Is sustainable fashion just a marketing hook?

While some brands trumpet their environmental credentials, others are quietly working on small parts of this highly complex issue.

Allbirds, the unicorn footwear start-up whose merino-wool, sugarcane-soled trainers have become ubiquitous in Silicon Valley, labels every one of its items with its carbon footprint.

Lauren Indvik

Jan 8, 2021 – 9.47am

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The breathless email was all too familiar. It was from Levi’s, the company I buy most of my denim from, telling me about a new product: its “most sustainable jeans ever”. Made of “high quality recycled denim” and hemp, these jeans were “positive impact” and “negative waste”, the copywriters pledged.

There are some phrases so well-worn we become numb to their meaning. For me, “sustainable fashion” is one of those phrases. It is a term now so ubiquitous in PR and marketing, so liberally applied to any brand that uses organic cotton or makes its goods locally, that its fundamental definition has become obscured.

Financial Times