After knitting and inspection, the items went upstairs for washing. They came out thicker and fluffier than before. Each item was then tagged, ironed, and inspected again. In a corner of the warehouse, a woman was examining a Soufflé skirt. She pulled it apart, as though kneading dough, and let it bounce back to its usual shape. Then she did the same with the hem, revealing that the machine had missed a stitch. The woman marked the offending area with red thread and put it aside, to be sent to the factory’s repair sector. The skirts that passed muster would be put through a metal detector—to insure that there were no stray needles—then folded, packed, and shipped out to the port on trucks. The music chimed again: break time.
So is Uniqlo fast fashion or not? The company’s foundational secret, executives say, lies in its tightly focussed product line, which enables it to buy and develop fabric in enormous quantities. This puts the company in a uniquely advantageous negotiating position, allowing it to offer better quality at lower prices. “We are misunderstood as a fast fashion brand, we are the opposite,” Kazumi Yanai recently declared.
It is true that Uniqlo has made concrete efforts to be more sustainable. It has, for example, pledged to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in stores and offices by ninety per cent before 2030, and it is already halfway to that target. Eighteen per cent of the company’s clothing is made from recycled or other climate-friendly materials. Inspired by the leaves of the lotus plant, Uniqlo came up with a natural way to repel water from rain gear, an innovation more in demand than ever as customers push to phase out PFAS. Uniqlo says that it doesn’t burn or dump unsold inventory, and that it has directed approximately sixty million pieces of clothing toward emergency aid, in addition to donating thirty-eight million dollars to support programs run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
But much of what Fast Retailing says about its deep commitment to creating timeless clothes is undercut by the fact that it also owns GU, a lower-priced sister brand. Pronounced “jee-you,” GU offers “trend-driven styles” and “rapid turnaround times from design to retail”—with, presumably, rapid turnaround times from retail to landfill as well. And the scale of Uniqlo’s operations, not to mention its quest for endless expansion, makes real sustainability an impossibility. Maxine Bédat, the director of a sustainability think tank called the New Standard Institute, told me, “While Uniqlo has made some strides, it’s part of an industry-wide problem that piecemeal initiatives can’t resolve.”
According to the latest available data, from a 2016 McKinsey report, the average consumer buys sixty per cent more clothes than she did about fifteen years ago, and keeps them for half as long. Thirty per cent of the clothes manufactured in a given year are never sold, much less worn. The question of whether or not Uniqlo is fast fashion or sustainable fashion or ethical fashion has perhaps become irrelevant in a world in which fashion—no modifier needed—is increasingly culpable for the ravaging of the planet.
The likelihood of Uniqlo fulfilling its global ambitions depends in large part on whether it is, at long last, able to conquer the American market. Will U.S. customers submit to the notion that dressing like everyone else has its benefits? In fashion, as in politics, collectivism might make life better, but individualism often prevails.
The company also has a cultural goal: “to democratize art for all.” For more than a decade, Uniqlo has sponsored free public programs at MOMA, the Tate Modern, the Louvre, and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. In exchange, the company burnishes its halo of high-mindedness, receives the right to feature famous works on its T-shirts, and gets to stage events in empty galleries or under an iconic glass pyramid, furthering the idea that its interests lie in Life as much as in Wear.
On one such night in May, Uniqlo gathered a crowd at the Tate Modern, in London, to bestow awards for the UT Grand Prix, an annual competition in which people around the world vie to design a Uniqlo shirt. About a hundred people packed into the museum’s private cinema to hear the results—five winners out of some ten thousand entries—while munching popcorn from little striped cartons.
“Can I do something to help that won’t take you twenty minutes to show me how to do?”
Cartoon by William Haefeli
I was impressed by Ahn Do Eun, a seventeen-year-old student from South Korea, who was the youngest winner, for an abstract submission—yellow splotches, pink streaks, smeary pepperoni reds—that she called “The Pizza I Want to Eat.” Unlike her adult competitors, she was wearing a suit, with her hair sharply parted in the middle. She got up on the stage and read shyly from her phone: “One day, I got told off by my dad. I was feeling so sad and angry, but, even in that moment, I wanted a pizza. The toppings are my emotions.”
Afterward, there was prosecco and a d.j. in the museum’s atrium, the center of which was given over to Louise Bourgeois’s soaring steel spider, “Maman.” Lingering by one of its attenuated, knobby legs, I struck up a conversation with a quiet, conservatively dressed man. He was wearing a Uniqlo lapel pin, in the manner of an American politician’s flag. It was Koji Yanai, one of Yanai’s sons.
I told him that I was writing a story about Uniqlo and asked if there was anything about the company that he thought was misunderstood. “In the past, we haven’t always been good at telling our story,” he said. “But most apparel brands are not existing like us.” I had heard Uniqlo executives compare the company to Apple, releasing gradual updates each season, “like iPhone 4, iPhone 5,” or to a supermarket of clothing, serving daily needs. Koji preferred another, even further-reaching metaphor. “We want to be the infrastructure of clothing,” he said. “Water, gas, electricity, and Uniqlo.”
