Why fashion has to embrace sustainability

Sus­tain­abil­i­ty is like teenage sex: every­one says they’re doing it, but very few are actu­al­ly doing it right. It has been ten years since Amer­i­can sus­tain­abil­i­ty entre­pre­neur Joel Makow­er first coined this now-infa­mous phrase, but it makes reg­u­lar come­backs, most recent­ly at this year’s Drap­ers Sus­tain­able Fash­ion con­fer­ence. The quote is always met with laugh­ter, but its longevi­ty reminds us of the fash­ion indus­try’s glacial pace towards a solu­tion for the hav­oc it wreaks on human rights and the envi­ron­ment.

In Feb­ru­ary, a UK par­lia­men­tary com­mit­tee issued a rep­ri­mand for the way we make, use and throw away clothes. Around 300,000 tonnes of tex­tiles, worth £140 mil­lion, is sent to land­fill or incin­er­a­tors every year. Tex­tile pro­duc­tion con­tributes more to cli­mate change than inter­na­tion­al avi­a­tion and ship­ping com­bined.

“Fash­ion shouldn’t cost the Earth, but it is on track to con­sume a quar­ter of our car­bon bud­get by 2050. The indus­try has a respon­si­bil­i­ty to set out how it will be a net-zero car­bon emit­ter,” says Mary Creagh, chair of the Com­mons envi­ron­men­tal audit select com­mit­tee, which made rec­om­men­da­tions to gov­ern­ment. The ver­dict was clear: fash­ion had marked its own home­work for too long.

Is H&M’s sustainable clothing action plan enough?

“We absolute­ly sup­port the work of the com­mit­tee, but for pos­i­tive sys­temic change to take place, the intro­duc­tion of indus­try stan­dards needs to tack­le mul­ti­ple ele­ments of the sup­ply chain and involve col­lab­o­ra­tion among all par­ties, includ­ing gov­ern­ments, brands, third-par­ty experts, trade unions and NGOs,” says Giorgina Walti­er, sus­tain­abil­i­ty man­ag­er for H&M UK and Ire­land.

H&M aims to ensure 100 per cent of its mate­ri­als are sus­tain­ably sourced by 2030; cur­rent­ly the fig­ure is 57 per cent. By 2020, it pledges to increase its use of recy­cled or sus­tain­ably sourced-cot­ton from 95 to 100 per cent. “We have joined the Swedish research group RISE in their project Min­Shed, which aims to find meth­ods of design­ing clothes with min­imised microfi­bre shed­ding,” Ms Walti­er adds. “On hm.com you can now see which fac­to­ry every item we sell was pro­duced in. Trans­paren­cy dri­ves pos­i­tive change.”

Yet for all this good work, H&M is part of the fast-fash­ion mod­el, dri­ving chang­ing trends to make and sell clothes at speed. When the sin­gle biggest thing a fash­ion con­sumer can do to help mit­i­gate envi­ron­men­tal dam­age is to buy few­er clothes, how does H&M ratio­nalise its busi­ness mod­el?

“Cur­rent­ly a large pro­por­tion of tex­tiles can­not be recy­cled, so increased con­sump­tion is direct­ly linked to an increase in waste,” says Ms Walti­er. “But we can close the gap between con­sump­tion and waste by trans­form­ing to a cir­cu­lar busi­ness mod­el, where­by we only cre­ate prod­ucts made using mate­ri­als that can be recy­cled and regen­er­at­ed, and by max­imis­ing exist­ing resources.”

How to make the apparel industry take responsibility

How­ev­er, retail­ers can­not con­tin­ue to just make more “stuff”, how­ev­er sus­tain­ably made; they must also look for new rev­enue streams, includ­ing a ser­vice-dri­ven mod­el of repair and rental. “This will be the only way to achieve growth in a sus­tain­able way,” says Rebec­ca Thom­son, head of com­mer­cial con­tent at Drap­ers. “The two – sus­tain­abil­i­ty and growth – can absolute­ly co-exist, but there is upfront cost and busi­ness­es need to view it as a long-term invest­ment to ensure they are keep­ing up with their con­sumers.” In a recent report, the fash­ion trade mag­a­zine found that half of Gen­er­a­tion Z shop­pers had aban­doned pur­chas­es because a retail­er didn’t match their sus­tain­able val­ues.

The Com­mons select com­mit­tee called for a 1p charge per gar­ment to be placed on retail­ers and pro­duc­ers to pay for bet­ter cloth­ing col­lec­tion and recy­cling. The MPs also called for the chan­cel­lor to use the tax sys­tem to shift the bal­ance of incen­tives in favour of reuse, repair and recy­cling to sup­port respon­si­ble com­pa­nies.

“Just 1p per gar­ment?” ques­tions Graeme Rae­burn, per­for­mance direc­tor at fash­ion brand Rae­burn. “Look what a 5p tax did for car­ri­er bags. Be brave and apply this to tex­tiles: a £10 per kilo deposit scheme – a pair of men’s jeans weighs 250g – or a sup­pli­er cred­it sys­tem. Sup­pli­ers would be forced to design bet­ter-qual­i­ty prod­ucts, or more suit­able for fibre-to-fibre recy­cling, if they knew con­sumers would bring them back at end of life to claim the deposit. In the same way we cul­ti­vat­ed a vora­cious con­sumer mar­ket – aka fast fash­ion – in the UK, we can sure­ly pio­neer nov­el, cre­ative alter­na­tives.”

The fashion industry must explore how to create value sustainably

Along­side indus­try stan­dards and leg­is­la­tion, fash­ion must tack­le the root caus­es of why we have reached such reck­less lev­els of waste and con­sump­tion. Pro­fes­sor Dilys Williams, direc­tor of the Cen­tre for Sus­tain­able Fash­ion at the Lon­don Col­lege of Fash­ion, Uni­ver­si­ty of the Arts Lon­don, believes cli­mate change should be part of school cur­ric­u­la. “The whole sys­tem is bro­ken,” she says. “How can gov­ern­ment incen­tivise busi­ness­es that emit high lev­els of CO₂? We need new ways of defin­ing what busi­ness is. The cur­rent mod­el under­val­ues nature and the under­ly­ing prin­ci­ples of human­i­ty.”

Pro­fes­sor Williams says busi­ness­es must ask them­selves how they can cre­ate pros­per­i­ty in four dimen­sions: nature, econ­o­my, soci­ety and envi­ron­ment. And she sees hope in young design­ers such as Bethany Williams and Sara Arnold, and Ms Arnold’s cloth­ing sub­scrip­tion and rental busi­ness Higher.Studio. “But you need to look at change across the sys­tem,” says Pro­fes­sor Williams, cred­it­ing lux­u­ry group Ker­ing for its intro­duc­tion of an envi­ron­men­tal prof­it-and-loss account. “It shows a hor­rif­ic debt to nature, but it’s a bold move and will become some­thing that investors will look at.”

To hope for a sin­gle indus­try stan­dard in a mar­ket with a huge­ly com­pli­cat­ed sup­ply chain is unre­al­is­tic. But to dis­miss any form of mea­sure is lazy and irre­spon­si­ble. A set of stan­dards, backed by leg­is­la­tion, is a neces­si­ty. And it’s excit­ing. “We have the her­itage, best col­leges, exper­tise and a mar­ket recep­tive to new expe­ri­ences; we are primed to be glob­al lead­ers in respon­si­ble, account­able fash­ion,” Mr Rae­burn con­cludes. “To ignore this oppor­tu­ni­ty is not only reck­less, but ter­ri­ble busi­ness sense.”