Fashion’s moment of truth
The fashion industry’s epiphany around sustainability is one thing, implementing this newfound awareness is quite another.
Can fashion ever be sustainable? If only there was a simple answer to such a straightforward question. Certainly optimism is required when discussing the biggest issue facing the fashion industry. Some ask what the word “sustainable” even means anymore, so ubiquitous has it become within the industry, often with little information to back it up.
Stella McCartney spoke for many when she launched her Spring 2021 collection online in October and conducted a Zoom press conference in support. “I barely even know what the word sustainable means anymore,” she said. “And I don’t think people know. There’s so much greenwashing going around, as we all know, and there’s so much confusion around what these words mean.”
Morten Lehmann, chief sustainability officer for the Copenhagen-based Global Fashion Agenda, a not-for- profit organisation and leadership forum for sustainable fashion, sums up the confusion around sustainability succinctly when he says: “The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.”
New Zealand-based designer Maggie Hewitt says sustainability is a never-ending question: “You ask one question and you get 10 more back. It’s a total rabbit hole.”
The $2.2 trillion global fashion industry is already considered one of the most resource-heavy and polluting industries on the planet. But while discussion around sustainability initially covered the realm of environmental concerns within fashion’s supply chain, it has more recently come to be an umbrella term for good practice along its length, including ethical production and worker’s rights, as well as animal rights.
On that note, the London-based Dr Christina Dean, founder of Redress, a not-for-profit focusing on sustainability in the fashion industry, and its upcycled fashion label, The R Collective, says: “The term sustainable conjures up different things to different people, [but] its true definition should include environment, economy and society.”
Since the Rana Plaza factory collapse on April 24, 2013, in which more than 1100 Bangladeshi garment workers were killed, the industry has been increasingly under scrutiny at every level of its supply chain, which is one of the most complicated and opaque of any industry.
True sustainability has to factor in production and workers at all levels, from the farmers and farming practices of raw materials including cotton and wool, for example, through to the processing of these materials and the manufacturing of garments. Many of these stages take place in different countries, so there is an additional carbon footprint in the shipping. Increasingly, “end of use” is being factored into the discussion, given issues with overproduction and waste, from upcycling of garments to recycling of fabrics. In Australia alone, some 500,000 tonnes of textiles and leather ends up in landfill each year, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
So, what would a truly sustainable fashion industry look like? “The ideal utopian vision is a closed loop,” says Lehmann. “If you have a closed loop based on renewable energy, with no leaks, no virgin materials, that’s sustainable. If we could do that, not just thinking about the environmental issues, but also making sure that jobs that are created are decent and provide a fair wage, that could be sustainable. But we are not there yet.”
Given the multitude of factors along the supply chain, he doesn’t believe that at this stage any brand can claim that every worker throughout its supply chain is being paid a fair wage and experiences no exploitation.
“I don’t think a brand can call itself sustainable without justifying [that] and saying what it is they’re doing,” he says. “Because no brand can be sustainable across the line. They can aspire to be sustainable and they can say by 2030 we will only use recycled materials, or we will have full transparency [though our supply chain].”
Transparency has been a more recent buzzword in the discussion, in the hope that more companies will reveal all suppliers along their supply chains. That’s no easy feat, given that in some instances, a manufacturer, for example, may outsource some of that production to another factory.
LUXURY VS FAST FASHION
Since 2015, Fashion Revolution – the grassroots organisation that came into being in the aftermath of Rana Plaza – has published its Fashion Transparency Index, which takes a sample of the world’s largest fashion companies and brands and highlights what is publicly revealed about their social and environmental policies, practices and impacts. The 2020 Edition of the report looks at 250 brands, from fast fashion to luxury, and their transparency is measured across five categories, including Policy & Commitments, Governance and Traceability.
While fast fashion is often considered the worst offender in the sustainability arena due to the sheer volume and short lifespan of products, the 2020 Edition shows that some of these brands are leading the way, at least in transparency. For example, Swedish fast fashion retailer H&M tops the list with a score of 73 per cent; the highest-scoring luxury brand is Gucci, at 48 per cent (the overall average is 23 per cent).
“For years and years, the fast fashion and mass market businesses have been held to massively more accountability in terms of behaviour, their sourcing transparency, their supplier index, CO2 emissions reports,” says Dean. “So in many ways the gun’s been pointed towards the volume businesses for much longer and luxury has got away with a lot. From a transparency point of view, luxury brands have been able to work under the carpet. You like to trust them because it’s so beautiful and you like to think it’s made beautifully, but actually they’re not at all transparent. Looking at luxury in the report, Zegna is the first luxury brand to publish its supply list last year.”
Lehmann agrees that the line between fast fashion and luxury brands isn’t always clear when it comes to sustainability. “I think it’s a misconception [as to] who is the most sustainable, that it’s price segments,” he says. “It’s the size of companies.”
He cites the Pulse Report, which GFA released in conjunction with Boston Consulting Group and the Sustainable Apparel Coalition for three years from 2017; the report measured social and environmental performance across industry segments.
“We had both price segments and size segments, and the key determinant was not fast fashion or luxury, it’s the size – the bigger the company, the better the score on sustainability,” Lehmann says. “It’s not enough to say you’re good because you’re in luxury or bad because you’re in fast fashion. There are really bad factories in Bangladesh, but also in Italy.”
Hewitt’s four-year-old label Maggie Marilyn may be a small player globally, but the designer is committed to becoming a leader in sustainability. Last year she overhauled her business model, giving up wholesaling to go direct to consumer, flipping the emphasis of her collections to 90 per cent perennial, 10 per cent fashion-forward items, and even sourcing fabrics from regenerative cotton and wool growers, for example. All pieces were already made in New Zealand.
