LET’S TALK SHOP

As we enter the third decade of fast fashion, environmental journalist Lucy Siegle assesses the real price of our destructive appetite for trends.

As we enter the third decade of fast fashion, environmental journalist Lucy Siegle assesses the real price of our destructive appetite for trends.

Iam sitting in an imperfect circle on swept ground observing six women sorting dumped clothing, and it’s so much more fun than I expected. Firstly there’s the skill of it. The recyclers can whip through a clothing heap in minutes. They separate out strands of colour and fibre, winding the trickier items like a glossy pair of tights around their arm as they liberate the sleeves of a jumper from the ball. After some frenetic pulling apart, the clothes appear as neat (and sometimes folded) piles separated into colour and fibre. It’s not altogether clear how they create order from chaos.

Panipat, located about 90 kilometres north of Delhi, is also known as the cast-off capital of the world, a soubriquet taken from the daily influx of preloved clothing that flows here from rich, developed countries. I ask the translator to intervene: “Can the ladies slow down and look at the garments?” He replies that the boss won’t like them slowing down their work. Eventually he barks across to the women. Like someone running fast, it takes a moment for them to wind the pace down. “Now I’d like to know their impressions of these clothes.”

Their responses are unexpectedly uproarious. Bimala, at 16 the youngest of the group, holds up a pair of bejewelled briefs. As the rhinestones glint in the sunlight she proffers them to her colleagues who fall about helpless with laughter. Eventually the translator informs me with exaggerated seriousness: “They say: ‘Why would people wear such highly decorated garments under their clothes?” Next Bimala extrudes a glossy stocking from the pile with great fanfare – cue more laughing. A pair of skinny jeans with diamanté detailing has Bimala doubled over with mirth, and so it goes on.

But there’s a pause as Bimala holds a white blouse in her hands and examines a tide line caused by foundation makeup. She frowns. “She says: ‘I think these people have no water, they cannot wash their clothes,’” reports the translator. To these women on the margins, whipping through our cast-off clothing, there is simply no other explanation.

I feel the colour rising in my cheeks in embarrassment, on behalf of the Western consumer.

We’re now entering our third decade of fast fashion, an accelerated system of clothing production that promises a quick turnaround of trends at low prices and is reliant on a supply chain that snakes through some of the lowest wage economies on Earth. Many of us have never known any other model of production, or way of getting dressed.

More than 10 years ago, I began tracking this phenomenon, intrigued as it began to pick up even greater speed. I travelled to the hot spots of textile production, responsible for most of the contents of our wardrobes, namely Dhaka in Bangladesh. I followed the waste too, including my visit to northern India. I interrogated the environmental footprint (the amount of natural resources that went into system and the likely negative output in terms of waste and pollution). I discovered that major brands were not altogether sure where their inventory was coming from, so I prodded and poked away. In my 2011 book, To Die For:

Is Fashion Wearing Out the World?, I estimated that around 80 billion new garments are produced freshly (that is from virgin materials) each year. That figure now looks conservative.

At times I felt like Alice falling through a rabbit hole. I discovered that the demand on natural capital from our collective fashion habit is nothing short of spectacular. Producing a single pair of jeans can take more than 10,000 litres of water, one fifth of a person’s entire personal water consumption in a lifetime. And if we’re not clad in cotton, we are usually to be found in a form of polyester. According to the World Resources Institute, world polyester production releases greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 185 coal-fired power plants every year.

The demands on human capital are just as extensive. When the Rana Plaza factory complex collapsed in 2013 in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh and an engine of production for fast fashion brands supplying Western markets, 1133 garment workers were killed. Many people could simply not compute that an industry lavishly associated with glamour was one that had caused the world’s biggest ever industrial-scale ‘accident’.

But even loss of life on that scale could not slow down production, or apparently consumption. In Australia, fast fashion has taken a particularly firm grip. Australians now carry the ignominious title of being the second biggest per capita consumers of new clothing and other textiles in the world (just falling behind US consumers). Each gets through an average of 27 kilograms of fashion and textiles every year. Retail analysis from 2017 showed 1.7 million Australians bought at least one pair of jeans every four months. Unsurprisingly, this adds up to a ferocious waste habit: six tonnes of textiles (mostly clothing) is dumped into landfill every 10 minutes.

For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. If not the equal to fast fashion in terms of popularity, over the last two decades sustainable fashion has evolved as the key oppositional fashion force.

Next month in London, when the Victoria and Albert museum unveils the major new exhibition Fashioned from Nature, it will pay tribute to sustainable fashion, showing seminal pieces that mark the transition from trend to movement.

But what exactly does sustainable mean? There is no agreed or legal definition. There’s also a surfeit of names and badges: ethical fashion, slow, zero waste, organic, fair trade are all terms that can be applied to apparel that lets the planet set the limits and produces decent livelihoods for workers throughout the supply chain (mainly young women).

In truth, this movement has not always hit the high notes. A plethora of tie-dye drawstring trousers and rainbow motifs (on everything) typified the do-gooder garments of the 1980s. Besides, as consumers we were confused. When the European-based chain store C&A attempted to introduce organic cotton to its rails shoppers were puzzled: ‘Can you eat these T-shirts?’, some were heard to ask.

It was left to Katharine Hamnett, the queen of the 1980s block-print slogan T-shirt such as ‘Choose Life’, to work it out. Horrified by the number of deaths in the cotton supply chain for clothing from pesticide poisonings, especially in rural Indian communities, she raised the

Six tonnes of textiles (mostly clothing) is effectively dumped into landfill every 10 minutes

I buy little and often and prioritise fair trade and organic cotton basics and ethical labels

alarm on toxic chemicals and spent 10 years developing her own uncompromising clean cotton supply chain to be used in future collections. But crucially, she also questioned eco design cliches. “I started out asking why organic and ethical should mean disgusting porridge-coloured fabrics,” she said. The design world got the message.

