In the UK, Leicester, as a garment manufacturing and sourcing destination, experiences the economically and socially harsh realities of producing cheap, economically driven fast-fashion. Its historically settled multi-generational migrant workforce are being 'exploited and dehumanised’ (Benstead, A. 2025), producing low cost, agile fashion products to serve the mass market.
Leicester was historically renowned as the "City that clothed the world" (Fish, 2023) but is currently facing an ongoing reputational crisis due to its association with labour exploitation and modern slavery (Hu, 2023; Fish, 2023; Weston, 2023).
Today, Leicester’s garment manufacturers are used by many U.K. based high-street and online retail brands. Their working practices have been the subject of several media documentaries, public inquiries and union/campaign group investigations. However, even with the growing awareness of these issues and a “focused spotlight upon Leicester” (Muller, D. 2024), it is still fundamentally experiencing a ‘polycrisis’ (Tooze, A. 2023).
‘Polycrisis’, has been defined by The World Economic Forum’s 2023 Global Risks Report, as ‘where disparate crises interact such that the overall impact far exceeds the sum of each part’ (WEF. 2023).
As described by Sullivan (2022), Leicester’s ‘Dark Factories’ economies of sourcing, means that many fast fashion brands can achieve agile speed-to-market to suit their fast-fashion business models. Their supply base, being geographically located centrally in the U.K., allows them to serve their domestic and western European consumers by ‘Reshoring’ (Ellams et al., 2023) their production, whilst the ‘living factor’ (Schumacher, E. 1973) is often seen as an uneconomically contributing externality. By brands taking advantage of competitively low price point production and disregarding corporate social responsibility, a mass of unregulated manufacturing businesses, ‘relying on factory workers paid as little as £3 per hour’, (Agarwal, P. 2024) has been allowed to proliferate.
Within such an economically driven environment, the fast-fashion manufacturers, based in Leicester, are unable to invest in social functions within their businesses. The totality of pursuing pure business logic and profit maximisation from the razor-thin margins of their work, leaves nothing to ‘embrace social logic and its social returns’ (Weller and Ran, 2020), overall creating a detrimental effect to supply chain model itself, and the stakeholders involved.
This ongoing research is exploring the potential for Leicester's garment manufacturing businesses to initiate dual economic and social value organisational logics. The aim is to cultivate a harmonious co-existence of these contradictions and simultaneously improve each organizational logic, at their core business levels.
To develop both credible economic rationale and improved social values, a manufacturing innovation hub will be established to support Leicester’s garment manufacturing businesses with their economic and social transformations.
By employing Paradox Theory, as a conceptual approach, the intended outcomes will be to change working practices, improve the lives of those who work in this industry and the region’s reputation as a key sourcing hub for British fashion and textiles.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)