The Edit is our weekly show, where Social Editor Grace Robinson quizzes editor-in-chief Ben Hanson on some of the most significant fashion and technology stories from the past seven days.
This week, Grace and Ben discuss the PHP security flaw and Google Cloud outage through the lens of fashion’s relationship with the web, The Fabricant’s generative tech packs and sewing-pattern tools, and the general state of clothing repair and resale.
This show is available in video format, embedded above, as well as audio, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
For deeper interviews with brand and technology leaders, our prestige interview show releases on Thursdays everywhere you find podcasts – and will be coming to YouTube soon.
Subscribers to our mailing list will receive notifications for both shows.
Grace Robinson: So welcome to The Edit from The Interline, the show where we run a quickfire analysis on our pick of the most important fashion and beauty technology stories from the last seven days. I’m Grace, the Social Editor, and I’m joined by Ben, the Editor-in-Chief. And together, we have a little bit less time today because we do have fewer stories this week, but we’re still going to talk about all of the interesting stories that really stood out to us. So, Ben, how are you doing?
Ben Hanson: I’m jet-lagged is how I’m doing, which is also the reason that we’re running a slightly truncated edition of this. So I was in Colorado from Sunday to yesterday, and got back quite late in the game yesterday, so you and I only had a chance to float a few stories across our collected desk instead of five. So a slightly truncated version this week. We’re going to be doing three rather than five headlines. But I am here in spirit even if I’m not 100% here in body.
What the PHP vulnerability means for fashion
Grace Robinson: I know we’ve covered cybersecurity a couple of times already, but we couldn’t really ignore it this week since it became a headline in the news in a way I don’t think we’ve seen before. So I’ll let you fill in the more technical details, but in essence there was a long-dormant vulnerability in PHP, which is a scripting language that’s used in a lot of web applications. And some estimates that I’ve seen are that it’s part of something like 70% of the web.
Now it sounds like AI had something to do with the discovery of this vulnerability or the development of exploits for it. And this story was absolutely everywhere this week; it was the top headline on the BBC and other news sources. So tell me what happened here and what you think the implications are for fashion.
I’ve seen some government websites and other big news sites being taken down as a preventative measure, but I don’t think we’ve seen any brands or retailers doing that. We did also see payments and logistics being disrupted in separate outages for Google Cloud earlier this week as well. So let me know what you think.
Ben Hanson: Yes. I know we’ve talked about cybersecurity a few times here. We did it last week around physical retail premises. We did it in the wake of the Hugging Face attack. This is the first time, I think, that it’s percolated into the very top of the mainstream news. And while it didn’t directly implicate fashion and retail in the sense that no brands and no retailers took their websites down, it did impact a lot of government services, a lot of other places. I’m talking specifically about the PHP exploit here.
Then earlier in the week, a Google Cloud outage was behind Revolut, the fintech slash just recently accredited bank, prominent here in the UK, along with shipping and a bunch of payment services and things being taken offline by Google Cloud. I’ll put a pin in the Google Cloud one because I think that’s a fairly everyday outage of the type that we’ve seen before, where you have Amazon Web Services, US East 1 or whatever it is, that famous data centre that when it goes down, takes down huge amounts of the web and web applications like Spotify and things like that. We’ve seen that before.
What we haven’t seen before is something on the scale and sudden severity and accelerated patching timeline of this PHP thing. So Satya Nadella, who’s the CEO of Microsoft, said this is something that we’ve not seen in a very, very, very long time. It’s not as long-running as Y2K, but a very similar scale of severity and action needing to be taken. Now it doesn’t seem like it led to any big issues or any big breaches or any big hacks, but that’s going to take time to play out here.
So PHP, correctly, yes, is the scripting language behind a lot of web applications, primarily content management systems and things like that. There is PHP mixed into a bunch of other stuff, but WordPress runs a huge volume of the web. The Interline runs on WordPress, and PHP is the main scripting and execution language behind that.
The vulnerability, apparently, has existed in PHP for ten, twenty years potentially. The actual ability to exploit it seems to have been expedited. It seems to have been discovered by AI, by different companies. OpenAI took credit for it. Google took credit for it. A company called Wiz, which is part of Google, took credit for it as well. So you have something that’s existed and been an issue for ten to twenty years, hasn’t been able to be exploited. Suddenly, thanks to AI, it’s flagged, discovered, patched within the space of 24 to 48 hours, it seems to have been.