The landscape of sustainable brands that prioritise a high aesthetic with their ethics is developing fast. Crucially, it offers a range of fashion that has found a way to disrupt the status quo. I have a weakness for sustainable labels that design out waste from the start, using zero waste pattern cutting and overstock fabrics (destined for landfill). This is a challenge to the fact that three to five per cent of every factory’s inventory becomes waste.

I am also passionate about the artisan fashion trades. While most of the pieces in our wardrobes are assembled in factory set-ups, behind the scenes an estimated 60 per cent of global fashion is made by homeworkers in the informal trades, and hand-worked. When a brand moves to tell the story of artisan producers, many of whom work with traditional crafts and skills, then I’m likely to fall in love with a piece, like jackets made from woven ikat, a process used in southern India, and the DFYNorm platform (a fashion brand based on fairness and to workers and the planet.) It is impossible to mass-produce ikat woven fabric, as no two garments are exactly the same, and to me, that’s the appeal.

Similarly I fell for Birdsong London, an e-commerce platform run entirely to advantage women producers and gender empowerment. Women who make Birdsong products are paid a living wage. Between 30 to 50 per cent of the sale price goes to the makers. This is unusual. The average garment worker receives just 0.6 per cent from a T-shirt.

The truth is that sustainable fashion is rarely an analogue of mainstream, just a version made in a ‘good’ factory from organic cotton. It’s an entirely different method of production and intent.

On my desk I have a framed black and white picture by the seminal female fashion photographer Lillian Bassman of a woman looking out of the window of the train, titled, More Fashion Mileage Per Dress. That pretty much sums up my approach to fashion consumption these days. I buy little and often and prioritise fair trade and organic cotton basics and ethical labels despite the higher price – justified by working out the price per wear. Should I find a great quality vintage piece in my size I’ll buy it as long as it’s in a natural fibre. I wear my clothes year in year out, but I wear them hard.

My friend jokes that shopping for clothes with me reminds her of the way her Neapolitan Nonna used to buy fruit at the market. She would prod and poke and sniff peaches and melons in the same way that I interrogate the fibre, the seams, the labels. I bought an old microscope for home, and have been known to spend time looking at fibres until the small hours. It’s incredible how much plastic fibre is in cheap cashmere.

If my strategy for getting dressed sounds pricey, elitist, bananas, I understand. I can only tell you that this is a very personal choice.

Many struggle to break away from fast fashion. The big brands offer familiar territory where we feel at home (as Dorothy said, there’s no place like home) and a sense of security. Many will argue it’s all they can afford.

And this may well be the strangest thing I’ll say in this piece but here goes: I understand if you buy from mainstream brands for these reasons. All I ask that is that you buy fast fashion for slow reasons: to keep in your wardrobe for as long as possible and commit to wearing until it’s fit for dusters. But, above all, avoid their green and ethical collection. Yes, really. I implore you not to buy in.

From recycling schemes that promise to turn old garments into new, to extravagant company sustainability reports, bankrolling conferences and pilot schemes on workers rights and collections fashioned from sustainable materials, the biggest of the fast fashion brands are keen to show us that they are not just cleaning up, but leading the charge. But behind the scenes the business model remains intact, predicated on producing ever-increasing volumes at lower prices and faster speeds. Meanwhile, fast fashion brands set their own timetable for reform and their own goals to reach. I’m not the first to make this observation, but the global fashion industry is being allowed to mark its own homework.

The highly rated design activist and UK academic Professor Kate Fletcher has had enough of this type of obfuscation. She recently called for profound change in the fashion system, which she labels “the agenda of our times”.

“It is nothing short of profound systems-level stuff; a new framework of concepts, results, and procedures in which all subsequent fashion work will be structured. It is built on a new set of values. It describes new purpose, new ways of distributing power and benefit, new economic models, a changing fashion culture, fewer pieces …”

It is tempting to play the blame game. And today’s hyper-responsive consumers, especially YouTube ‘shopping haulers’, as they proffer their latest spoils to camera, are typically in the frame. But that is unfair. In reality the seeds of fast fashion were sown as far back as the 18th century, with the invention of the Spinning Jenny, a machine that sped up cotton yarn production and enabled the first ready-to-wear garments. By the 1840s, the well-heeled were writing angst-ridden letters to newspapers, bemoaning the way their feckless housemaids spent meagre wages on multiple new dresses. (Inevitably, a weakness of character among lowerclass women was blamed for such excess – seen as unvirtuous – and foolishness.) In truth, each generation just responds to the triggers and opportunities to consume that the industry presents it with.

This may suggest that we’re doomed. If a destructive pattern of behaviour was inculcated so long ago, surely we have no chance of changing? But being a consumer should not define us. In fact, we are active global citizens with far more agency that we recognise. And it’s when we collaborate that profound change can really take off.

Three years ago, a group of more than 800 Dutch citizens began the process of suing their own government on the grounds that it had knowingly contributed to a breach of the two degrees Celsius maximum target for global warming. Finally the courts ruled in their favour, ordering the Dutch government to take action to cut greenhouse gas emissions by a quarter within five years. This was the first time in history that a court had ordered a state to protect its citizens from climate change.

It was a stunning victory, described as “remarkable” and as having “broken through a political and psychological threshold” by environmental lawyer James Thornton. But notable to me is the fact that this was a breakthrough that did not require anybody to buy different socks, or from an ethical capsule collection or to read through endless reports to try and work out which brand was less bad. No, this victory rested on active citizens coming together as activists (not consumers!) to give change an almighty shove. Now, wouldn’t that be amazing if one day we could do that on behalf of fashion?