In some of my earliest inspiration gathering sessions for Sevenbillionth, one particular area simultaneously shocked me and completely captured my imagination. The further I looked in to it, the more a key question bothered me. How does an industry home to some of the most creative, rebellious, forward thinking minds on the planet…an industry so fast paced that it not only celebrates change, but relies on it for it’s continued success and in its most iconic moments, has completely thrown convention to the wind…
How does fashion remain to this day the second most polluting industry on the planet?
Considering how integral the necessity of moving with the times is to the fashion industry, surely it should be leading the way in terms of pioneering sustainable technology, production and by extension, sustainable products? Yet, the more the environmental implications of fast fashion started to appear on my radar, the more frequently I found myself derailed by another shocking statistic. It was an interesting breed of surprise in that it was only shocking because in all honesty, it had never really occurred to me before.
I had never really been confronted with the realities of mass producing textiles for an audience that has an insatiable appetite for the new. Even before I started writing about it I would have considered myself a relatively “conscious” individual, but if you’d have asked me, I would have said plastics or the meat industry were the bigger polluters. Perhaps this is just a byproduct of my “liking” every ‘save the wave’ type Facebook page or because the algorithms have long since clocked that I’ll pause my scrolling to watch a video of human cuddling a cow/sheep/goat/turtle/stingray/barnacle (I’m a sucker. I’ve accepted it. Sue me.) but its been a couple of years now since Cowspiracy started doing the rounds and it seems that everyone has seen the viral videos of shocking conditions in slaughter houses, or folks scuba diving through plastic trash in place of abundant fish. But while people in general seem to be more aware of the scale of the problem where these issues are concerned, fast fashion seems to have slipped the net of public scrutiny in a way its counterparts haven’t…or it would have done, if it weren’t for this meddling kid.
So how did that happen? Well, there is a distinct absence of transparency within the fashion industry that prevents us from knowing the true extent of the damage being done. Take ‘deadstock’ as an example. Of the sale rails that are full to bursting at the end of each season, there are clothes that cannot be sold the other side of multiple reductions…where do they go? (and if you’re looking for an idea of scale with regard to how many items become deadstock each year, it’s largely still guess work for now, it hasn’t been investigated to a point where we can be sure of exact numbers, but from what I can make out it’s safe to assume we’re in to the multi-millions of items of clothing…) Well, frequently unused clothes are destroyed outright. Incinerated or shredded and made in to insulation, that kind of thing. When they’re not though, they are often donated to charities and shipped to developing countries. Which at surface level sounds like a reasonable solution, after all it prevents them from piling up in landfill. But another slightly less desirable outcome of bulk offloading hand me downs on lower income countries is that it waters down the economy, hindering local designers ability to turn a profit from their craft. It’s a complex, multilayered issue with many pros and cons that a brief mention in a blog doesn’t do justice to and I sure as hell don’t have a full grasp on. But it’s a good illustration of how something that seems like a reasonable, if not beneficial solution to fashions waste problem on the surface has much less desirable knock on effects. There is no straight forward answer here.
Surely, brand new unworn clothing can just be recycled though? Well actually, it turns out that recycling has a slightly different meaning when it comes to clothing. When we refer to recycling clothes, we are largely talking about them being worn again by somebody else. Being swapped or donated. Textiles are notoriously tricky to recycle in the traditional sense. So tricky in fact, that the technology doesn’t really exist. Not yet anyway…more on that in billionths yet to come. According to my much-loved-to-the-point-of-it-being-dog-eared, slightly torn and heavily underlined edition of Fashion Revolutions most recent fanzine “Loved Clothes Last” (as a quick aside, if anything I’m saying here is even vaguely sparking an interest in you, I cannot recommend highly enough that you follow what these guys are up to on all their social media platforms and familiarise yourself with their reading material. Their work is beautifully presented, easily digestible, informative and not to mention, incredibly important. They’re making the kind of waves you’re going to want to ride, trust me.) less than one percent of collected clothing is fully recycled in to new textiles. Unlike high grade plastics which can be easily melted down and reconstructed in to a complete new product, the chopping up and treating of textile fibres shortens and weakens them. That’s if you can separate them to begin with.
I watched a really interesting TED talk recently by Amit Kalra, a fashion enthusiast eagerly seeking out solutions to fashions pollution problem. He shows` an interesting diagram of a way in which a jacket could be built with all of the zips attached to an internal hidden skeleton, meaning once the jacket was at the end of its usable life, it could be easily separated in to its component parts, making it much more cost effective and less time consuming to recycle. It suprises me that this kind of intelligent design isn’t widely used in the fashion industry already?!