Within that 24 to 48-hour window, though, the standing advice from governments, a lot of web infrastructure providers and things was to take websites offline. So let’s just say, okay, close this down for 24 to 48 hours until the patch is ready and deployed. In the interim, people use Cloudflare and some other things to try and mitigate what Cloudflare says are millions of attempts to break into websites from this. A massive severity issue with full remote code execution on people’s servers and stuff, like the highest grade of cybersecurity risks that there can possibly be.
This is a testament to a couple of things, I think, for fashion. One, it’s lucky that Shopify, for instance, or these kinds of things don’t incorporate a huge amount of PHP because nobody needed to take down their ecommerce storefronts. Nobody needed to take down their public-facing Shopify pages or what have you. But this is a vulnerability and an exploit that has to be patched server by server. So if you work with a big infrastructure provider for your website content, then you’re fairly safe in the sense that they will have already done the patching for you. That was the case at The Interline. We used Cloudflare as an interim solution, and then the patch was deployed by our distributed cloud provider within 24 hours.
If you are the kind of company that is developing your own applications, which is increasingly true now: when I was in America this week, I spoke to a few brands who were like, we’ve reduced our reliance on software provided by third parties for things like market analytics, competitive analysis, those kinds of things, for our own homegrown setups and scrapers and what have you.
If you have that setup where you’ve developed something for yourself, you’ve developed a tool, the big issue that people have been saying for a while with these homegrown or semi-vibe-coded setups is they’re hard to maintain. And that feels really abstract when you’re putting something into place, when you’re like, okay, I’ve developed a platform that does all my market analytics stuff for me. I’ve developed a platform that replaces our CRM. I’ve developed a platform that replaces part of our PLM or something along those lines. How hard can it be to maintain? I have a fixed number of users. I have a fixed set of activities. I know the volume of data that’s going to be passing through it at any given time, but surely it’s fine.
It’s fine until you hit a scenario like this, where if any measure of that is built on PHP in this case, or it could be Rust in the future. It could be Ruby on Rails, which Shopify is primarily built on. There’s nothing fundamentally different about those except for Rust is a little bit more secure in that respect. All of a sudden, you have full responsibility to patch this yourself. You have full responsibility to close this yourself.
So a very weird week in cybersecurity in the sense that the Google Cloud outage is just a reminder of how reliant everybody is on centralised infrastructure for the web. And then you have the PHP thing, a massive story because it can’t just be fixed in one central location. If it was an issue with Shopify, if it was an issue with Visa or what have you, it would be fixed in one central place. What you have is an issue in an underlying language discovered and exploited by AI that has to be fixed in each individual instance.
And as AI cybersecurity issues become more prevalent and as brands develop more of their own homegrown solutions without necessarily understanding the full architecture underneath them, you’re going to see more of this start to happen. And I’ve seen people say, you know, this is the start of a terrifying era for the web in general, where exploits are discovered and exploited actively within a matter of hours, and you have this tiny window to defend yourself against them. I don’t know how true that is, but this is definitely the biggest instance of this that I’ve seen in the news headlines in a long, long time, and it’s something that should be a further reminder for fashion about the importance of cybersecurity.
Can generative tools close fashion’s skills gap?
Grace Robinson: Next, we have to talk about a really interesting development from The Fabricant, who I know you’ve spoken to recently. Now, we all know that there is this technical skill gap in the industry and this has meant that European textile manufacturing has shrunk significantly in recent years. However, in collaboration with London College of Fashion, The Fabricant has developed two new digital tools that could prevent things from shrinking further.
Now the first is an AI-powered tech pack tool, and this has been developed in collaboration with a handful of real garment manufacturers. The second is a sewing pattern tool and this essentially converts a sketch or a photograph of an existing garment into a 2D pattern. Now both help to put pattern-making back within reach of small manufacturers and they also are trying to help with this technical skill gap. Now I wanted to get your take on what this story means to you, and also if you think that this is a good approach or not to this issue.
