A new fashion mindset

Imagining a more collaborative industry

The conventional wisdom in the business world is that competition is the answer to everything. If you’ve got a problem, just throw a bunch of entrepreneurs, inventors and CEOs into the arena and when the smoke clears, you’ll have your solution. It’s very important that there’s a huge pile of money at the end of it all — that’s the thing everyone’s fighting each other for. It’s a very Darwinist, survival of the fittest way of looking at the world and it works great when you want to optimize battery performance or make computers the size of a fingernail.

Competition is not good for improving the human condition, and it often makes things worse. The Darwinist economy leads to huge inequalities and monopolies, and the whole thing quickly becomes a race to the worst way of doing business. Social scientists call this the race to the bottom and it’s how we end up with Amazon workers pissing in bottles and Shein and Temu flying almost 600,000 packages of disposable fast fashion into the US every day.

We have a tendency to think that this is just the way it is. People have always done bad things to get ahead. Go back in time and there will be some Victorian factory owner exploiting poor children with lungs full of ash or medieval peasants dying of bubonic plague while the Duke sits around all day eating pheasant. Yes, the world has always been grotesque and unfair but also…we live in specific political circumstances that are the result of very specific ideas about how the world should be.

All of this survival of the fittest economics is really a philosophy called neoliberalism. It’s the idea that business knows best, and that any social problem can be fixed through businesses competing against each other. What all these politicians don’t seem to realize is that when you have a brutal competition with no rules, nobody has a reason to work together to actually make things better.

Ken Pucker wrote about this in a recent op-ed for Business of Fashion. Ken was the COO of Timberland before it was bought out by VF Corp and has been critiquing the corporate sustainability landscape for years. As he writes, the competitive environment in fashion means there is almost no reason for companies to take sustainability seriously. “Investment in sustainability is hard to justify because the benefits are often intangible and hard to value. Financial returns — if they exist at all — typically manifest over the long term.”