I never would have known any of this without having a specific interest, and going looking for information. Which realistically and completely reasonably, isn’t what the majority of people have time to do -and nor should it have to be. In an ideal world, consumers should be able to take for granted that their clothing is being produced in line with technological developments which ensure there is as little damage being done to the environment as possible. No one should have to go on a time consuming investigation, which often leads to dead ends anyway due to the current lack of information, to figure out where is safe to find environmentally friendly, ethically produced clothing. But a little bit of awareness can go a long way and leave you feeling much more empowered to make change. Until we are in a position to trust our clothing isn’t being produced at the expense of our planet, one of the easiest ways to make your contribution towards making that change a reality is to put pressure on retailers for higher standards across the board. For garment workers and for the planet. Movements like Fashion Revolution certainly make that easy for you. The other way is to vote with your wallet and increase the demand for sustainable clothing…
A world in which clothing brands are completely transparent about their products would look very different to how it does at present. Its certainly something I didn’t think existed beyond small independent companies…until I found Reformation. “Being naked is the no.1 most sustainable option. We’re no.2” is their tagline. And you know what, from what I can work out, I’m inclined to believe them. They are not over here in the UK yet, but they have three stores in New York, three in L.A., one in San Fran and one in Dallas. They show no signs of slowing down, so keeping your fingers crossed for a London store doesn’t seem like an unreasonable hope at this point…(PLEASE REF. PLEASE.) If when you imagine environmentally considerate clothing, the image you see in your head is all hemp trousers and vegetable dye, that’s not what we’re dealing with here. Not that there is anything wrong with either of those things, if that’s what floats your boat, I’m all for it. But I’m not fucking with you, the clothing they produce is mouthwatering. I’ve had dreams about some of their dresses. (If at this point you’re thinking I’ve got some sort of crazy sponsorship sell out deal from them, think again. This is my second ever blog, the majority of my readership is formed of Mums friends -thanks by the way guys, I really appreciate it! Also, Reformation if by some miracle you’re reading this and want to send me some clothes, I’m not saying I’m not a sell out, I’m just saying I’m not writing this because I am right now, you get me?)
In all seriousness. These guys have one of the most extensive “who we are” sections I have ever read and sustainability is at the core of everything they do. From using wind to power their factories to calculating the construction footprint of their stores and offsetting 100%, to using recycled paper hangers to display their products and providing pre paid shipping labels so that you can reliably recycle their clothing after your next wardrobe clear out, Ref have thought of it. They even offer their staff one paid day off per month to volunteer in the community (-could I also mention at this point that over three quarters of their management team are women?)
But from the perspective of making it easy for you to make an informed and empowered choice as a consumer…every item of clothing they sell displays exactly what impact each garment has had on the environment. I’m sure you can appreciate why I was overjoyed to find these guys after everything else I had discovered about an industry that…actually I really love. Not only are the guys at Ref proof that this is possible, just imagine what clothes shopping would look like if they were the blueprint. If they, and companies like them took centre stage. It feels particularly ambitious right now, but imagine the shift in our buying habits as consumers if considering the environmental impact of any given product was standard practise? Or if we lived in a society in which total transparency and declaration of environmental impact was a legal requirement? Sigh. I have a dream.
Sadly, sustainable clothing is still a relatively niche market and the price tag attached to said clothing often reflects that. That is something that will change with time, but as much as I would love it to, it’s not a shift that’s going to happen overnight. So until we’re all buying beautiful Ref clothing with our pocket money what can we do? Charity shopping, and shopping vintage are sustainable three ways (-your money either goes towards a good cause or presumably a small local business, less brand new clothing is produced thus less drain on resources and energy spent on production, and you’re preventing clothing with a useable life left in it from going to landfill. Well done you!) it’s also much easier on the wallet. Aside from those obvious benefits, there are some other really optimistic byproducts of a shift in attitude more towards this style of shopping. Creativity and individuality being one. Although there is an appeal and a sense of community towards following fashion trends, given that realistically they do not cater to all shapes, sizes and budgets, it often leaves people feeling excluded and left behind. I have often found in the past when shopping brand new the extent of the creativity I’ve used is maybe liking an item of clothing and then coming up with a couple of things I own already that it might go with. When I shop in charity shops, I don’t just think like that, I think about what I can do with those clothes. How I can alter them, embellish them to make something really unique. It already feels like theres less at stake because I haven’t spent a fortune, I’m more prepared to take sewing machine based risks on them. And when I do, excluding the times I completely fuck it up, I usually end up with something much more meaningful to me than something I picked up on impulse in H&M on my way home from work.
Which leads me to my final and potentially most naive and romantic point on the matter. With the mass production of clothing, not only did clothes get less expensive, but the intrinsic value of them got lost too. In the grand scheme of things, the times when you saved for months for one pair of jeans, wore them to death, reincarnated them and then did it over again are not that long ago. I’m not saying we’d be better off being back there, but I do think there is a lot of value and sense to be learned from the creativity and grit of the make do and mend era.
I like to think that the clothes I buy have a life beyond me. As they did before me, for the vast majority of them anyway. I try to keep that in mind when I shop now. I try to think much further than just one occasion I could wear an item of clothing to, as I have done in the past. The doe eyed couple in the image at the top are my Mum and Dad. They’re every bit that cute now, if you were wondering. The outfit my mums wearing, she passed on to me. If I had seen it in a shop, I don’t know if it’s something I would have considered “me”. As a general rule, I steer clear of pink. No shade, just not my cup of tea. But I gladly make an exception for those shorts -because they were hers. They mean so much to me because of that. The more I’ve thought about it, the greater my sentimentality. I don’t know what the future holds, but I do know that when my mum was rocking those shorts she never imagined her daughter would be wearing them and writing about them the best part of thirty years on. I don’t know who it is wearing my hand me downs in this rosy image of the potentially impossible future, but I do like to think these shorts have another generation of summers, beach walks, festivals and holidays still to come beyond me…
Maybe, my Sevenbillionth looks a little like this.
My Sevenbillionth 