HELLO, YOUR FUTURE WARDROBE IS CALLING
One writer explores the future of fashion – and our closets
FAST-FORWARD TO 2O25. It’s a bright, late-summer morning: rise and shine! Make the bed, tightly tucking in those bionicyarn sheets. A spritz of a shower – no water waste, thank you very much. Then, breakfast: a slug of Soylent, or avocado-CBD smoothie? And now, what to wear? How about Levi’s organic cotton jeans, dyed in natural indigo, with a black belt in biofabricated leather, grown in a lab? A tailored Marks & Spencer men’s suit jacket in a recycled wool that looks as fine as Savile Row cloth; Nike 3D-printed trainers; De Beers synthetic diamond studs; the Baume recycled-aluminium watch, with its upcycled-material strap. A Stella McCartney handbag made from Econyl yarn, a recycled nylon. And out the door, on the bike, and off we go!
This may all sound slightly sci-fi, but, in fact, most of these sustainable clothes and accessories exist on a small scale today. And if fashion has its way, they will fill our wardrobes in less than a decade. ‘The way we consume fashion will be different,’ H&M’s head of sustainability Anna Gedda tells me. ‘It has to be, because we’re running out of resources.’
To be more sustainable, corporations such as Kering, the luxury group that owns Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and Alexander McQueen, has set up an EP&L (environmental profit and loss account) to analyse where the negative ecological impacts are and see how best to correct them. This has led to supply chains being restructured worldwide, as well as setting deadlines for improvements. H&M aims to use only sustainable or recycled materials by 2O3O. By next year, Marks & Spencer will source all its cotton from sustainable sources – a big move, says the British retailer’s head of product development and innovation Paschal Little, ‘since we use cotton more than anything else’. And by 2O2O, Theory plans to use only sustainable fabrics, such as Supima cotton, Tasmanian wool or Forest Stewardship Council-certified triacetate (a popular synthetic fabric), with as much supply chain traceability information as possible. ‘In ten years, the fibres, the buttons, the labels, the shoulder pads, the inner components of the garment – we want that all to be sustainable,’ said its senior vice president of manufacturing and sustainability Wendy Waugh.
More intriguing – and sexy – however, is the technology that will reinvent what we think of as clothing. Take Levi’s project with the Seattle-based textile start-up Evrnu, for example.
In 2O16, the duo created the world’s first jeans made of a fibre derived from five recycled cotton T-shirts. This renewable fibre not only converts clothing waste into new cloth, it also uses 98% less water than the traditional cotton process. Cotton is one of agriculture’s most thirsty crops, requiring a staggering 2O,OOO litres of water to produce just one kilo – the amount needed to make one pair of jeans.
‘Evrnu is an industrial miracle,’ Paul Dillinger, the head of global product innovation for Levi Strauss & Co, tells me proudly. ‘Now we have viable garments with both the same strength properties and wearer experience as conventional cotton. We haven’t run it to market yet because it is a research and development-intensive process, but we’re thrilled with the progress Evrnu has been making and are just shy of the point where we will introduce it into our broader supply chain as material.’
Many of these initiatives are cooked up at in-house laboratories. Kering opened its Materials Innovation Lab in 2O13 outside Milan. ‘We already have 25O swatches of new fabrics that meet our criteria and can be used by our brands,’ says the group’s chief sustainable officer Marie-Claire Daveu. Richemont, the luxury group that owns Cartier and Chloé, has Microcity, an innovation centre in Switzerland where a team of 5O researchers and technicians explore everything from new metals to digital processes like 3D printing. ‘They have quite a wide scope,’ says Matthew Kilgarriff, Richemont’s director of corporate social responsibility. In April, Gucci opened Artlab, a 37,OOO-square-metre hub outside Florence. Its 800 staff will prototype and sample products in new materials. Near its San Francisco headquarters is Levi’s Eureka Innovation Lab, where the brand finds cleaner, smarter ways to make jeans, such as fading cloth using oxidation rather than chemicals, and distressing with lasers instead of hand-sanding.
Perhaps the greatest shift in production is coming from sailing legend Dame Ellen MacArthur, as she heralds the shift from a linear to a circular apparel economy. She launched the Circular Fibres Initiative at the Copenhagen Fashion Summit in 2O17, encouraging the collaboration needed from fashion- industry heavyweights from Kering to Inditex to reform the textile supply chain, so everything is reused in a continuous cycle. Nike’s chief sustainability officer Hannah Jones explains that, in a circular economy, ‘everything you make can be reborn and reused’.
How will this translate in our wardrobes? ‘What you wear will be made of a by-product, such as vegan leather made from leftover wine products, or fabrics from bio-waste like pineapple peel,’ says Gedda. Or even 1OO% recycled material: Kering and H&M have both invested in Worn Again, a London-based firm developing a way to separate cotton-polyester blends, reprocessing them to a virgin-like state.
‘As the science-fiction writer William Gibson said, “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed,” and that’s what we are seeing,’ says Nike’s Jones. ‘We are putting the future on people. Question is, how do you scale it and change the entire industry? How do you make these the mainstream products of the future?’ That, she says, is what brands are working on. Nike has managed it with its Flyprint running shoe, which has a 3D-printed upper – Kenya’s Eliud Kipchoge ran in a pair of Nike’s Zoom Vaporfly Elite Flyprints when he won the London Marathon in April. As for the idea that pro-environment business practices are loss leaders, Jones says, ‘We discarded that myth long ago. We are investing in growth and in the future.’
There are plenty of other innovations on the horizon, like sewing robots (or ‘sewbots’), which Gedda says will revolutionise manufacturing. Garment workers will be trained to run the machines rather than sew themselves, and in doing so, will be working in cleaner, safer environments. There will be more customisation via software, such as what London’s the Unmade has developed for factory knitting machines, so each sweater produced will be different from the previous one. ‘We will move from supply-driven to demand-driven,’ says Gedda. ‘You won’t have leftover clothes because you won’t produce anything that won’t be sold. Economies of scale will disappear.’
Will artificial intelligence eventually tell us what to put on in the morning? Maybe. What is certain is that while many of this seems exotic now, ‘Given how quickly everything is evolving, in ten years this will all seem normal,’ says Daveu. With a circular economy and lab-generated materials, the idea of more planet-friendly attire is not only pleasing and uplifting, it’s ennobling. Coco Chanel famously said, ‘Fashion comes and goes.’ But in our future, fashion will come around again, and again, and again.
“THE WAY we CONSUME FASHION WILL be DIFFERENT. IT HAS to BE – WE ARE RUNNING OUT of RESOURCES”
“INA CIRCULAR, ECONOMY EVERYTHING you MAKE CAN be REBORN and REUSED”