Right Angle: Sustainable fashion is an oxymoron
Fashion’s reach goes far beyond clothing, extending to everything from phones to perfume, fuelling constant consumption.
Luxury labels use spectacle to hook middle-class buyers into cheaper branded goods while keeping aspiration alive and “democratise luxury".
The fashion industry is locked in a toxic marriage with polymers, with plastics, derived entirely from oil, making up about 60 per cent of all materials it uses.
Even if made sustainably, the sheer scale of fast fashion production — hundreds of millions of items annually — makes true sustainability impossible.
The most expensive article of clothing showcased in the recently concluded India Couture Week was apparently a little over Rs 50,00,000. Most likely, only one piece of this haute fashion will be bought by one person, or maybe two, who will wear it only once. But millions of people will buy fast fashion inspired by the ones trending this week. There will be a new trend next week. This is just like fast food, priced relatively cheaply, produced with not-so-nutritious ingredients and consumed by the people who cannot afford fine dining.
Fashion is a great equaliser. You can feel it in the Delhi Metro. The Jor Bag aunty in her pearls (an absolutely infrequent metro traveller showing off the great Delhi Metro to friends visiting from abroad) and the Gurgaon electrician in his jeans and T-shirt on his way to Chandni Chowk look perfectly fashionable. Everyone in the metro looks fashionable.
If one cannot afford branded clothes, they’ll find at least fake brands, or ‘first copies’, or recycled items from Ghora Mandi, or imported second-hand, or export rejects, or imported defectives. In the process, far too many clothes are being consumed and there is a pushback from the sustainability gang.
As a result, sustainable fashion, a buzzword, has been doing the rounds for the last decade. “You know, Saloni (name changed) has the largest collection of sustainable clothes” is a self-goal. Or, a shirt proclaiming it is ecological with a tag in small print saying ‘Made with 17 per cent recycled fibre’ makes a pretentious claim.
The fashion industry runs on hyperbole. Otherwise, who would take an oversized sock and call it a headgear? Or who would take miniature missile heads to make bra cups? So, the pretentious industry’s claim to be ‘sustainable’ deserves a hyperbolic response: sustainable fashion is an oxymoron.
Why is fashion industry pretending to be sustainable?
Fast fashion has created a global dumpyard of discarded clothes, dumped by consumers after the trend is over (and it happens frequently), waste materials dumped by manufacturers, as well as unsold clothes. We dump 92 million tonnes of textile waste every year while trying to look good. Check out those trending photographs of the fashion dump in the Atacama Desert in Chile doing the rounds. It’s so big that it can now be seen from space.
The industry is also a guzzler, drinking 215 trillion litres of water annually. If you have no idea how much water that is, here is a clue: it’s equivalent to 86 million Olympic-sized swimming pools! If you still have no clue, you can buy a new swimsuit.
Obviously, there is water pollution from unhealthy synthetic dyes and other processing chemicals. The World Bank has calculated the fashion industry’s wastewater generation as 20 per cent of total global industrial wastewater. But nothing can beat the fashion industry’s toxic marriage with the polymer industry.
Fast fashion, just like fast food, runs on the principle of affordability and that has ensured the advent of cheaper fabrics like nylon, polyester and acrylic in the fashion industry. United Nations Environment Programme in 2019 estimated that plastic constitutes around 60 per cent of all material used in the fashion industry, all coming from oil. A significant part is obviously generated by packaging, but don’t forget the buttons and zips.
Washing synthetic clothes generates 500,000 tonnes of microplastics every year that will come back to your body to make you more fashionable inside.
The industry boasts of employing 430 million worldwide. It’s almost a threat against any attempt to touch the industry. While the designers, stylists and senior management are hip, cool and fashionable, sweatshops in the Global South are a dark reality.
