Four ways fashion is embracing sustainability in 2021

The fash­ion indus­try is respon­si­ble for 10% of the world’s car­bon emis­sions, accord­ing to research pub­lished in 2019 by the Unit­ed Nations Envi­ron­ment Pro­gramme and the Ellen MacArthur Foun­da­tion. That’s more than the total pro­duced by inter­na­tion­al flights and ship­ping com­bined. As the UN pre­pares to hold its 26th con­fer­ence on cli­mate change in Glas­gow this Octo­ber, what have fash­ion busi­ness­es been doing to make their sec­tor more sus­tain­able?

1. Even slower fashion: the made-to-order model 

Retail­ers Net-a-Porter and Sel­f­ridges have start­ed stock­ing brands that oper­ate on a made-to-order mod­el, while H&M is offer­ing cus­tom-made jeans on demand in select­ed test mar­kets. This approach can reduce waste and the num­ber of unsold items by pro­duc­ing only what con­sumers have already com­mit­ted to buy­ing, rather than order­ing high vol­umes and push­ing sales.

But this approach faces a big chal­lenge: con­tin­u­al over­sup­ply in the indus­try has trained con­sumers to expect to get what they want straight away. Can they be re-edu­cat­ed to become more patient? 

Cal­ly Rus­sell believes that it’s pos­si­ble. He is the founder of made-to-order online brand This is Unfold­ed, which offers a lim­it­ed cap­sule col­lec­tion with a six-week turn­around. The trick, he says, is to keep in touch with cus­tomers over that time.

“We’ve had to think about to we make it an inter­est­ing peri­od, so we talk to our shop­pers about every stage an item goes through,” Rus­sell says. “We have had huge amounts of feed­back from peo­ple who’ve actu­al­ly enjoyed that time, because we have engaged them in the process and made it a bit more of a spec­ta­cle. This kind of approach, we hope, is get­ting results.”

Those hopes are being realised if the business’s num­bers are any­thing to go by. The return rate is just over 1%, com­pared with an indus­try aver­age of about 30%. 

But the made-to-order mod­el needs to use more effi­cient tech­nolo­gies and process­es to keep turn­around times to an absolute min­i­mum, stress­es Vanes­sa Bar­boni Hal­lik, founder and CEO of sus­tain­able lux­u­ry brand Anoth­er Tomor­row. 

This is the only way that brands using this method can com­pete effec­tive­ly against their main­stream rivals, she argues, adding: “How do you ask peo­ple to wait when at the same time there’s an excess of prod­ucts already avail­able – often at a low­er price?”

2. Repairing is caring: restoration services

Offer­ing repair ser­vices to keep cus­tomers’ pur­chas­es in the best shape used to be the domain of spe­cial­ist providers, but the pro­vi­sion of after­care is becom­ing more wide­spread. High-end retail­ers Far­fetch, Har­rods, Har­vey Nichols and Sel­f­ridges have part­nered with The Resto­ry, for instance, to offer repairs to pre­mi­um prod­ucts. 

The Resto­ry is keen to make after­care the stan­dard in the lux­u­ry sec­tor, help­ing to boost its sus­tain­abil­i­ty cre­den­tials. But what poten­tial is there for such ser­vices in main­stream fash­ion? 

Swedish den­im label Nudie Jeans has long made free life­time repairs a sell­ing point. The brand’s sus­tain­abil­i­ty man­ag­er, Sandya Lang, says: “For us, it comes nat­u­ral­ly to take care of our prod­uct. We see it as our respon­si­bil­i­ty to do that. We’ve trained our store staff to explain to cus­tomers the ben­e­fits of pro­long­ing the life of each pur­chase.” 

Is this anoth­er area where more main­stream play­ers can step up to ensure that sus­tain­abil­i­ty doesn’t become the pre­serve of high-end cus­tomers? To Lang, the prin­ci­ples of after­care appear incon­gru­ous with those of fast fash­ion.

“There might not be the same oppor­tu­ni­ty in that sec­tor,” she says. “Cer­tain items are more suit­able for after­care than oth­ers. If you buy some­thing from a fast-fash­ion brand, its qual­i­ty might not be good enough in the first place to enable a nice repair.”

