GARDE Editorial
Overproduction and the unsold closet
The fashion system is not only guessing what people will buy. It is guessing what can still be useful after the guess is wrong.
Overproduction sounds like a factory problem. In fashion, it is also a calendar problem, a sizing problem, a trend problem, and a memory problem. Clothes are made before demand is known. Assortments change quickly. A colour that looked right in planning can miss the season by the time it reaches the floor. A silhouette can be crowded out by the next drop before the first one has been properly understood.
The result is not a neat pile called excess. It is a set of flows: pieces that never sold, pieces that sold and came back, pieces that were marked down, moved to outlets, liquidated, exported, recycled, incinerated, or destroyed before anyone used them. Each route has its own accounting logic. The closet only sees the final confusion: more clothing in circulation, less certainty about what deserved to exist in the first place.
The Forecast Miss
The European Environment Agency links unsold textiles to rapidly changing fashion, frequent new designs, and the difficulty of forecasting demand across styles, colours, sizes, seasons, and geographies. That phrasing matters. It does not reduce the issue to one villain or one bad habit. It points to the operating shape of modern assortment planning.
A retailer can know that a category is selling and still misjudge which version will move. It can know that black trousers are reliable and still order too many of the wrong rise, fabric, or length. It can know that a trend is visible and still miss how quickly it will tire. More variety gives shoppers choice, but it also multiplies the number of small forecasts that have to be right.
In the EEA's reviewed study set, the average reported share of unsold textile products was about 21%. The agency is careful about the limits of the data: reporting is thin, company disclosures vary, and the available numbers are not transparent enough to turn into a universal law. Still, the direction is hard to ignore. A system built on many new pieces, short seasons, and uncertain demand will produce leftovers as a normal output, not a rare exception.
Markdown Is Not a Reset
Markdown is often treated as the useful escape hatch. Price falls, stock moves, the floor clears. Sometimes that is exactly what happens. But a markdown does not undo the production decision. It changes the terms under which the piece is asked to find a home.
A reduced price can make a good garment reachable. It can also make a weak match look temporarily reasonable. That is the quiet consumer-side problem with excess stock: the signal shifts from usefulness to urgency. The shopper is no longer only asking whether the piece belongs in their closet. They are also asking whether the discount is too good to leave behind.
Liquidation pushes the question further away from the original customer. Stock moves into secondary channels, jobbers, outlets, exports, or waste streams. Some of it will be worn. Some of it will be processed. Some of it will lose value with every handoff. The original forecast error does not disappear. It is distributed.
Returns Join the Same River
Returns are not the same as unsold stock, but they often meet it. A piece bought online may come back because the size, fit, colour, fabric, or styling was not what the buyer expected. It then has to be inspected, sorted, repackaged, restocked, discounted, moved, or written off. The EEA notes that return handling can be complex and slow, which matters more when fashion is seasonal or fast-moving.
A coat returned after the weather turns is not the same asset it was before the cold week. A dress returned after the event season may still be perfect and still be late. The garment has not changed. The context around it has. That is why forecast error and return friction belong in the same conversation. Both expose how much fashion depends on timing.
Destruction Is the Hard Edge
The hardest word in this system is destruction. The EEA defines destruction broadly for returned and unsold products: discarding or intentionally damaging them so they become waste, including routes such as recycling when the product is destroyed before being used for its intended purpose. That definition keeps the focus where it belongs. A garment can leave the sales ledger without ever becoming clothing in someone's life.
Europe is now moving against that outcome. The European Commission's textile strategy includes design requirements, repair and reuse measures, a digital product passport, restrictions around waste exports, and mandatory harmonised producer responsibility rules for textiles. The Commission's timeline also places a ban on destroying unsold textiles and footwear for large enterprises from July 19, 2026, with medium-sized enterprises following later.
The Council of the EU and Parliament's 2025 provisional agreement points in the same direction. It frames textile waste policy around prevention and producer responsibility financing: fashion brands and textile producers would be responsible for their waste and would pay fees helping fund waste collection and treatment, with design choices able to affect those fees. The logic is plain. If excess is built into the business model, the cost cannot sit only with municipalities, charities, sorters, and the next buyer.
The Waste Context
The European figures are large enough without being stretched beyond their scope. The Council says the EU generates about 12.6 million tonnes of textile waste per year. Clothing and footwear account for about 5.2 million tonnes, roughly 12 kilograms per person each year. Those are EU figures. They should not be casually converted into a global claim.
Separate collection is part of the policy direction because textiles are not one simple waste stream. A clean, wearable piece, a damaged synthetic top, a mixed-fibre coat, and an unsold shoe do not ask for the same next step. Prevention comes before sorting because the most efficient waste system is still the one that did not need to handle a piece that should not have been made, bought, or discarded in the first place.
The Unsold Closet
There is a version of the closet that retailers can see: transactions, returns, browsing, wishlists, and stock movement. Then there is the real closet, where the evidence is quieter. A jacket is almost right but never worn. Three shirts serve the same role. A sale dress still has tags. A shoe would be useful if the person remembered the trousers it unlocks.
That is the unsold closet. It is not only the stock that never left the warehouse. It is also the private accumulation created when weak matches are made attractive by price, novelty, or convenience. Forecast error begins upstream, but it can end in a bedroom, with the owner carrying the cost in space, attention, and guilt.
Better information will not make fashion perfectly predictable. It should make the question harder to evade. What is already owned? What role would a new piece actually serve? Is the gap real, or has the assortment simply made it feel real for a moment? The honest answer may still be purchase, repair, resale, donation, or nothing at all. The point is to ask before the system turns another forecast into another leftover.