Under pressure, fashion industry has pretended to work towards ‘sustainable fashion’. The biggest thing it could do was to pick up some old clothes to create recycled fibres and mix them with virgin fibres and put an ‘eco’ label on them. Some will recycle wastewater. Some have promised to use only recycled and sustainably sourced fibre by 2030. Some are trying to reduce or eliminate single-use plastic from packaging. One has promised to use only renewable energy for manufacturing.
There is a new trend of using discarded polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles to make recycled new fibre and clothes. This has been promoted as giving new life to PET bottles. In reality, this is just postponing the death a bit — eternal recycling is not an option.
On the other hand, as a response to the ills of fast fashion, a lot of small entrepreneurs have offered clothes made of organic cotton, responsibly sourced, dyed and stitched for discerning buyers. These efforts are great but too small compared to the large quantity of clothes churned out by fast fashion companies. It is also very difficult to change the system and processes in large manufacturing units. But industry watchdogs have always called out big brands’ claims as greenwash because they are producing and selling too many clothes. This method of producing and selling too many units is true for all industries. But the fashion industry has a deeper reach.
The fashion industry is the shop window of capitalism, the unending cycle of extraction, production, consumption and disposal. The divine objective of this shop window is to generate aspiration — not only aspiration, but unending aspiration. How can this industry be sustainable?
The gospel of excess
Fashion is not only about clothes and accessories like belts, bags and hats. The extended family consists of everything from your mobile phone to cosmetics to perfume to jewellery to motorcycles, cars, whiskey glasses, audio speakers and gold-plated commode seats. The fashion industry fuels consumption. Your current mobile phone may be functioning perfectly, but you need that new phone with a ‘monkey brown’ body because your best friend got one as a birthday gift from their spouse.
The hyperbolic design of haute couture, often offensive, is not meant for consumption by most people. Alexander McQueen was an important British designer in the late 90s worth taking note of. He presented some of the most atrocious fashion shows, peppered with violence and sexuality to generate shock.
As a designer for Givenchy, McQueen thought of reaching the earnest elite with his avant-garde clothes. But Givenchy was not interested in selling those clothes; they were selling the brand with a shocking spectacle to reach the large middle-market wannabes, ending up selling cheaper but branded handbags, cosmetics and accessories.
This is sweetly called the democratisation of luxury. There is a reason for fashion to be so popular. The social atmosphere signals us towards upward mobility. Meher Varma, an anthropologist with experience in the fashion industry, explained to me that two important elements to trigger upward mobility — good education and foreign travel — are difficult to accomplish for most of the population. It’s fashion that can help you attain instant moksha.
Media is part of the game; there is a clear design by the media to bring it to everyone. There is no reason to regularly report upmarket fashion shows selling unaffordable clothes to middle-class readers, apart from churning the impossible desire to consume more and look ‘good’.
Then there are always cheaper versions available. Like all other industries, the fashion industry has also created built-in planned obsolescence by fast-changing ‘trends’. A 2016 report by McKinsey hinted at an alarming trend: the fashion industry sold 60 per cent more garments in 2014 than in 2000, but clothes bought in 2014 were kept only for half as long compared to 2000.
While there are altruistic sermons about slow fashion, no brand can possibly ask their clients to consume less and buy responsibly sourced expensive ‘last forever’ clothes. For years, this industry has done just the opposite, in a mischievous way. Just imagine, who could have sold hundreds of thousands of the same design to hundreds of thousands of buyers, telling them individually that they’d look unique in that same design?
Look at the trend of buying new pairs of torn jeans! Traditionally, people used to wear the same pair for a long time until they frayed or got torn. This reduced sales, so they came up with selling brand-new torn pairs!
The biggest fast fashion company is famous for introducing new designs every week. They are known to manufacture 450 million pieces a year and the number is always increasing. Even if they produce everything in a sustainable manner, can producing 450 million pieces in a sustainable manner really be called sustainable fashion?
The fashion industry needs to move beyond recycling — it’s the number that’s the problem. And it cannot change, because excess is the motto behind capitalism’s shop window.