why sustainable fashion costs more: the part one: before the flood — fashion before globalisation

there was a time when buying a coat was a considered decision.

not because people were more thoughtful by nature, but because the economics of clothing made it so. a garment cost a meaningful proportion of a weekly wage. it was made locally, or at least regionally, by workers whose names you might have known, in factories whose conditions were visible and regulated. you bought less. you kept it longer. you had it repaired when it wore out.

this wasn't nostalgia. it was simply how the industry worked.

the pre-industrial wardrobe

before the industrial revolution, clothing was almost entirely handmade. fabric was woven by hand, cut by local tailors, and passed down through families. a single garment could represent weeks of labour. the idea of discarding a coat because it had gone out of fashion would have been incomprehensible — not a moral failing, but a practical absurdity.

the industrial revolution changed the mechanics of production without immediately changing the culture of consumption. factories could produce fabric faster and at lower cost, but clothing remained a significant purchase. the ready-to-wear industry that emerged in the late nineteenth century made fashion more accessible, but not yet disposable.

the golden age of garment-making

the mid-twentieth century represented something close to a golden age for the garment industry in western europe and north america — not in terms of glamour, but in terms of structure.

factories operated under regulated conditions. workers were unionised. wages, while modest, were tied to local economies. a shirt made in italy was made by italian workers, paid italian wages, subject to italian labour law. the price of the garment reflected those realities.

fashion moved slowly. collections changed twice a year — spring/summer and autumn/winter — and the pace of change was set by designers, not by algorithms or trend forecasting software. consumers bought fewer pieces, but those pieces were built to last. a well-made wool coat from the 1960s could still be worn forty years later. many were.

the beginning of the end: the 1970s and 1980s

the first significant shift came in the 1970s, as western manufacturers began exploring lower-cost production in developing countries. the logic was straightforward: labour costs in south-east asia, latin america and parts of africa were a fraction of those in europe or north america. moving production offshore meant higher margins without raising prices.

at first, the change was gradual. quality remained relatively high. brands still maintained oversight of their supply chains, if only because communication and logistics made close management a practical necessity.

by the 1980s, however, the pace was accelerating. deregulation, advances in global shipping and the loosening of trade restrictions made offshoring not just possible but almost inevitable for any brand competing on price. the garment industry began its long migration away from the countries where it had been built.

the 1990s: the decade that changed everything

the 1990s were the turning point.

the north american free trade agreement, signed in 1994, opened the door to large-scale manufacturing in mexico and central america. the multi-fibre arrangement, which had previously imposed quotas on textile imports, began to be phased out. china's integration into global trade networks accelerated dramatically.

for consumers, the effect was immediate and seductive: prices fell. a t-shirt that had cost the equivalent of several hours' wages in 1975 could now be bought for the equivalent of twenty minutes' work. fashion became, for the first time in history, genuinely cheap.

what wasn't visible — what couldn't be seen from the high street — was the cost being paid elsewhere. in the factories of bangladesh, cambodia and indonesia, workers were producing garments for western brands at wages that bore no relationship to the prices those garments would eventually command. the supply chain had become long enough, and opaque enough, that the connection between the person who made the coat and the person who bought it had effectively disappeared.

the era of fast fashion had begun.

and with it, the slow erasure of everything that had made clothing worth keeping.

part two: the real cost of making things locally

when a garment is described as ethically made or locally produced, the price tag that follows often provokes a reaction.

why does it cost so much?

it's a reasonable question. but it's also, in a sense, the wrong one. the more useful question is: why did we ever expect clothing to be so cheap?

what localisation actually means

producing a garment in western europe — in italy, portugal, france or the united kingdom — means operating within a specific set of conditions that have no equivalent in the countries where fast fashion is manufactured.

it means paying workers a living wage, not a minimum wage calculated to satisfy a legal threshold, but a wage that reflects the actual cost of living in that country. in northern italy, where much of europe's finest garment production is still concentrated, a skilled seamstress earns between €1,500 and €2,500 per month. in bangladesh, the minimum wage for a garment worker is approximately €100.

that difference doesn't disappear when a brand chooses to manufacture locally. it becomes part of the cost of the garment.

the components of an ethical price

when you buy a locally made coat priced at €600, the breakdown looks something like this.

fabric accounts for a significant portion — often between 30 and 40 percent of the final cost. quality wool, deadstock fabric or certified organic cotton costs substantially more than the synthetic blends used in mass production. a metre of fine italian wool can cost €30 to €80. a fast fashion brand might pay €2 for a synthetic equivalent.

labour is the second major component. a coat that requires eight hours of skilled work — cutting, sewing, finishing, pressing — at a fair wage represents a meaningful cost before a single overhead has been considered. add studio rent, equipment maintenance, quality control and the time spent on sampling and development, and the numbers accumulate quickly.

then there are the costs that don't appear on any invoice: the designer's years of training, the pattern maker's expertise, the relationships with suppliers built over decades. these are real costs, absorbed into the price of every garment a small brand produces.

the hidden subsidy of fast fashion

fast fashion isn't cheap because it's efficient. it's cheap because its true costs are paid by someone else.

the garment worker in dhaka who earns €100 a month is subsidising the €15 jacket on the high street. the river in cambodia contaminated by textile dye is absorbing a cost that never appears in the brand's accounts. the landfill site receiving 92 million tonnes of textile waste every year — a figure cited by the ellen macarthur foundation — is the final destination of a system built on the premise that clothing should be disposable.

localised, ethical production refuses that premise. it insists that the full cost of making something well should be reflected in its price — and that the people who make it should be paid accordingly.

small-scale production and the economics of craft

there is another dimension to the cost of ethical clothing that is rarely discussed: scale.

a brand producing 10,000 units of a single style can negotiate dramatically lower prices for fabric, trims, labels and manufacturing than a brand producing 50. the economics of mass production are built on volume, and small ethical producers simply cannot access them.

this isn't a failure of the small brand. it's a structural feature of an industry designed around scale. when a small atelier produces a limited run of coats from deadstock fabric, every element of that process costs more per unit than it would at industrial scale — and that cost is reflected in the price.

what the small brand offers in return is something the industrial system cannot: a garment made with attention, produced in limited quantity, and built to last far longer than the season in which it was made.

what delocalisation means

delocalisation is the opposite process: moving production away from the country where a brand is based, towards wherever labour costs are lowest. for most fast fashion companies, this means manufacturing in bangladesh, cambodia, vietnam or china — countries where wages, environmental regulations and workers' rights offer the least resistance to profit margins. the brand designs in london or stockholm, markets in new york or milan, and manufactures in dhaka. the distance between those places isn't just geographical. it's the distance between the price on the label and the true cost of making the garment.