There are over 7 billion people on this planet. 7 billion! If you count one number a second without stopping until you reach a billion, you’d be counting for 31 years, 259 days, 1 hours, 46 minutes, and 40 seconds. That’s how much a billion is.
If each person owned only one pair of pants, one shirt, and one jacket, that would be 21 billion articles of clothing. If you were to count each of those, one per second, it would take nearly 672 years. That’s a lot of clothes! And it’s safe to assume that many of us own more than three items of apparel.
Given that there are so many of us, and clothes are one of the three basic needs, the statistics surrounding the textile and fashion industry are nothing short of staggering. Here are some of the more shocking.
The world market for textiles made from organically grown cotton was worth over $5 billion in 2010.
Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge has spent more than £35,000 $54,000 on clothes since the beginning of 2012.
The Chinese textile industry creates about 3 billion tons of soot each year and a single mill in China can use 200 tons of water for each ton of fabric it dyes; many rivers run with the colors of the season as the untreated toxic dyes wash off from mills.
Employment in the U.S. apparel manufacturing industry has declined by more than 80 percent (from about 900,000 to 150,000 jobs) over the past two decades.
Germany has the highest hourly compensation costs within the apparel manufacturing industry. The Philippines, with compensation costs at 88 cents per hour, has the lowest.
New Yorkers spend the most on apparel at $362 (R4,000) per month.
The world menswear industry should exceed $402 billion in 2014.
The world womenswear industry is expected to pass $621 billion in 2014.
The world childrenswear market is expected to reach beyond $186 billion in 2014, marking a 15 percent increase in five years.
The world clothing and textile industry (clothing, textiles, footwear and luxury goods) reached almost $2,560 trillion in 2010.
Consumers in the United Kingdom have an estimated £30 billion (R550 billion) worth of unworn clothes lingering in their closets.
The world bridalwear market is expected to reach almost $57 billion by 2015.
In 2010, China’s textile industry processed 41.3 million tons of fiber and accounted for 52-54 percent of the world’s total production.