FASHION NEEDS AND CONSUMPTION - Global Point of View

 FASHION NEEDS AND CONSUMPTION 

- Global Point of View

Fashion plays an important role in many lives, but in the twenty-first century, the environmental and ethical challenges inherent in the global fashion system have reached a critical point. At the risk of hyperbole, the concerns of sustainable fashion affect nothing short of the entire world: the practices of all humans who wear clothes, the well-being of the world’s 60 million garment workers and 250 million cotton growers, the farms and forests that provide cotton and viscose, the oil fields providing petrochemicals for synthetic fiber, the animals providing fiber and hides, the growing mountains of waste, and the economic paradigms that require fashion’s systems of production and consumption to grow ad infinitum. As the fashion and sustainability discourse gathers momentum internationally, it is imperative that companies and individuals alike collectively work to reduce the impacts from producing and consuming fashion garments. 

Which countries consume the most?

Just ten countries dominate the market for retail purchasing: China, US, India, Japan, Germany, UK, Russia, France, Italy and Brazil. Together, these markets account for three-quarters of the clothes and more than two-thirds of the shoes sold each year.

There is a huge variation in the purchasing habits and spending power among the consumers in the different countries. This reflects the economic circumstances of each country as well as potentially different shopping cultures. However, the country averages tend to hide disparities of purchasing power within different societies.