashion-driven mode of development cannot last long.
This contradiction becomes more complicated when the fashion industry’s long supply chain is taken into consideration. According to the United States Fashion Industry Association, the fashion industry ranges from high-end luxury brands to fast-fashion retailers, with the millions of companies in between that produce and sell clothing, shoes, and other textile products (United States Fashion Industry Association, 2019). As a result, in order to mediate the short-term fashion trend and the long-term sustainability of the fashion industry, companies and professionals across the entire supply chain ranging from design and development to manufacturing and packaging and logistics and transportation all need to adjust their current mode of production simultaneously.
This intrinsic contradiction provides entrepreneurs in the fashion industry with a great business opportunity. Following Schumpeter's (1934) classic definition, entrepreneurs are defined as innovators who bring any new problem-solving idea into use. Among the various types of innovations, this chapter mainly focuses on the entrepreneur’s technological innovations. The core issue discussed in this chapter is whether the entrepreneur’s technological innovation can mitigate the intrinsic contradiction between the short-term characteristics of fashion design and the long-term prospect of the fashion industry alongside the supply chain system to achieve sustainability. To be specific, using Schumpeter's (1934) classic criteria of measuring the entrepreneur’s creative destruction strategies, this core research issue can be further developed into the following two research questions:
- 1.
Can the entrepreneur’s creative destruction of technological innovation be “destructive” enough to reformat the fashion industry’s intrinsically systematic and contradictory mode of development?
- 2.
Can the entrepreneur’s creative destruction of technological innovation be “creative” enough to create a new and more sustainable mode of development?
With this purpose in mind, interviews of four professionals alongside the fashion supply chain, including professionals in the design and development stage, manufacturing and packaging stage, and logistics and transportation stage (Figure 1), are conducted in this chapter.