Bright future? Fashion's watershed year as it moves from waste to woke
From Meghan and Harry’s wedding to the Dolce & Gabbana debacle in Shanghai, 2018 was a big year for fashion. But it may also be remembered as the year people finally took notice of the negative environmental and social effects of an industry that’s been allowed to get out of control. And it’s hard to do this without recalling what happened in June, when we learned that Burberry had been burning £28m worth of its clothes, accessories and beauty products to safeguard its brand.
Insiders already knew that H&M was burning excess stock, but to discover that the luxury sector was at it too made many question the industry as a whole. The same month, Mary Creagh, who chairs the Commons environmental audit committee, announced she would be investigating the sustainability of the fashion industry.
She said alarm bells were ringing about the fast-growing online-only retail sector against a backdrop of the global ecological emergency. “Lowquality £5 dresses aimed at young people are said to be made by workers on illegally low wages and are discarded almost instantly, causing mountains of non-recycled waste to pile up,” she said. According to a report for the committee, UK shoppers each buy an average of 26.7kg of new clothes every year – more than any other country in Europe.
With her panel of cross-party MPs, Creagh questioned experts from brands including Marks & Spencer, Burberry and Primark, as well as the online retailers Arcadia, Boohoo, Asos and Missguided. The key issues were labour
rights, flouting of the minimum wage – in factories in the UK as well as abroad – issues around waste and recycling, overproduction (in March, H&M had a stockpile of £3.4bn of unsold goods) and the urgent need to slow down and make clothes that are designed to endure. Creagh accused the industry of “chasing the cheap needle around the world”.
So it’s been a year of reckoning for the fashion industry, one in which to take stock of a wasteful, polluting, exploitative business that has been responsible for the doubling of garment production in the past 15 years, to between 80-100bn pieces of clothing a year.
However, for brands that are putting social and environmental impact at the heart of their business, 2018 has been a good year. The original organic cotton campaigner Katharine Hamnett relaunched her business in 2017, and in May she said she was fundraising for future expansion, to create a hub for sustainable manufacture in Italy. “The world has caught up with us on the sustainability aspect,” she told the Financial Times. “People have changed