All the rage
The fashion industry has faced accusations of wastefulness, exploitation and environmental harm in recent years. Can it turn things around?
The fashion industry has faced accusations of wastefulness, exploitation and environmental harm in recent years.
Can it turn things around?
If the world stopped buying new clothes, that would do more to mitigate climate change than if we stopped all air travel and suspended shipping. Patently, this is not going to happen at Christmas and during summer, but fast fashion’s effect on greenhouse-gas emissions and environmental degradation is gradually dawning on consumers.
Those anxious about throwaway fashion’s depredations have waited in vain for a David Attenborough albatross moment – a seabird filmed trying to feed its chick with a Prada sequin, or a fragment of last season’s Crocs choking a dolphin. Curiously, it was a trip by Melania Trump to Texas last year that came closest to a mind-focusing cut-through. It wasn’t a statement she intended to make, but her choice of a Zara-brand jacket emblazoned “I really don’t care, do U?” inadvertently proved a priceless conversation starter.
The inexpensive jacket is nothing to a wealthy American president’s wife, but would have taken more than 3000 litres of water, a dollop of noxious chemicals, not to mention labour priced at well below anyone’s idea of a living wage, to reach the First Lady. It was one of 450 million similarly unsustainable garments Zara pumped out that year.
Before anyone scoffs, “Hah! Those Trumps, eh?” it’s the same deal when any old Joe buys a cheap T-shirt. That’s 2700 litres of water, plus chemicals, for that scrap of cotton.
As for the latest sensation, the €1 bikini, Paris-based apparel-industry writer
Dana Thomas speculates, “Whoever physically sewed that bikini would be lucky to have been paid 1c.”
Thomas’ profile of the fashion industry, Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes, is far from a reductive call to get us all into organic boiler suits.
It’s packed with growers, manufacturers and designers around the world who are
finding sustainable – and profitable – ways to produce quality, durable high-fashion clothing, and a slew of pioneers of new green and recycled fabric.
But considering the scale and relentless growth of super-fast-fashion labels such as Zara that aren’t sustainable producers, the green fashion-forward movement looks far from achieving an industry tipping point.
THE HUMAN COST
Worldwide, the average consumer bought 60% more garments in 2014 than in 2000, but kept them for half as long, according to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. “Fast fashion is conditioning shoppers that it’s normal to burn through clothes,” Thomas says. She regrets that’s still an accelerating trend.
Social media has its part to play, with a UK
survey last year finding one in 10 women would throw away a clothing item after being pictured online in it three times.
Fast-fashion trailblazer ASOS has had a profit slump this year, not because demand for its clothes is falling but because it’s growing so fast it has had logistical problems keeping up. But there have been some resonant jolts. That British luxury fashion house Burberry was found to have incinerated $55 million worth of unsold products in 2017 was a prime motivator for French President Emmanuel Macron’s G7 pact to eliminate waste.
From being a laggard on green issues, France this year decided to ban all product destruction within four years, after taking stock of the millions of euros worth of cosmetics, footwear and luxury goods being dumped and destroyed to protect markets. Companies can either sell, donate or recycle them, but dumping or destroying will attract steep fines and, just as damaging, terrible publicity. Staggeringly, France has calculated that just this one new restriction will cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 250,000 tonnes a year, equivalent to running 125,000 petrol cars.
It wants other big countries to sign up, and is also trying to broker a coalition of leading brands to commit to a code of sustainable practice. Other countries, including Britain, are mulling a per-garment tax to put towards waste reduction and sustainability.
Moral imperatives had been building up along with environmental ones, piqued by mass tragedies such as the 2013 garmentfactory collapse in the Bangladeshi capital,
Dhaka, that killed 1134 people and, just this week, the deaths of 43 workers in a fire in a bag factory in the Indian capital, Delhi.
The world has begun asking: do companies know workers are making their products in often deplorable and lethal conditions, and if not, why not?
A further quasi-albatross moment came when the charity Barnardo’s commissioned a survey on clothing consumption that found Britons bought 50 million new clothing items in a single summer season that they wore only once.
A STELLA CAST
Obviously, fashion isn’t the only throwaway threat to the environment. The Global E-waste Monitor estimates developed countries junk electronic goods at a shocking rate – Britons are the worst, at 24.5kg per person, Australians dump 23.6kg and Americans 20kg.
European politicians have begun to consider legislation requiring all electronics and appliances to be repairable. For information technology, where regular “upgrades” and instant obsolescence are fundamental to the business model, this could be tricky.
But Thomas writes in Fashionopolis that it’s possible fashion, among the most conspicuous of the consumer goods we waste, could lead the way in climate-change mitigation. It’s a high-vis industry, and it’s easy for consumers to get how its dots are joined – from displaced rainforest and habitat, chemical pollution, voracious water use, labour exploitation … to that $5 T-shirt and €1 bikini.
In June, increasingly influential industry-leadership forum Global Fashion Agenda convened a Davos-style summit on sustainability for the rag trade in Copenhagen. There, the difficulties of greening the supply chain without going broke were aired. With a sense of inevitability, attendees discussed “pre-competitive collaboration”, admitting it was time to open up about supply chain effects. There was dawning recognition that if fashion giants continued to drag their Christian Louboutins, they
“Fast fashion is conditioning shoppers that it’s normal to burn through clothes.”