Fashion can (and must) save us from us.
Julie Boulton’s work has focused on using the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to change and drive decision-making processes. More recently, Julie’s work has focused on using SDG 12 particularly to implement a circular economy in textiles. This is an opinion piece outlining the impact and the opportunities we are faced with in this sector.
Written by Julie Boulton
1999. The year of The Matrix movie and its iconic shiny, black, trenchcoat. I owned a cheap, imitation version which was made from PVC and — with me inside of it — would have gone up in flames had I ever worn it while standing next to a fire, something I did not know then.
I am not wearing that shiny black coat today. The relationship I have with my clothes has evolved since then, both in terms of what I wear and what I buy. Today, for example, I am not wearing any PVC and my jeans and sneakers are both items that I have borrowed from my daughter’s wardrobe. This change is undoubtedly related to my age, how much spare time I have, and how active I am (I’m too old to follow fads, I have no time to shop and I work from home so I have no real need for clothes at all), but it has also occurred because I now know so much more about the environmental and social impacts of fashion.
What’s going on?
I know that the fashion industry:
Has a voracious appetite for virgin materials, with new material making up 94% of clothing and textile production content;
Is very thirsty, consuming 93 billion cubic metres of water annually [1] and, on average, using an estimated 200 tonnes of water to produce just one tonne of dyed textile[2];
Is responsible for between 4% and 10% of the total global amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions [3], (in 2018 the industry emitted 2.1 billion metric tons of the stuff[4]);
Is very dirty, producing 20% of the world’s annual industrial water pollution as a result of textile treatment and dyeing [5] and accounting for up to 10% of global pollution (making it the world’s second largest dirtiest industry after aviation [6]);
Contributes 35% (190,000 tonnes per year) of oceanic primary micro-plastic pollution [7]; and
Is toxic — really, really toxic for humans, non-humans and for our planet: the European Union classifies 165 chemicals commonly used in clothing production as hazardous to human health and the environment.
The consequences of knowing these things means that I now have a very, very uncomfortable relationship with all clothes, even the ones that I already have in my wardrobe. I struggle to look at any item of clothing without also thinking about the fact that fashion is a huge contributor to the environmental problems that we have today: where our planet’s boundaries are breaking (see Netflix’s Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet [8] to understand more about this concept).
One of my side projects is a series of interviews I conduct with some incredible people in Canberra, people who are working valiantly to make positive, sustainable change to our environment, in a range of different ways. With my co-host, we always ask our subjects to project themselves nine years into the future — 2030 — and to describe the world that they see around them.
Recently, the answer from Dr Kate Ringvall [9], was short and simple. She said: “No waste.” She went on to say that by 2030 she imagines that we will all live in a community that has absolutely no waste because we use all that we have again and again and again. We place value on what exists and we recycle, repair, regenerate, reuse — we do everything but waste.
This idea of no waste was my prompt for this article. What is it that I want to see in the future for the fashion industry?
Waste is a huge problem with clothing, both in production and in use. Australians buy a lot of clothes, purchasing an average of 27 kilograms of new clothing per year [10] which is second only to the US in terms of per capita consumption. And, we toss a lot away, disposing an average of 23 kilograms of clothing to landfill per year [11]. We buy “shiny black trench coats” and then we throw away “shiny black trench coats”, and we do this over and over and over again. And it’s getting easier and easier to live like this given that global per capita textile production continues to increase (from 5.9 kg in 1975 to 13 kg in 2018 [12]) and globally, brands are now producing almost twice the amount of clothing today compared to 2000 [13].
But fashion is so important
This is an absurd situation, right? But fashion is so important; to our protection, wellbeing and to many’s livelihood. In fact, fashion is often the only thing that makes me smile during the day: I see an amazingly shaped dress; I come across a new cut on a pair of pants; I find a sneaker that is the perfect colour of green; I drool over images from a fashion shoot that is full of colour; or I visit a store that is styled in such a way that makes me want to stay there forever. Even though, as I said earlier, I have a complicated relationship with clothes, fashion makes me feel something. I think the feeling is hope.
The fashion industry in Australia employs 489,000 workers, 77% of those being women, and generates $27.2 billion annually for the Australian economy [14]. In addition to this economic contribution, fashion sparks joy, feeds our imagination (today, my youngest daughter is a K-Pop ‘star’ thanks to a gold bomber jacket that she found at our local op shop yesterday), gives us confidence and perhaps provides us with a little magic from time to time. This aspect of the industry should not be underestimated. Creativity is, after all, one of the most important aspects of being a human. To create is to live. “The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul.” — Dieter F. Uchtdorf.
Fashion is one of the world’s largest and most powerful creative industries, involving many millions of inventive and industrious people. It is this visionary, originative and energetic spirit that the fashion industry and its people desperately need to tap into if we are to have any chance at solving the complex environmental problems that we find ourselves now facing.
