STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Who are our eco-dollars helping?
IBeing green has never been easier, but in a clothing market saturated with ‘eco-friendly’ options, how do we know for sure who our dollars are helping — or harming? Phoebe Watt investigates sustainable fashion and where the future of enlightened consumerism lies
’d call myself a socially conscious consumer. ‘Buy less, buy better’ is my shopping philosophy, and for the most part, I stick to it. Sometimes, though, an unexpectedly sunny Saturday necessitates an emergency swimwear purchase, which is how I recently found myself walking out of H&M’s newly opened Auckland flagship store with a $25 bikini in one hand and a leaflet on the company’s Garment Collecting Initiative in the other.
‘Together we can close the loop!’ proclaimed the piece of paper I’d picked up at the counter. It spoke of H&M’s commitment to reducing waste. It reminded me to rewear/reuse/recycle my worn-out clothing. It also helpfully let me know that those bags of unwanted garments at the back of my wardrobe could be brought into the store and subsequently processed into raw materials for new products.
Did this make me feel a bit better about the extremely wellpriced pieces of polyester in my carry bag? Not really. But it did prompt me to go home and investigate H&M’s wider sustainability strategy, which is how I found out just how exhaustive it is. I’m talking over 150 pages of content across two websites, covering off everything from supply chain transparency to natural resource management and responsible marketing. It would have taken me a week to read through it all. That’s when I decided to take my hardhitting questions (which were by now plentiful) straight to the source.
“How do you reconcile your commitment to conscious fashion with the fact that, at the end of the day, H&M is a fast-fashion brand?” I emailed H&M’s global head of sustainability, Anna Gedda.
“We don’t at all consider ourselves a fast-fashion company, and don’t encourage a throw-away attitude,” came the reply, which was totally contrary to my perception of the multi-national, multi-billion-dollar Swedish retail giant. “We create garments that have the prerequisites to last a long time.”
It’s a statement that recalls a statistic on the H&M website: 26% of the environmental impact in a garment’s life actually occurs after it has left the store. “That’s why we have the garment collecting programme,” says Anna. “It’s important for companies to take responsibility for the products they offer, not just at the production and selling stages, but when the customer no longer wants it. A circular approach to how fashion is made and enjoyed is the best way to
“We don’t encourage a throw-away attitude. A circular approach to how fashion is made and enjoyed is the best way to combat the negative impacts of consumption”
combat the negative impacts of consumption.” The subtext, of course, is that it’s not just up to the retailer to provide the infrastructure to accept used garments, or to educate the consumer on responsible garment care. It’s also up to the consumer to make use of that infrastructure or information, and to look after their clothes in the first place.
Aweek later I was on the phone with Gosia Piatek, founder and creative director of New Zealand label Kowtow Clothing and champion of ethical, sustainable, fair-trade fashion. Currently based in London, Gosia recalled a conversation she overheard while in line at Australian department store Target. “The woman behind me was like, ‘I love it here, it’s so cheap that I don’t have to wash my kid’s clothes when they get grubby, I can just throw them out and buy new ones.’” To this day, Gosia is incredulous. “I don’t get that way of thinking at all. It’s just so wasteful.”
Wasteful and destructive. Thanks largely to this type of consumer behaviour, the fashion industry is second only to oil as the world’s most environmentally damaging industry. For Gosia, the antidote is humanising the garment manufacturing process from beginning to end. Several years ago, she spent time at Kowtow’s factories in India, documenting what she refers to as the seed-to-garment journey, and she’s now piecing together a followup film that will be released later this year.
“It’s really focused on the craftsmanship this time,” she says. “We want people to understand that it takes a lot of effort to make one garment, and that it’s all done by hand — there’s no such thing as a machine-operated machine. It’s a guy behind the machine, and that’s true whether it’s from Kowtow or H&M or Céline or Margiela.”
