Sustainability in Fashion is a nuanced, and complicated topic. Why?
Before we dive deeper into raw materials, certifications and legislations. Let me start from “The journey and the complexity of a garment”.
Where do our clothes come from? How are clothes being made? What’s the journey of a material to make clothes? Let’s talk about the supply chain.
The supply chain is a complex web of connections.
Let’s take a material for an example, such as the crop we know best – Cotton. The raw material comes from a farm, then goes to a ginner to process, then a spinner to make into yarn/threads, then a fabric mill weave it into fabric, then a manufacturer turning it into a garment.
By the time the garment reaches your hands, this cotton ball has definitely earned more travel miles than you. Furthermore, there are multiple components on a garment. The buttons, the zippers, the lining, the trims, the labels etc.
They are produced by an individual supplier and might be coming from a different country, which also means? More travelling!
This is why we say fashion is the second most polluting industry because the journey and the process of making a garment is so much dependent on transportation.
The awareness that I would like to raise is that a garment doesn’t magically appear in front of us, but has gone through many processes and pairs of hands. Don’t forget we haven’t gone into the process of designing, dyeing, washing, and assembling. Complicated, isn’t it?
No matter how much a brand shouts out their sustainability ethos, the environmental impact is there.
It’s the matter of how the brand tackles it and goes the extra mile to minimise the impact.
From the consumers’ perspective, now we know that every garment in our wardrobe needs such a resource intensive process to reach our doorstep. So there are a few questions that i would like everyone to ask ourselves.
Shall we take good care of them?
Shall we re-wear them more?
Shall we rethink before we buy?
Shall we start making conscious choices?
Sustainability, in plain English, means the ability to continue over a long period of time. Putting into our modern context, it’s a mindset, a way of life, it is about preserving the environment for every living being to live for a long period of time.
In a nutshell, to be sustainable in fashion, is neither something that can be action in a day or two; nor a silver bullet to cure everything. It requires all sectors from the fashion industry, to come together and put sustainability at it’s core, and start thinking of solutions on minimising the environmental impact respectively.
References:
https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/fashion-clothing/fashion-supply-chains
https://www.seethroughcarbon.org/articles/pilot-7-why-global-textiles
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