With the progress of comprehensive strength in contemporary technological level, the traditional fashion industry which used to be labour-intensive and large-scale production is facing a structural reformation. This research will analyse the feasibility of fashion industry’s sustainability from three perspectives, which were fashion consciousness, green policies and digitalisation.
2.1 Fashion consciousness: the leading power of fashion industry’s development.
China is an enormous fashion market which results in numerous studies focus on the purchase behaviour, attitudes and intentions of Chinese consumers [7, 8] while less research concentrated on the reason why they were changed. Caroline Evans regarded “fashion” as a contradictoriness, which could reflect not only in the field of fashion design, but also in fashion production, marketing and communication [9]. In other words, actions, attitudes and intentions of consumer actually lead by “fashion consciousness”. In the subconsciousness, people need “fashion” to represent their social identity [10]. Gradually, “fashion” became a symbol of regional and national aesthetics and culture [11].
However, the current understanding towards “fashion” was not achieved overnight. In the early stage, “fashion” was a regarded as “public awareness”. Le Bon, G (1841-1931) was one of the earliest polymaths who investigated the relationship between crowd’s consciousness and behaviours, he described “fashion” as “the crowds are more especially guided by unconscious considerations and are not given to reasoning” [12]. It reflects that “follow fashion” was a natural psychology. The consciousness of “fashion” is a result of human’s complex thoughts although it doesn’t have an object shape but present people’s deeper desire.
On this basis, many researchers suppose that fashion consciousness was the motivation of fashion consumption. Kim. J and et al. thought that fashion consciousness was a bond between garment retailers and consumers [13] and could make strongly influence to enhance fashion consumption [14]. Although, researchers like Heinze worried about the practicable sustainability of current fashion system [15], chasing fashion still an essential part of people’s daily life, which was the comprehensive manifestation of conformity and novelty psychology. In a word, fashion business is a rigid industry that could meet people’s psychological demands, the psychological demand of “fashion” shall be the motivation to keep fashion products renewed and fashion industry continuous [16].
2.2 “Green”:A consensus in present fashion industry.
The development of industrialize makes fashion pollution a global concern [17] which force people to pay more attention to the baseline of fashion manufacture. “Green” means “sustainable”, this concept was brought by Victor J. Papanek, an American researcher who studied in fashion design theory in 1960s. He took “sustainable development” extremely crucial and herald people a chaos serious result if textiles and apparels were produced uncontrolledly [18].
As a “compromise” to reality [19], “green” become a symbol of different segments in fashion industry, such as design, dying, transport. Meanwhile, “green” also caused debate in many countries. For some, human is the dominator, so the external world shall adapt to mankind [20]. As time goes by, majority people start to show more concern about environment rather than short-term benefits [21]. “Fashion” was considered as “take, make and waste” [22]. Not until 1972, the concept of “sustainable development” in fashion industry was widely approved [23]. After that, the “green” concept greatly turns into policies and rules in countries recently. For example, European Green Deal was announced in 2019 and it was trying transform the EU into a resource-efficient and competitive economy [24]; California, a state of the American, introduced act for responsible textile disposal and reuse in the march of 2023; etc.
A competitive market frequently leads to a lower “greenness level” [25]. Fleming and Roberts regard “green” as an invisible approach to mitigate the relationship of both fashion market demand and ecological carrying capability [26]. Under the “green” trend, the duty of designers has constantly shifted into fighting climate change and decrease environmental conflicts from simply match and collage [17]. “Green” is now a consensus of industrial attitude, which could be found as practical hypothesises and strong examples in R&D (Research and Development) and 3R (Reduce-Recycle-Reuse) process among the mainstream fashion industry [27]. In other words, “sustainable design process is a synthesis process” of civilisation [28]. Figure 2 shows the factors that should be concerned fron the perspective of “green”, among which, the core idea shall be concluded as “think forward, design practically, meet and achieve requires properly” [29].