3. Sheer ingenuity: biodegradable tights

French entre­pre­neurs Sophie Bil­li-Hard­wick and Marie Bouhi­er knew that biodegrad­abil­i­ty was becom­ing a suc­cess­ful solu­tion in the fash­ion indus­try, but it had nev­er been applied to hosiery. For such small gar­ments, tights are a big prob­lem when it comes to waste man­age­ment. World­wide, 8 bil­lion pairs are pur­chased, worn a few times and dis­card­ed each year. Most are non-recy­clable and can take up to a cen­tu­ry to decom­pose in land­fill. 

It was for these rea­sons that Bil­li-Hard­wick and Bouhi­er start­ed their biodegrad­able tights brand, Bil­li Lon­don, on the back of a huge­ly suc­cess­ful crowd­fund­ing cam­paign in May 2020. This was the cul­mi­na­tion of an 18-month col­lab­o­ra­tion with Ital­ian fibre experts to find the cor­rect weav­ing tech­nique to achieve a pre­mi­um prod­uct designed to biode­grade in land­fill in only five years. 

“Women tend to dis­pose of their ripped tights robot­i­cal­ly, with­out real­is­ing the impact this has on the envi­ron­ment. This is how it’s always been,” Bil­li-Hard­wick says. “Because of this, we’re also try­ing to edu­cate our cus­tomers and bring them on a con­scious liv­ing jour­ney with us.” 

She and Bouhi­er are plan­ning for their brand to become the leader in biodegrad­able inti­mate wear in Europe by 2025. They sell on their own web­site; through online mar­ket­places Wolf & Bad­ger, Know the Ori­gin and Lone Design Club; and in Parisian design­er bou­tique La Mai­son Per­chée. Bil­li Lon­don is also set to fea­ture in a pop-up store at Covent Gar­den this year.

4. Second-chance salon: recommerce 

The pan­dem­ic has height­ened con­sumer demand for sus­tain­able shop­ping choic­es – and retail­ers have been respond­ing. The val­ue of the glob­al mar­ket for sec­ond­hand clothes, for instance, is expect­ed to leap from £21bn in 2020 to £47bn in 2025, accord­ing to research by ThredUp and Glob­al­Da­ta Retail. 

Retail Gazette has esti­mat­ed that 17% of retail­ers will have start­ed sell­ing sec­ond­hand items by the end of this year. Mean­while, ded­i­cat­ed sec­ond­hand plat­forms such as ThredUp, Depop, Ves­ti­aire Col­lec­tive and The Real­Re­al are inno­vat­ing with brand and influ­encer part­ner­ships in the effort to main­tain a com­pet­i­tive edge.

The Real­Re­al in par­tic­u­lar has seen an upsurge in the pop­u­lar­i­ty of its B2B pro­gramme, which enables lux­u­ry retail­ers and brands to sell to its com­mu­ni­ty of 20 mil­lion shop­pers – one-third of whom use the plat­form as a replace­ment for fast fash­ion. So says Alli­son Som­mer, its senior direc­tor of strate­gic ini­tia­tives, who adds that con­sumer demand for the sus­tain­able prod­ucts fea­tured on its web­site has near­ly quadru­pled in two years. 

She puts these trends down to a com­bi­na­tion of fac­tors. “Retail­ers and brands are com­ing to us direct­ly, while we’ve been con­tact­ing some of the most in-demand brands on the site that we think could be look­ing for addi­tion­al sales chan­nels. Because we sell to a glob­al audi­ence, sea­son­al­i­ty doesn’t affect us. Knitwear is per­form­ing just as strong­ly as sum­mer dress­es right now, for exam­ple.”

Som­mer con­tin­ues: “We’ve seen a real shift in how brands are pri­ori­tis­ing sus­tain­abil­i­ty. The Covid cri­sis has been a cat­a­lyst for them, expe­dit­ing their com­mit­ment to sup­port resale. Near­ly half of our buy­ers say that they will shop with more sus­tain­able retail­ers and brands over the com­ing decade, while 60% say that they’ll be buy­ing more resale items.”