Ben Hanson: Yeah. You’re right. So I have spoken to The Fabricant a couple of times, actually. Their CTO, Marco Marchesi, was on my other show, the weekly interview show, a couple of weeks ago. And we did start to talk about some of this, like AI pattern-making, AI tech pack creation. We didn’t go super deep into it. And then Adriana Pereira, who is one of their co-founders, she was on our Mailroom episode a little while ago talking about AI-native brands. These are people who know what they’re talking about. These are people who understand the industry very well.
I’ve not seen this solution in action. Neither have I yet been able to pin down a demo from companies like Fermat or FLORA. The kinds of organisations that are saying, okay, we’ve done a lot of generative work in visualisation and in image creation. We now think we have the foundations to go and apply our learnings around AI and our industry knowledge to generative pattern-making to some extent and generative tech pack development. But this seems to be something that the industry is converging on. We’ve talked about this before. It seems like that’s the next step for those workspaces.
The challenge is going to be that I don’t think there’s much about image generation that teaches you anything about making. And neither is the other way particularly true. These are two fairly isolated worlds from one another. When we talked about Apogy from Lectra the week before last, I think it was, that’s a bit more grounded in this in the sense that Lectra is a company that spent a lot of time working on product design, development and direct production. So they have, in theory, a stronger foundation to build some of that stuff on.
Now there’s two parts to this. One I agree with and one I’m not sure about. The one I agree with is traditional tech pack creation, which is done in or around PLM and involves assembling manual… I mean, a tech pack, technical specification, it’s a PDF that captures all of the essential information you need to produce a product. It’s the equivalent to an IKEA manual for making a garment. Points of measure, sewing operations, materials, colours, and so on.
In a lot of traditional setups, tech packs require rework at the factory. So when The Fabricant talk about manual tech packs, unstandardised spreadsheets, iterative sampling processes, I’m using words from some of the coverage here, they’re not wrong. That is a process that happens. Brands put together tech packs, they send them to their manufacturing partners, and their manufacturing partners end up having to either rework them, reverse engineer them, recreate them from scratch, which is what leads to the average sample iterations per style being like three or four at the very least, because it’s not an exact science, and you started from an inexact brief.
Now anything that could do something about that, like 3D, digital product creation, lots of tools have been pointed at shortening that gap, removing iterative samples, and getting everybody talking the same language between creative and technical design. I just don’t know that AI is going to solve it. Again, I haven’t seen the demos. I need to see that. I’m not 100% convinced at this point in time, but I remain open-minded.
What I’m not sure about is what this does for skills because the reason that tech packs, patterns, and things get battered backwards and forwards between the different actors in the supply chain is that the skills to do these things are rare and hard to acquire and highly specialised. Like, pattern-making is a very scientific and artistic discipline that only a few people learn nowadays, and only a few people really have. That’s true at the brand end, and it’s true at the supplier end as well.
Way more brands than you think don’t do their own patterns anyway. They don’t own the patterns. They don’t own the blocks. They rely on their manufacturing partners, vendors, to do that work for them. I don’t know that generating this stuff does anything to bring skills back. Again, maybe I’m missing something here, and the generation is a way of teaching pattern-making to a new generation or to an existing generation.
This to me feels like an instance where you’re automating something because there aren’t enough people to do it at the volume and to the degree of accuracy that you need. Great. Interesting use case for automation. I hope it plays out. The gap for me is I don’t know what that does to then encourage a new generation of pattern makers. I don’t know what that does to close the knowledge gap or close the skills gap.
It closes the execution gap, hopefully, in the sense that if a generated pattern is right first time or if a generated tech pack is right first time, you don’t have to sample as much. I don’t know how anybody ends up knowing more about the art and the science of either of those things in the process. To me, it seems like you end up knowing less. But time will tell, I think.
What will make clothing repair more common?
Grace Robinson: Finally, we have to talk about a report done by Circular Fashion News on clothing repair. The report explains that there’s been an increase in searches for repair services in recent years and this is because consumers have become more interested in fabric and quality and materials.
Also at the same time different brands like Arc’teryx and Burberry and Barbour are investing a lot more in their personal repair services. And also there’s a new rule in France that could mean that repairing clothes could become cheaper and therefore more accessible.
Now, this is all super positive on the surface, but as we’ve spoken about in previous weeks, the fact that a lot of people can only buy super fast fashion in the first place means that actually repair services aren’t really going to be utilised all that much because there’s no real point in them. So I wanted to get your take on this report and this story, and if you think repairing clothes is going to become more common.
