the moment
From the bio-revolution to new legislation, there are signs that a change for good is underway in the fashion industry. Dana Thomas asks, what will it take for sustainability to stick?
WHEN COVID-19 STRUCK, AND THE WORLD CAME TO A standstill, the fashion business underwent a very public environmental and social re-evaluation – one that was, and still is, greatly needed. The fashion industry produces between 100 and 150 billion items a year – nobody really knows the exact number, because no one has to keep count – and only 80% are sold; the remaining 20% are destroyed or dumped in landfill before ever hitting the retail floor. Only 1% of fashion that is sold is recycled.
Hearing designers and executives call for change was heartening. I have reported on the fashion industry for 35 years, starting at The Washington Post in the late 1980s, and thought I knew the business – how our clothes were made, who made them, what the factories were like.
Then I started researching for my book, Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes, and saw a completely different side of the industry: filthy sweatshops in Bangladesh and downtown Los Angeles; a ‘dead’ river in Vietnam, turned toxic from denimfactory runoff. And the statistics gathered by NGOs and the United Nations on fashion’s environmental impact – now that was mindboggling. The business is believed to be responsible for 2 to 8% of global carbon emissions – again, a broad range, because no one has to report their carbon-impact figures. Many of those emissions come from coal-powered factories. Two-thirds of our clothes are made from petroleum-based materials, such as polyester, nylon, neoprene and elastane, which give Lycra and Spandex their stretch. These are plastics, essentially, that never biodegrade, and that emit microfibres when washed –an estimated 1million per load of laundry. And there are so many other horrors, too: immense water usage, carcinogenic dyes, toxic chemicals to treat crops like cotton, animal abuse.
‘Textiles have, on average, the fourth-biggest impact on the environment and climate change from a consumption perspective,’ says Lars Fogh Mortensen, circular economy and textiles expert at the European Environment Agency. ‘Only food, housing and mobility have higher impacts, and these have been regulated for years, if not decades.’
How could a business that is supposed to be about beauty be so ugly? The fact that fashion’s top players found this appalling, too, and were moved to do something about it, gave me hope.
Then everyone got back to work, and the loud talk of reforms q
