Rethinking Fashion's Perspective on Sustainability

Sustainability in fashion has been an ongoing movement within the fashion industry with seemingly many strides. Fashion companies have learned to reduce their waste and introduce recyclable textiles, while also making vast commitments to alleviate their impact on the environment. In honour of Earth Month, a reflection on the fashion world’s robust progression in the sustainability realm is in order. But we must not rest on our laurels.

Though 2021 and 2022 have seen widespread initiatives that promise (and serve to deliver) a greener future, the fashion world might want to rethink its interpretation of “sustainability.” This year has brought new triumphs worth celebrating, but to classify the industry as meaningfully sustainable overlooks grave facts about fashion’s true role in climate change and environmental destruction.

The interest in sustainability has also been embraced by the corporate world and consumers alike. In retail research group Edited’s Sustainability Edit report, products labelled as “sustainable” have increased 176 per cent from 2019 to 2021. Consumers themselves are increasingly concerned about the ethics of the brands they’re buying from, with McKinsey’s 2020 consumer sustainability survey determining 38 per cent of respondents have expectations for fashion brands to “reduce the negative impact on the environment,” with high response to other metrics including employee wellbeing and working conditions.

Brands like Stella McCartney and Gabriela Hearst have long put sustainability at the core of their ethics and practices. This has expanded into other influences, with Hearst bringing her eco-friendly insights to Chloé earlier this year. Now Chloé is the only luxury house classified as B Corp Certified, meaning they meet the highest ethical standards for a company, from employee benefits to environmental interaction. The brand also recently introduced a sustainability metric tool that measures its social and environmental impact, which can be adopted by the broader fashion industry.

Good On You is an organization that extensively researches brand ethics and practices, with nearly all prominent fashion labels analyzed by their team. Stella McCartney and Chopova Lowena are two of the few designers to receive a “Great” rating, which is determined by how they care for the planet, animals, and people. Stella McCartney is a pioneer in this with a vast array of innovative organic materials, circularity policies, and commitments to combat deforestation. 

Gucci, Vivienne Westwood, and Marine Serre are other brands that are climate-conscious. Gucci works well to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and Marine Serre’s upcycling policies promote a necessary circularity in textile use. Vivienne Westwood also employs upcycling and is free of plastics and non-recyclable materials, such as polyester. In 2020, Vivienne Westwood launched a green initiative with the non-profit Canopy to combat deforestation. With the increased visibility of fashion brands taking steps to control their impact, there is a call for others to make the same strides for widespread improvement.  

Although luxury fashion does not exactly amount to fast fashion’s detrimental effects on the globe environmentally and humanistically, many brands have fallen trap of similar marketing strategies that Zara and H&M have in the hopes of portraying themselves as eco-conscious. This is a phenomenon known as greenwashing.

With more brands joining in on the earth-conscious zeitgeist, greenwashing is certainly a tempting tool to create buzz, but true sustainability entails checks and balances and transparency of the day-to-day operations to pinpoint growth opportunities. Many brands have pledged – and failed – to introduce more sustainable measures in the Global Fashion Agenda’s 2020 Commitment, with only 64 per cent of targets being reached.

Greenwashing leads consumers into believing they are supporting a sustainable brand when they’re not completely. Chanel has begun testing the waters through green technology investments, notably with startup Evolved by Nature which works to create natural fibres to replace synthetics. It seems these investments are few and far between, as the brand has not followed suit in terms of implementing better practices within the company itself. Despite setting a goal to reduce emissions, Chanel uses little to no eco-friendly materials — a basic step in becoming more sustainable (see Gucci). 

As luxury prices from designers like Chanel are on the rise, consumers expect that exclusivity to guarantee ethical practices. Biotechnology company Genomatica released a 2019 consumer report that indicated 58 per cent of consumers “care about the materials that [go into] their clothes and want them to not be harmful to the planet,” and 47 per cent ranked “clothing made with renewably-sourced or natural materials as a top sustainability characteristic.” 

A clear indicator of these values is reflected in the rise of resale. Celebrated for its true sustainability, the secondhand shopping consumer trend, since 2020, is just one of many aspects of shopping that the pandemic revolutionized. Resale platforms like Depop and The RealReal exploded in popularity. Designer vintage, archive fashion, and luxury resale are trendy consumer buzzwords — primarily thanks to TikTok — that refer to growing preferences for secondhand fashion. The same McKinsey survey demonstrated that 15 per cent of Gen Z’ers and 16 per cent of millennials intend to shop secondhand more often, greatly due to COVID-19’s economic impact.

No brand is perfectly sustainable; between fashion’s consistent exorbitant waste, fossil fuel emissions, use of cheap labour, and overproduction, the industry is still contributing a great deal of harm regardless of plastic bans and deadstock fabrics. 

This year’s State of Fashion report by McKinsey presents the usage of circular textiles as the leading way to increase sustainable practices across the industry. According to the report, reusing materials is “one of the most important levers that the fashion industry can pull to reduce its environmental impact is closed-loop recycling,” which promises “to limit the extractive production of virgin raw materials and decrease textile waste” through its cyclical use of already-existing materials.

Other than methods of production to implement, perhaps a perspective change is what we’re missing as well. Coming up with new creative strategies to solve more growth areas requires full awareness of company standards and capacities of which new product is being released into the market. According to the Harvard Business Review, understanding that all production is inherently not sustainable is a way to be realistic about the state of fashion so as to not become complacent. This connects to the transparency of a company’s supply chain, textile usage, and emissions. When looking at Chloé’s Social Impact Measurement/Social Performance and Leverage tool, self-awareness is injected into the model as it relies on transparency of its production impacts, value chain presence, employee ethics, and various other metrics. Chloé, among other brands that consistently and clearly report their environmental behaviours, has created a starting point for a sustainable industry to grow; an undertaking which is certainly still in the beginning stages, regardless of our current process. 

A simple fact is that the creation of new clothing and accessories requires manufacturing sourced from the already deteriorated environment. Despite the myriad positive initiatives, a true commitment to sustainability would be the ceasing of production altogether; which will, quite literally, never happen. As we gush over the latest collection fresh out of fashion week or a sumptuously dressed celebrity at the Met Gala, let us not be fooled to think the production behind it had little consequences on gas emissions, landfill pollution, and earth’s ecosystems. Continued awareness of this sad truth may be the crux of solving fashion’s sustainability crisis, free of greenwashed delusions and PR-driven illusions.