Breaking the pattern: The apparel brands ditching trends and seasons

vào tháng 6 05, 2023

In an industry that thrives from constant change, a handful of fashion brands have broken away from convention to refine timeless apparel collections. Their seasonless business models proved notably resilient during the pandemic when many clothing companies suffered from overstock and supply chain woes. Could they serve as a viable alternative to overproduction and other wasteful practices that prevail in the fickle world of fashion?

Sometimes it takes outsiders to question norms that have been upheld for generations. Stockholm-based minimalist brand Asket was established in 2015 by August Bard Bringéus and Jakob Dworsky who were tasked with building a business plan in their last year of university. The idea was a simple one - they would only offer an essential wardrobe of garments that are truly needed and that customers could always return to.

Their motivation stemmed from the shared frustration they felt towards the clothes they saw on the market and the countless items in their wardrobe. “We just found that quite strange and inefficient. From a customer point of view, you’re very frustrated. You spend a lot of money on stuff that you don’t use," says Asket’s co-founder Bard-Bringéus.”You buy things that you don’t feel comfortable in, that you’re not happy with. It’s either the quality or the style that at some point renders the garment obsolete.”

His irritation about the phenomenon of “planned obsolescence” is also backed by data: In a report from 2017, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation estimated that worldwide clothing utilisation - or the average number of times a garment is worn before being discarded or no longer used - declined by 36 percent within 15 years, while clothing production has doubled to more than 100 billion items in the same period.

Trends are spinning ever faster

These figures highlight how wasteful the fashion industry and consumer behaviour have become. The emergence of fast fashion since the 1990s fueled the notion of apparel as a disposable good, while the rise of social media accelerated the dissemination of trends and pace of change in human desires, resulting in ever faster production cycles.

"With modern target groups, a trend is usually visible for six seasons,” explains Ulla Ertelt, head of Frankfurt-based market research firm HML Modemarketing. “From product launch to saturation and decline, a trend usually lasts three years.”

While many trends take several seasons to spread, fast fashion companies are adding newness on their shop floors much more frequently. The Spanish fashion chain Zara offers 24 new collections every year and its Swedish competitor H&M as many as 16, estimated a report by consultancy McKinsey in 2016. The brands don’t comment on the figures. Their business models proved so successful that more fashion brands increased the number of their collections from the traditional spring/summer and autumn/winter offers.

The Chinese digital-only retailer Shein even seems to drop new styles on its website daily, earning the moniker of ultra-fast-fashion company. The company didn’t provide figures when asked for comment but said that speedy on-demand-production limits its overstock to single-digit percentages, while the fashion industry average is between 25 to 40 percent.

Choosing to defy the break-neck speed of churning out ever more items could seem outdated or at least puzzling. How can brands which disregard seasons and miss out on trends survive and even thrive in the current system?

Crafting timeless styles

One of the open secrets in the fashion industry is the fact that wardrobes in affluent countries are full. People own more clothing than ever before and are discarding them more quickly, studies by organisations such as Greenpeace show. Their wardrobes have grown so much that at least 50 percent of the clothes are never even worn. Fashion relies on pushing trends and other stimuli to keep selling in a saturated market, but the founders of Asket wanted to find an alternative.