A System Approach: Fast Fashion Supply Chain for Sustainability

The fast fashion industry is one of the most globalised and profitable sectors, witnessing tremendous growth over the past decades by offering consumers affordable and constantly changing clothing styles while maintaining cost efficiency. However, this success comes at a cost to society, the economy and the environment, as fast fashion companies prioritise low supply chain costs to meet consumer demands; such cost reduction is usually achieved by maintaining low salaries and poor ecological practices. Accordingly, this project focuses on complex sustainability issues and how to dissolve, resolve, or find a solution to unsustainable practices within multiple firms in fast fashion supply chains.

The literature review reveals several sustainable frameworks within the fashion industry, like the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), which quantifies environmental impacts across product lifecycles; the Corporate Sustainable Responsibility (CSR) that guides ethical business practices; the Circular Economy (CE) models to redesign resource flows during the life cycle of the products, and the Triple Bottom Line (3BL), which aims to balance economic, social, and environmental performance. While these frameworks serve well in their specific domains, only TBL tries to provide an integrated approach, even though TBL fails to explain how such balance may be achieved in detail. Therefore, an approach involving various stakeholders' perspectives, including their interests, context, and barriers, would benefit fast fashion supply chains dealing with increasing complexity.

A critical analysis reveals a significant opportunity to advance knowledge in terms of a systemic approach to enhance firms with sustainable supply chains and assist stakeholders in developing coordinated actions. The systems approach has the potential to a) understand how different elements within the fast fashion supply chain are interconnected, interact and influence each other, b) draw boundaries of the relevant components and interactions to study, c) consider the fast fashion supply chain as an open system that interrelates with its environment and other systems, subsystems, and elements, and d) apply the principle of equifinality to recognise multiple pathways to achieving sustainability for a company, supply chain or industry.

To address this opportunity, this research aims to study fast fashion companies in their supply chain and develop an alternative method for problem structuring, decision-making, and problem-solving sustainable issues. The research objectives are to assess the current sustainability impact of fast fashion firms and their supply chains, identify the side effects and their root causes of sustainability impacts, help develop a roadmap to guide stakeholders to improve their sustainability impact, and ultimately, contribute to economic, environmental and social well-being.

The research design includes an extensive literature review, expert input through focus groups, and in-depth case studies to test and validate the framework's efficacy, efficiency and effectiveness. The framework will continuously improve and adapt through iterative refinement based on the empirical data. The case study will incorporate direct observations, semi-structured interviews, and collaborative workshops with local businesses. The case studies will be in Mexico, where the context regarding sustainability awareness, regulatory frameworks, and implementation capabilities is low. This is particularly evident in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which often lack the knowledge, resources, and structured approaches to implement sustainable strategies.

This research contributes to an enhanced understanding of sustainability issues within fast fashion supply chains. By adopting a systemic perspective and leveraging transformative interventions, companies can align with sustainable development goals and drive positive change.