Eileen Fisher Wants Clothes Back When You’re Done
It’s back-to-school time, which means the advertisements are everywhere: Buy! Buy! Buy! Pencils and gadgets. Backpacks and sneakers. And, yes, heaps and piles of brand-new clothes.
But this year, those ads are running up against another powerful message, resounding from such big brands as
Eileen Fisher and Patagonia, along with a growing cadre of smaller thrift and resale shops: Let’s make do, reuse, recycle.
Fast-fashion trends, driven by consumer taste and innovations in textile manufacturing, have overstuffed American closets. Clothes shopping has emerged as a weekly habit, and people are constantly clearing out and buying new.
It’s a big problem. In 2019, Americans will throw away more than 35 billion pounds of textiles, according to the Council for Textile Recycling. That’s nearly double the number from 1999.
It’s more important than ever, environmental advocates say, to keep that clothing out of landfills.
“We’re trying to take responsibility,” said Eileen Fisher, whose eponymous fashion brand buys back its garments from customers at $5 each and reworks the material into new merchandise, under its Renew brand, at factories in Irvington, New York, and Seattle. It bought back its millionth garment in May. Fisher lives near the former printing warehouse in Irvington that the company converted into its Renew sewing factory. She walked through its clothing-intake center, wearing a gray and white kimono coat made from patches of Eileen Fisher clothing scraps that were turned into felt.
At an early stage in her 34-year-old company, Fisher said she and her co-workers grew alarmed at the environmental toll of clothing manufacturing — from depleted farm fields to dye pollution in rivers. Her company’s reuse efforts have expanded into its Circular by Design mission, in which today’s clothes become tomorrow’s raw materials.
“We need to move from a use-and-discard economy to a reuse economy,” she said. Its remade clothes are specially tagged and sold in Eileen Fisher stores, in pop-up shops and in several Nordstrom locations. A $250 jacket gets a second life at $90. “As manufacturers, we want to treasure the resources we’re using, to make clothing that lasts and can be repurposed.”
Patagonia, the Ventura, California-based outdoor clothier, has for decades been a leader in this closed-loop system of manufacturing and reuse.
“As individuals, the best thing we can do for the planet is to buy less and keep our stuff in use longer,” said Rose Marcario, Patagonia’s president and CEO. “The simple act of extending the life of our garments through proper care and repair reduces the need to buy more over time.”
It’s estimated that the global textile industry uses 98 million tons of resources a year, chiefly water and energy. Fabric dyes have polluted major rivers in India, Bangladesh, China and other countries.
One vision of the future works like this: Brands manage the products they make after consumers use them. Consumers buy garments with the idea of keeping them as long as possible, and then the brand repairs and resells them. If garments are too damaged to be donated or resold, they will be “upcycled” into new clothing or recycled into fibers. So, for instance, a favorite shirt may one day provide the fiber that insulates a home. Or the fabric of a sofa. A garment might have six or seven life cycles.
“We don’t want sustainability to be our edge,” Fisher said. “We want it to be universal.”