Journal 1 2023/02/15(future of work)

Speculation, Now : Essays and Artwork  Edited by Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao with Prem Krishnamurthy & Carin Kuoni 

At first. I feel so confused about the word of speculation, even I search the meaning of the definition-the forming of a theory or conjecture without firm evidence.( Oxford Languages)

I still can not comprehend the concrete meaning, I guess it is a way of prediction. In this book, authors tried to propose speculation as a methodology that accommodates our awareness that things could be different, that there exists an alternative to analytical assessments that can be useful in navigating a world of systemic failures, new levels of complexity, and unobtainable standards. Traditionally, speculation is associated with financial markets and defined as measuring investment against future returns. However speculation can be an important role in more fields not only in financial markets, as human being, we have a lot of uncertainties need to face and overcome. This book showed 26 examples of how speculation applied in different areas and reflected an unusual degree of risk-taking and playfulness.

I spent more attention on this passage “Colors, Cash, Fabric, and Trim: Fast-fashion Families in Downtown L.A.” because my background is fashion design and I think I can know the speculation in this situation immediately.

To fully understand speculation, one has to consider that feeling of standing at a precipice. Speculation always comes with a gamble, a risk. It is that feeling of hitting it big, along with the deep anxiety of possibly losing it all.  With no doubt, fashion industry can be extremely developing with risks. For example of my brand momonary, each season’s concept and design can be a bet on style. Customers always need something new to stimulate consumer desire. The proportion of new vision will change the attitude of consumers to a large extent. If you can handle it properly, you will attract more new consumers, and at the same time, old consumers will be more stable, and vice versa.

In China’s huge clothing market, the development is even more rapid, and more often it is necessary to seize the first-line business opportunities and the decisiveness to rein in the precipice.

Back to this article. The clothing manufacturers of Los Angeles’s downtown Jobber Market shows intense feeling of both hopeful anticipation and deep anxiety is what they experience on a daily basis in the making of fast fashion. Speculation is the basis for the entire neighborhood where they work: an informal wholesale clothing market that supplies trendy fashions to the largest fast-fashion retailers in the United States: Forever 21, Macy’s, Marshalls, T.J. Maxx, Urban Outfitters, and many others. Located east of the formal Fashion District on Main Street, this once desolate area of downtown L.A. has witnessed, in the last decade alone, the emergence of hundreds to thousands of small-time clothing manufacturers who run their fast-fashion businesses. Speculation as risk takes on the physical form of cash, which must be paid up front in the fast-fashion business. Manufacturers in the neighborhood tell me that “key money” of $200,000 cash must be given up front to landlords in order to secure a better geographic location for showroom spaces, which can potentially bring better foot traffic among buyers. This along with a monthly rent of $20,000 in cash, is needed for store spaces along Pico, 12th Street, and San Pedro. Cash must be paid up front to order fabrics, hire cutters, and pay for the work of factory sewers in cut-and-sew factories in Guangzhou. They tell me that the production of just one style of clothing, fifty-thousand pieces of which can fill one entire shipping container, can cost $1.5 million dollars and must all be dealt in cash. And the money paid out under the table to all the undocumented workers, those originally from Mexico, Guatemala, or El Salvador who work in the Jobber Market as sales reps and general laborers throughout the district, must also be paid in cash. In just under a mile, one can walk from the formal Fashion District, with the white walls and fixed prices of its corporate showrooms, to the streets, sidewalks, and alleyways of the Jobber Market, where anything can be negotiated and where every exchange must be handled in cash. because cash is real and cash is final and cash makes the flow of transactions quicker. Cash produces an instant sense of trust and makes relationships stronger. In a landscape of anonymity and mistrust, cash gives confidence that the other person will most likely deliver. In this informal clothing market of downtown L.A., cash cuts out the corporate white world of bureaucracy—the department store executives who are too high up in a chain of command and whose approvals slow down the decision-making processes of a fast-paced, quickly changing industry of fast, fast trends. 

Not only in the fast fashion industry, but also in our independent designer brands, we also need to pay in advance for the cost of each series. From development to publication to production, the brand needs to bear all the risks. It is true that risks are everywhere, and the more terrifying Yes, it’s all fast. Although speculation can be held in practice as a common, not individual, pursuit of happiness. I still feel confused about the future.