How fashion can help create a new future
“Fashion is a potent visual marker of our times,” says Caroline Stevenson, head of cultural and historical studies at London College of Fashion. “Trend analysis of any given era will reveal society’s values and aspirations.” [15] Time and again the industry deliberately chooses to “engage with the world to change the world” [16]. This is the sentiment that becomes my jumping off point for describing what I see as the future of fashion: three interlinked ideas.
Connecting to nature - Fashion’s primary purpose in the future becomes that of (re)connecting people with nature. This means that industry places the wellbeing of planet and people at the centre of its operations and, as a consequence, eliminates virgin resources, harmful chemicals, carbon emissions, and waste.
Sufficiency - Fashion shifts from a model based on over consumption and excessive production to a model based on sufficiency - of just having enough - where the concept of success moves away from growth to be one of broader impact on the health and happiness of our world. This focus eliminates overproduction or excess stock, items are deliberately designed to last and to be repaired, remade and reused multiple times, and renting and re-imagination services are the norm. Deconstruction at the end of life is possible and the resulting materials are able to be decomposed in a way that does not harm the planet.
Change and adaptation - The industry positions itself as an integral and ongoing part of developing and driving innovative solutions to our environmental crisis. It provides education alongside its products and, critically, it works to transform our world.
The future is now
All of this is possible. We already have businesses like A.BCH, Seljak and Citizen Wolf, among many others, who are showing us what bold and innovative fashion future companies look like. Innovative partnerships between competitors have also emerged, like the AllBirds x Adidas collaboration which aims to reduce the CO2 footprint of a sneaker from the industry standard of 13.6 kg to under 3 kg [17].
We need to celebrate, support, nurture, respect and demand that a lot more businesses like these emerge and thrive, because they will revolutionise the industry and make the transformation possible. However, this is not to say that the fashion industry can save itself — and us — all by itself. For transformation to happen, we need other parts of the fashion ecosystem to contribute, including governments and citizens.
Governments have a number of levers at their disposal to ensure these future fashion businesses are nurtured . They can regulate and incentivise both companies and consumers to speed the transformation to sustainable practice. As Stella McCartney, noted, and called for, at the recent G7 meeting: “One of the biggest problems that we have in the fashion industry is we’re not policed in any way. We have no laws or legislations that will put hard stops on our industry…. We need to be incentivised, [and] we need to have taxations looked at to work in a better way.” [18]
As for citizens, well, it’s our role and responsibility to support these future fashion businesses, and to demand that all businesses adopt similar practices. This means we need to make sustainable purchasing choices as well as actively participate in repairing, reusing, renting and recycling our clothes. To help us do this, we need more education about what to look for - ie, the origin and impact of our clothes and how we use and dispose of them. And we need this information to be accessible as well as reliable, verifiable and comparable.
A detail I discovered as I researched the “shiny black trench coat” future of fashion shown in The Matrix, was that it had a broader relevance to this story than I thought. The film gave us a glimpse of a world that the movie’s costume designer, Kym Barret, describes as one of “recycling” due to a scarcity of natural resources.
“When somebody dies, their uniform gets washed and goes back in the closet of military clothes [to be repurposed]. Anything they have, they make out of recycled things that they find.” [19]
The Matrix future is in some ways already our present. Our world today faces a scarcity of natural resources, a climate crisis, a biodiversity crisis and a water crisis. While the fashion industry is somewhat responsible for every one of these crises, the true creatives in the fashion industry can also lead us out of the crisis. The industry is full of visionaries, story tellers, artists, dreamers and people who are willing to push the norms. In a sense, it has always been future focused. What we need now is a fashion industry that uses its power to engage more holistically with our world. We need fashion to show and tell us about the connections between our clothing and our natural world, to give us new ways of enjoying fashion, to be inclusive, to demand that we all become activists, campaigners, strategists and to work together to design solutions that will change our world. This is the future that I am looking forward to.
Footnotes
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/fashion-on-climate
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/fashion-on-climate
Niinimäki, Kirsi & Peters, Greg & Dahlbo, Helena & Perry, Patsy & Rissanen, Timo & Gwilt, Alison. (2020). The environmental price of fast fashion. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment. 1. 189-200. 10.1038/s43017-020-0039-9
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/01/fashion-industry-carbon-unsustainable-environment-pollution/
https://www.environment.gov.au/protection/waste/product-stewardship/textile-waste-roundtable
https://www.environment.gov.au/protection/waste/product-stewardship/textile-waste-roundtable
Niinimäki, Kirsi & Peters, Greg & Dahlbo, Helena & Perry, Patsy & Rissanen, Timo & Gwilt, Alison. (2020). The environmental price of fast fashion. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment. 1. 189-200. 10.1038/s43017-020-0039-9
Ibd.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200921-is-2020-a-turning-point-for-fashion
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/why-art-has-the-power-to-change-the-world/
https://www.wired.com/story/allbirds-adidas-futurecraft-footprint-running-shoe/
https://fashionista.com/2019/03/the-matrix-20th-anniversary-costumes