Sustainability: a match made in fashion

Sustainability: a match made in fashion

Fashion is not frivolous. It is a multitrillion dollar global industry directly and indirectly responsible for half a billion livelihoods around the world. These livelihoods are literally dictated by your purchasing power; choosing sustainable and ethical fashion means women globally will no longer need to spend all day slaving and still be unable to feed their families.

Although sustainable fashion originated in the late 1980s and early 1990s from concerns about the degrading environment, sustainability is more than the impact an industry or choice has on the environment; it has to consider the human cost too. Choosing vegan clothes and rejecting wool or leather, for example, forgets the people around the world who depend on animal rearing and their by-products for their livelihoods. As the sustainable movement broadened and the primary focus remained on improving the impacts of products through processing and material provenance, exponential growth and consumption became major concerns.

Photo by Alexandra Gorn on Unsplash

The average American throws away nearly 70 pounds of clothing every year, with the fashion industry the second largest cause of pollution worldwide, primarily because two thirds of a garment’s carbon footprint will occur after it is purchased. This can be attributed to the rise of fast fashion: styles that spend fifteen minutes in the fashion limelight and then disappear. Fashionistas flock to purchase an item that almost immediately falls out of style as trendsetters look to next season’s offerings. Planned obsolescence forces manufacturers to produce huge volumes of garments in a cost-efficient manner to respond to these ever-changing consumer tastes: the United States imports more than 1 billion garments annually from China alone while the European Union generates a total of 5.8 million tons of textile waste each year. Fast fashion brings a unique business model and low prices that enable the public to purchase fashionable items even during economic recession but the growing demand for fashion at all times is polluting the planet at an alarming rate.

It’s not all about the environment though; the human factor must be mentioned. Fast fashion has fundamentally changed the labour market in some of the most vulnerable places. The fashion industry is incredibly labour dependent, with one in every six people working on acquiring raw materials and manufacturing clothing—the majority of these are women, working hard labour in poor conditions with severe health and safety risks at extremely low wages. The only justification for this is the need to achieve low costs to sell at low prices—is your access to a cheap but trendy t-shirt worth mass impoverishment on the other side of the supply chain?

Consumers have the power to change any industry—don’t like it, don’t buy it! But take it one step further: tweet, or tag, or email the company in question and make it clear why you aren’t buying from them. Ask about their sustainability efforts, ask about their labour market—merely asking a question shows them their consumers are paying attention. Brands these days face so much competition they are sensitive to consumer concerns—it really is as simple as hearing from a large number of their customers that something is not okay for them to sit up and take notice.

Get on board the slow fashion train; invest in quality pieces that will last you a long time. These are the timeless staples of a capsule wardrobe and let’s be honest, we tend to stick to a similar uniform day-in, day-out anyway. Have your clothes tailored to fit should you go up or down a size; if something breaks, have it repaired­—you’ll be contributing to the local talents in your community as well as reducing the environmental impact of throwing your clothes away.  

There is a simple pleasure in fashion but sustainable and ethical should be uncompromising requirements. If we can spend a little time caring about where our clothes came from and the impact they have on people and planet, we will start to see change happen.