Want your fashion brand to be a success in the world, without being a blight on the planet? This How-To Guide probably raises more questions about sustainable fashion than it answers (sorry)! But they are important questions. So do read on for plenty of inspiration, encouragement, support and hope…
The price of being sustainable versus the cost of not
One of the main hurdles for sustainable fashion is that it shares the marketplace with numerous brands that are competing to be cheap (as opposed to aspiring to be ethical). When online fashion retailers flog a basket of new clothes for a few quid, it ought to raise alarm bells. Instead, it has shoppers racing to buy. We need to educate customers to be as interested in the human cost as the checkout cost.
As well as providing quality clothing that lasts, sustainable fashion is about ensuring that workers are fairly paid and that fabrics, dyes and processes don’t harm the environment (oceans, creatures, people), etc. So if customers knew what they were buying into – as well as what they were buying – surely they’d want to pay more money for products that do less harm?
Perhaps it should be a legal requirement for clothing manufacturers to declare the provenance of their clothing on the labels (in the same way that food companies have to display their ingredients).
Are eco-friendly fabrics as friendly as they seem?
As crusaders for sustainable fashion, using eco-friendly fabrics is an obvious starting point. But finding a balance between what the people want and what the planet can sustain can be challenging. Take swimwear, for example. No one has yet stumbled upon a planet-friendly substitute for Lycra and its super-stretchy properties. There are innovative fabrics made from recycled plastic bottles – but they can contain nasties such as microfibres. Currently, skinny dipping is the only way to swim in the ocean without harming it through the manufacture of costumes. However, there’s a lot of good work going on in this area…
- Take inspiration from Italian swimwear company, Carvico’s sustainability commitment.
- Marvel at Roya Aghighi’s biogarmentry – a 100% natural and biodegradable textile that’s fully compostable and works to purify the air through photosynthesis!
- Visit the Queen of Raw, which sells unused fabrics from around the world: ‘these materials end up burned or buried. And we’re here to rescue them’.
The most affordable way to get hold of unused fabrics is to go straight to the factories and ask if you can have their deadstock textiles. You’ll be doing them a favour by saving them the trouble of disposing of their unwanted materials. Check out Paynter Jacket Co., which uses scraps from jeans and other materials to make gorgeous jackets.
Perhaps people should just buy fewer clothes?
An obvious and blatantly simple solution to making fashion more sustainable is to reduce the volume of clothing we make and to pay our workers better. That would mean putting retail prices up – which would force customers to buy fewer items and use them for longer (mending torn or worn clothing rather than throwing it away).
This is a great antidote to the disposable fashion mentality. But it presents problems if people genuinely can’t pay for basic essentials (i.e. families whose children outgrow clothes faster than they can afford to replace them). A solution to this would be to create easier ways of swapping clothes and to change mindsets to reduce any stigma about wearing pre-loved garments. Darned or patched up holes ought to be seen as a planet-saving badge of honour rather than an embarrassing indication that the wearer is ‘poor’.
How do you gauge a fair wage?
Understanding what a ‘fair wage’ is needs to be approached delicately, especially when recruiting overseas workers. Paying factory staff in Bangladesh what we consider to be a good wage here could cause all sorts of adversarial complications (e.g. resentment from other workers). So rather than make assumptions, it’s important to work closely with communities and ask them what they need.
Join forces with sympathetic brands
Sustainable fashion isn’t just a business sector – it’s a movement. So while you may see other businesses in your niche as competitors, they are also your comrades. Combining voices with people who share your values will help the sustainable fashion message resound louder across the world. So, as well as networking with people in your field, you may want to consider collaborating with them for certain schemes. For example, you could:
- Be part of a think tank like Fashion Roundtable, which exists to help make the fashion industry ‘more sustainable and inclusive, whilst adding value to the economy and wider culture of the UK’.
- Check out the Higg Index and their suite of tools that ‘assess the social and environmental performance of the value chain and the environmental impacts of products’.
- Get the GoodOnYou app and ‘wear the change you want to see’.
- Go to the Common Objective platform to ‘get matched with the people, and the tools you need to succeed in fashion business – sustainably’.
Wearing our hearts on our sleeves and leggings
The shift towards sustainability in the fashion world will no doubt happen first in customers’ hearts and minds. Fundamentals like self-perception and self-worth are internal issues that are externally reflected in how people dress and shop. Until society gets clear on its values – e.g. looking good versus doing good – its attitude to sustainability will surely remain ambivalent.
To end with a message of hope, see this short BBC video about Prato, a small town in Italy that built its fortune on transforming old scraps into new garments and is responsible for a whopping 15% of the world’s clothing recycling.
This How To Guide was inspired by a Zoom Dive with Jodi Muter-Hamilton, founder of Other Day, ‘a vision of a world built on integrity’. Through the initiative Lab 2030, which Jodi co-founded, she is exploring her idea to label garments with a traffic-light system based on the sustainability of their production.
Our Zoom Dive events are deep-delving discussions between our founder, Carolyn Dailey and a handpicked creative business expert. You can listen to Carolyn and Jodi’s full discussion here. Fancy catching our next Zoom Dive, live? See our Events calendar and sign up for free.
Meanwhile, feel free to plunder our Knowledge bank for more insights into the world of fashion.