“We had to radically transform our business model to even start on the journey of becoming a sustainable business, because we didn’t believe that with the business model we were operating to before we had any chance of being sustainable – or talking about sustainability with any level of integrity,” says Hewitt.
Having done the deep dive into her business model and continuing to find areas in which to improve, Hewitt is right in saying that every question has more questions, rather than answers. With regard to circularity alone, in which clothing is not disposed of but put back into the system, through recycling for example, she says people are looking for a “silver bullet”.
“It’s all well and good to have a takeback scheme and a way of recycling product into new product, but then how is that recycling mill powered? By coal or renewable energy? That takeback scheme – are we air freighting all the products from each customer to a centralised point, or are we shipping that? You have to scrutinise every process. There’s no silver bullet, it’s just dedicating yourself to the long, hard journey of building a better industry and building a brand that can sustain itself into the future.”
IS LEGISLATION THE ANSWER?
One of the biggest hurdles facing the fashion industry is that there is no single global agreement on sustainability and its many factors, environmental or social. Few countries have rigorous legislation covering the industry, let alone in terms of what may be called sustainable.
In 2017, Brune Poirson became what The New York Times called “France’s de facto minister for fashion”, in her role as a secretary of state within the government’s ministry of ecological and inclusive transition. It was Poirson who drove legislation against the destruction of unsold luxury goods, as one example. But Poirson is a rarity.
In her press conference, McCartney said that “our industry needs to be told they’re not allowed to do things. And they need to then be told that they can do something in a better way and if they take that choice they will get a benefit for it or a reward. Consumers should be rewarded for buying better.”
Hewitt “absolutely” believes in governmental inter-vention. “Governmental legislation really is where we’re going to see the big, impactful change. We need a carbon tax first and foremost.”
The problem remains that different governments would have different policies, from emissions targets to minimum wages. For an industry as global as fashion, in which one item might have three or four countries of origin, from farm to shop floor, it would be impossible to agree, let alone to regulate.
Dean laughs, imagining the “global united nations of fashion transparency”, which she describes as another elephant in the atelier. “The industry needs better regulation, but each country will get away with what it can get away with to get business. You won’t get developing countries seeing eye to eye on policy because they want to outdo each other to get industry flowing into their country.”
There is one area in which Dean does hope we could reach global agreement: chemicals. “Whether you’re in Cambodia or Vietnam, you don’t want to die of a carcinogenic material. Working conditions and living wages and minimum wages do differ and that becomes extra complicated to agree upon. If we could just get banned substances all agreed across borders, that would be a fabulous start.”
The California-based Sustainable Apparel Coalition developed the Higg Index, a way to measure and score a company or product’s sustainability performance.
“We do have something that really works from the SAC, so we try to make sure when there is new regulation from the EU for example, they adopt that, they don’t make up their own,” says Lehmann. “We need to have much more dialogue. Regulation is needed. But we of course need to make sure this is the right, smart regulation, and it needs to be global.”
In terms of self-regulation, for a handful of companies, creating an Environmental Profit & Loss statement, which aims to put a monetary value on the environmental footprint along the whole supply chain, is a step in the right direction. Lehmann describes this as “best practice”, but adds that he is “saddened” that there is little uptake across the industry. He says the luxury conglomerate Kering is leading with this initiative, its brand Puma being the first to undertake such a report in 2011. Formerly part of the Kering umbrella, McCartney still does an EP&L report, and said: “I actually dare my industry to do an EP&L – each and every one of them.”
Dean is more circumspect. “These audits and analyses are very expensive and time consuming,” she says. “And the suppliers are the ones who are having to scrabble around looking at meter readings and every invoice they’ve paid for utility readings and a lot of companies are doing audits slightly differently. It’s like a cat-and-mouse game, chasing around trying to put a carbon number on something, and all that’s doing is giving money to the auditors.”
GREENWASHING: A CONSUMER’S NIGHTMARE?
As sustainability as a concept has become more common-place, so, too has greenwashing, where a brand overstates its sustainability credentials. Dean, Lehmann and Hewitt all agree that it is an issue, but for different reasons.
“Is it intentional or is it stupidity?” asks Dean, suggesting that sometimes there is a disconnect between what a brand is saying and how the marketing department interprets that. “I don’t know the answer to that.”
Ultimately, it’s consumers who are increasingly caught in the middle, unable to see through that greenwashing and make informed decisions. And while some say consumers will drive the issue forward, others believe brands need to lead by example. “I have great sympathy for consumers,” says Dean, “because it must be a minefield out there. If you truly want to be a conscious consumer and truly want to shop ethically, it must be incredibly confusing trying to understand what is truth and what is not.”
She says there is also a disconnect between what a brand might be doing and how that is translated on the shop floor, the first point of contact for many consumers. “It’s always so disappointing when you know a company is doing something really great but the person on the floor has absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. So therefore we have yet another miscommunication at that very important touchpoint.”
That lack of regulation or legislation across the industry doesn’t help, says Lehmann, meaning that there is no comeback for brands who spread misinformation.
“It couldn’t be more confusing,” he says. “If you want to buy organic it’s super easy – either it’s organic or it’s not. But when you don’t have an agreement on what is a sustainable product, there will be different definitions. Some say if 10 per cent of the material of this jacket is recycled, it’s a sustainable product – others will say no, it needs to be 100 per cent.”
The idea of a rating system on the label of a piece of clothing would be the ultimate outcome, in his opinion, so that consumers could make informed decisions and shop accordingly. But that, like so many other definitive outcomes in this fraught field, is still a pipe dream.
Still, optimism has to remain, or else change will never happen. So, back to that first question: can fashion be sustainable? “We have to believe that,” says Hewitt. “I feel like in life you can never actualise a dream if you don’t believe it’s possible.”