Ben Hanson: And so I’ll bat this one back to you again. As somebody who shops way more than I do, do you make use of repair services? You’re also a prime candidate in the sense that you live in London. So a lot of this type, like Save Your Wardrobe, these kinds of services, they work best in big cities where there are service partners who can go and deliver on repair and so on. The fact that Patagonia and companies like that have their own repair services is a testament to the fact that there isn’t a big repair network out there. How does this play out for you?
Grace Robinson: So repairing my clothes is always something that I’ve had on my to-do list, and I really want to be more intentional with it. But I’ve only actually started doing it in recent years, and I’ve only ever done it with more expensive pieces. So I have some jeans which are a bit more expensive and they had a hole in the bottom from walking around and I’m getting those repaired. But I definitely don’t think I would care to do it for a cheaper piece, but it is something I want to do more of.
Ben Hanson: Yeah. I mean, I would tend to agree. I’ve not had much stuff repaired except for a pair of Red Wing boots a few years ago, and I had them resoled because the rubber on the sole had worn away. The rest of the boot was great, still timeless style. And so I had that done. Two, three hundred quid a pair of boots, you know, they’re not cheap. I wouldn’t have a pair of Zara trousers repaired, for instance, I could say.
And I think that that behavioural pattern does seem to show up over and over and over again, which I think puts a burden on the companies that sell cheaper items to understand that their consumer is going to recycle and hand back more than they’re ever going to get invested in repair. I think the brands understand that. I think the technology and service providers catering to this sector also do seem to understand that. They seem to understand that the market is higher mid-market, premium and luxury upwards is where repair tends to show up.
I do think it’s a bigger factor. I think the resale market is going to be the primary driver of this. So when I was on stage in Paris at Première Vision, I talked to Hannah Crump, who has also been on the show here before from Business of Fashion, and she was talking about just the growth of the resale market in general. The fact that financial incentives are usually a driver for a lot of this kind of behavioural change. Right?
And from that report that you put across our desk, the key bit that jumps out at me was that repair is valuable if what you intend to do is resell the item afterwards. So I think I plucked out a quick statistic. Repair, inspection, washing is something like €22 per item, and then each item resold for €73. This is all done on average. The majority of them, like close to 98%, resold for more than it cost to repair them, which is, again, like, it tends to be logical in most scenarios that we’re used to.
If you own a car and you want to resell the car, you better keep it maintained. You own a house, you want to resell the house, it’s in your interest to keep it maintained and up to code. So I think the financial incentives and everything there makes sense. It’s the resale market that’s going to drive repair for me, I think, more than individual people like you or I saying, I’ve spent a lot of money on this particular piece, and I want to keep it, and therefore, I’m going to invest from that point of view.
Now I found this report a little bit complicated to read because it’s a Substack with a PDF, and the PDF is made up of sources from other Substacks and PDFs and reports which are themselves synthesised from other… There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. It’s clear that there’s a dearth of first-party data here when it comes to how repair factors into what the brand gets out of this and what the consumer gets out of this.
Because the resale market that we’ve just talked about is primarily going to go through channels like Vestiaire Collective and so on, if we’re talking about high-value items. Or for lower-value items, it’s going to go through Vinted and eBay and what have you. The brands are not the primary beneficiaries of that higher value that we talked about there. It’s the consumer that is. It’s the impact on the brand that I think I would like to understand a bit more about here.
Luckily, you and I are in a position where we can go get some first-party sources. So I think we bring Hasna or Mehdi from Save Your Wardrobe and some other folks onto the show at some point soon, and we quiz them about the brand impact of all of this because there clearly is one, and I just don’t think it’s properly documented.
But, yeah, I think repair is on the rise. I think I will probably do more of it over time, but the primary behavioural change is going to come from people who want to secure high-value items as a store of value that they then transfer afterwards, it seems like to me. I don’t know. Do you sell clothes on afterwards? I’m curious.
Grace Robinson: I used to do it a lot more. I think I do it less now because I try to buy less and buy better, so I buy things with the intention of keeping it. But I can totally get why people would maintain more expensive pieces to one day sell.
Ben Hanson: I’m just lazy is the reason I don’t sell things on. I think that’s the primary reason. Maybe I am a target for one of those wardrobe quantification apps, which will help understand what you have and, at some point, assign value to it.