So as to solve the developmental difficulties brought by the constructure conflicts of China’s fashion industry and promote the circularity of China’s fashion industry, Chinese government has introduced series of policies, which mainly under the perspective of industrial upgrading and environmental protection. As the aspect of industrial upgrading, (1). 2012, The Outline for Building a Strong Textile Country (2011-2020) was released by China National Textile and Industry Council (CNTAC) which declaimed a development plan and goals of China’s T&G industry from 2011 to 2020, concentrating on achieving sustainable progress and expansion [30]; (2). 2023, Article 3 of the Outline for Building a Strong Quality Country issued by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council emphasizes the importance of protecting patents, trademarks, copyrights, and other contents; Article 7 declared the usefulness of improving industrial production’s level and promoting the scale of digitalization, intelligence and quantization; Article 12 gives priority to strengthen the content of research and design’s capability to promote the development of China’s industrial manufacturing level towards mid to high end direction; Article 21 highlights further move on creating strong fashion brands, deepen marketing strategies and maintenance[31], which would be the support of China’s fashion industrial upgrading. Meanwhile, as for the perspective of environmental protection, Chinese government released Implementation Opinions on Deepening the Battle of Pollution Prevention and Control in 2021, which pointed out the main trust of promoting carbon peak action in depth. Based on that, more specific requirements were announced for industrial manufacturing to reduce energy consumption and optimize production processes. What above ensured the China’s fashion industry move on with circularity and clear direction.
Compared to traditional fashion, “green” fashion requires enterprises to improve the environment through production that unavoidably impact product manufacturing and design ethics [32]. According to KPMG, it declaimed there was 75% consumers thought it’s essential to keep “fashion” growth in a sustainable way [33]. However, practical speaking, it was still too slow for fashion enterprises to carry out sustainable solutions in general. If the concept of “green” can be applied when in actual designing or manufacturing, it would greatly reduce the harm to environment [34]. Adamkiewicz thought in the perspective of achieving “green” and applied that the fashion industry requires urgent changes adapting much more con-scientious business practices, driving consumers to change their perceptions and behaviours toward circular products and services [35]. To sum up, it’s an agreement of the public that fashion industry requires sustainability [36].
2.3 Digitalisation: connecting traditional fashion to modern fashion
Whether fashion industry could achieve practical sustainability has been a debate topic [37]. Some scholars bluntly believe the approaches of sustainable development in the fashion industry needs to be improved [38], also, the fundamental changes shall be brought in the industry for the reason of huge pollution that the industry has caused [39]. Base on that, Musova and Musa believed that digital technologies were useful not only as a solution from design to manufactory but also the tool to transfer traditional fashion to a modern one [40].
Currently, digital technologies were used extensively and thoroughly [41]. According to Tang and Stylios, the digital technologies have been the considerable part of fashion design and engineering since 2006 [42]. Jin and Shin hold the opinion that the digital technologies were fundamentally reshaping the relationship between consumer and fashion [43]. However, as the digitalisation continues to change customer’s purchasing habits, SMEs are confronted with unprecedented challenges [44]. Generally speaking, numerous digital applications were applied to manufacture. For instance, RFID (radio frequency identification) apply to entire process of fashion business and management [45]. In practical, digital technologies could create transparency, traceability and automatization [46]. Besides to that, many digital methods like three-dimensional CAD (Computer Aided Drafting) have been proposed to automate, optimize design and manufacturing processes in the supply chains in majority fashion markets [47]. With the support of digital technologies, global fashion supply chain and management system could offer a near-real-time demand-response system for decision-makers across production network [48]. Meanwhile, data mining techniques have been used to solve marketing and manufacturing problems [49], so does in China’s fashion industry [50].
Nevertheless, different perspectives were shown towards digitalisation. In one hand, Kang, Hee-Myung believes that digital technologies could anticipate trends for next season, which made great contributions to planning, marketing, and developing fashion design algorithms [51]. In the other hand, Pan, Y consider that fashion products could hardly stay “fashion” due to the high speed of replacement brought by new technologies [30].
In summary, digital technologies are shaping modern fashion, which allow fashion products with better quality, higher attraction, lower cost, and increased manufacturing flexibility [52]. However, after Covid-19 pandemic and shut-down policy in the last three years, fashion business was deeply influenced [53] and numerous SMEs bankrupted, which convinced the public more about the importance of rationalisation of industrial development. To this end, this research focuses on exploring the opinions of scholars towards to China’s fashion industry, especially on following questions:
(1) What’s the general attitude of researchers towards sustainability of China’s fashion industry?
(2) What is the value that motivate China’s fashion industry to achieve sustainability?
(3) How could sustainability of China’s fashion industry to be achieved in the future?