How that guy is treated and, for that matter, how the company treats the farmer who grew the cotton the garment is made from, is where things often vary, and Gosia says consumers need to be more clued up about this. She points out that buzzwords like ‘sustainable’, ‘conscious’ and ‘organic’ aren’t regulated in their usage, nor are they interchangeable with words such as ‘ethical’ and ‘fair trade’. “A top that says ‘conscious’ or ‘organic’ could just mean that the cotton hasn’t been sprayed with pesticides. It doesn’t talk about workers’ rights,” she says.
Again, the onus is on consumers to do their research. “People need to look into certifications, and to delve into the roots of a company before they make a purchase. You can’t just trust what’s written on the tag because it could mean anything — or nothing.”
But although Gosia thinks it’s worrying that the language is being diluted by brands guilty of ‘greenwashing’, she’s hopeful that the message isn’t. “At least the conversation is happening. When I started out 10 years ago, people had never heard of organic or fair-trade fashion. They just thought those were labels you’d find in a health-food shop. Now it’s cool.”
And even if it’s only in response to how ‘cool’ it is to be conscious, she says it’s positive that big, corporate brands are getting on board. “They have a real power to communicate the message to the masses.”
This power isn’t lost on H&M. “We, and the rest of the fashion industry, are facing the biggest challenge ever with increasing resource scarcity and a growing global population,” says Anna. “Our engagement makes it possible for us to be part of the solution, instead of just following others.”
“When I started out 10 years ago, people had never heard of organic
or fair-trade fashion. They just thought those were labels you’d find in a health-food shop.
Now it’s cool”
Citing technological innovation as the way forward, Anna explains that H&M is actively working with scientists to speed up the development of new and interesting sustainable materials, including Bionic, which features prominently in its autumn/winter 2017 ‘Conscious Exclusive’ collection. Made from plastic shoreline waste that has been refined into chips and mixed with reclaimed PET bottles, then heated and pulled apart into fibres, spun into yarn and woven into fabric, the revolutionary textile forms the basis of the collection’s plissé dress, which was worn by actress Rooney Mara to the Vanity Fair Oscar party in March. The first time this technology had been used to create a couture garment, the dress cemented H&M as an industry leader as far as educating and inspiring brands and consumers on the potential of sustainable fashion.
“It’s great to be able to show just what’s possible with sustainable materials,” says H&M creative director and head of design, Pernilla Wohlfahrt.
Closer to home, Auckland-based designer Lela Jacobs is setting the standard for sustainable fashion with her zero-waste approach to garment construction — which, as she points out, isn’t just about working with recycled materials. It’s about maximising the amount of cloth used for a single garment and minimising what’s left on the workroom floor. “It doesn’t matter what a garment is made out of if all the offcuts are going straight to the landfill,” she says.
Although it was economic rather than environmental factors that first attracted Lela to zero-waste patternmaking, she says it’s like becoming a vegetarian: “Once you start digging into the issue, you see how many layers there are to it and it snowballs.” And indeed, having just previewed her spring/ summer 2017 collection which, at around 80% zero-waste, is her most ambitious yet, she’s beginning to move into fully fashioned knitwear. “It doesn’t waste any yarn at all because it’s constructed on a knitting machine to exact specs.”
She also talks of someday open-sourcing her patterns online. “Not everyone has $300 to spend on a garment, so it’s about giving people access to a pattern they can buy their own cloth for and make at home,” she says, adding that sustainable fashion shouldn’t only be for the elite.
According to Anna, H&M is on this same wavelength. “The starting point of our sustainability work is the idea that sustainable clothes should not be for just a privileged group. We want to make sure they’re available to everyone, no matter where you live or what your income is.”
Trust Gosia, however, to remind us that even an organic cotton T-shirt from H&M is out of many people’s price range. “It’s definitely still something for the 1% of the population. It’s not the mainstream. We forget that, as Westerners.”
The moral of the story? ‘Buy less, buy better’ is a good rule of thumb. Buy the best you can afford is a valid fallback. But every garment has a true cost, and it’s up to you to find out what that is.