{"id":23324,"date":"2022-06-05T13:33:00","date_gmt":"2022-06-05T09:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/me\/?post_type=articles&p=23324"},"modified":"2022-06-05T13:33:00","modified_gmt":"2022-06-05T09:33:00","slug":"co-designing-sustainable-fashion","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/me\/articles\/co-designing-sustainable-fashion\/","title":{"rendered":"Sustainability Is In Style: Why Co-Designing Your Closet Could Be The Future Of Fashion"},"content":{"rendered":"

The hottest item in your wardrobe right now is not by Alessandro Michele or Demna; it is an idea. Circularity is the buzzword du jour in fashion. But what and where is circularity? Why should you care? These are reasonable questions. For now, you may think of circularity as recycling with aspirations: turning old clothes into new, on repeat, baked into the entire system. The problem is, this is the opposite of fashion as we know it. Fashion has spent a couple of centuries training us to reject and re-buy on a seasonal basis, but, understandably, given our climate catastrophe, the industry has now changed its mind and wants what humanity wants, which is to save us from wipeout. At the same time, it still wants us to keep buying as much new stuff as possible. This is not mathematically viable. Fully functioning circular systems could help but we are nowhere near that. Fortunately, I have solved the world. It\u2019s called co-design. All we need to do is to love our clothes, keeping them alive, circulating, and fashionably mended. Trust me, this is more fun than click-shopping anyway.<\/p>\n

The hard truth is we cannot continue blithely bulk buying and recycling last year\u2019s frocks into the bin. The industry that produces our clothes sits at the pinnacle of the pollution charts, and treats its workers poorly, right down to full-scale human rights abuses \u2013 cleanclothes.org estimates some 60 million workers are grossly overworked and underpaid. We sustain these practices by shopping. And according to ellenmacarthurfoundation.org, every year New York City landfills 90 million kilograms of clothing which is equivalent to over 440 Statues of Liberty! (Donating unwanted garments is no better; a shockingly tiny percentage get reused.) The fashion industry, especially its \u201cfast\u201d part (read: mass brands that sell cheap), needs to change its unfettered growth model and fix endemic supply chain issues, but, meanwhile, we can all wield better purse power, and dress more circularly right at home.<\/p>\n

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Jordanian designer Thea Zeina Tadros, upcycles old men’s suits and redesigns them into womenswear. Image courtesy of Thea Zeina<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Circularity in fashion used to be second nature. Everyone kept good garments going by mending and remodelling, since textiles were by far the most valuable items most people owned. When you rear and shear the sheep, wash, comb, card, spin, and weave the wool before even starting to sew, you are truly and literally invested in the resulting coat. This was still the case even 150 years ago, and it is really only in this century that clothes have become so utterly easy-come-easy-go. This is linearity, the industrial take-make-waste model that broke our planet, and fashion, is finally fixing itself and curving that line. Well, it is trying.<\/p>\n

Luxury labels especially, but also mass market suppliers, are talking up a storm about circularity, and sustainability, and responsibility, which is great, but it\u2019s what they are actually doing that counts. It can be hard to sort the empty promises and PR \u2013 known as greenwashing \u2013 from genuine change, and unfortunately it\u2019s up to us to read between the lines, and act accordingly.<\/p>\n

Becoming the co-designer of your own wardrobe begins with learning to translate corporate doublespeak and then partnering with the better brands \u2013 by buying them. Few of the big players are hitting their own CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) targets, because switching to a circular model requires far more than occasionally using 50 percent recycled fabric in a special ethical collection.<\/p>\n

Circularity means rethinking the entire supply chain and being transparent about it. It means textile-to-textile recycling, sure, but also better, or longer lasting, design, using recycled or renewable materials and manufacturing measures such as zero-waste cutting. Most of all, it means decoupling revenues from material production by baking the four \u201cRe\u201ds into the business model: Resale, rental, remaking, and repair are essential to fashion\u2019s future. This is not as farfetched as it might sound. According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the four \u201cRe\u201ds \u2013 mostly \u201cresale\u201d \u2013 already constitute 3.5 percent of the global fashion market, and are rising at a rate that could reduce the industry\u2019s GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions by more than the annual output of France by 2030. You will spot the flaw in this scenario. It is all about the \u201cre\u201d. If we go on buying new clothes at the same rate, we may never get to breathe better than the French in 2030.<\/p>\n

This idea of pledging to improve by years with zeros on the ends has been around a while, and it has yet to work. I\u2019ve been reporting on this business for three decades, am on the board of two sustainability watchdogs, founded one of the first closet sharing sites, and am an historian of mending: I have seen this movie. As an example, Global Fashion Agenda, a major organisation promoting sustainability, got 12.5 percent of the global fashion market\u2019s businesses to sign a 2017 commitment \u201cto accelerate the industry\u2019s transition to a circular fashion system\u201d by 2020. In 2020, two-thirds of the targets they pledged were unreached, and most of the successes were about design, not emissions.<\/p>\n

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Danish sustainable Denim label Tomorrow Denim presents their Autumn\/Winter 2022 show | Instagram @tomorrowdenim<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This syndrome is more serious when you, the co-designer of your closet, are seeking something ethical, responsible, and sustainable, invest in Spring\/Summer Look 32 partly because its company promised to eliminate its emissions by 2030. That is pure greenwash, a PR hit \u2013 and a sale \u2013 from a broken promise. Other common greenwashings include \u201ctake-back schemes,\u201d where you exchange old clothes for a voucher to make you buy more clothes from that company. And do they recycle those taken-back clothes? Nope. At best, only slightly and symbolically. \u201cCarbon offsets\u201d are merely guilt payments: emit many bad gases, but, hey, plant a tree. Then there are all the virtuous sounding words: \u201cConscious,\u201d \u201cFor Life,\u201d \u201cWashwell,\u201d \u201cEarth Friendly,\u201d \u201cBetter Planet,\u201d \u201cGreen Wear,\u201d all accompanied by reassuringly righteous phrases about aiming to minimise environmental impact, or helping to guarantee clean production, that are, on second glance, so vague they mean nothing.<\/p>\n

Aside from the \u201cRe\u201d methods \u2013 I\u2019ll get to those \u2013 hope in future fashion can be found, but often outside the mainstream, in fresh brands and indie labels that have their very foundations in the principles of circularity. Maybe they were started by millennials who grew up with climate crisis and human rights awareness; or maybe COVID reset the founders\u2019 value systems \u2013 and thus their market perceptions. Another sartorial effect of the pandemic has been to spread the joys of closet sharing. According to a report on thredup.com, 33 million people shopped secondhand for the first time last year. And now, with owned clothes (the common term \u201cpre-owned\u201d is nonsense: someone always owns them), we reach the core of co-design.<\/p>\n

To be a co-designer is to rethink your relationship to your wardrobe. No longer are your clothes just things sitting in drawers passively waiting their turn, they are altogether part of you. You work with them to create your looks, that is, how you enhance, or define, or present yourself in the world \u2013 in fact, who you are. We\u2019ve been cast as consumers of fashion for so long, we\u2019ve forgotten how to have fun with it. Consuming is a strange term to use for clothes, as if we were gobbling them up until they\u2019re gone. (Come to think of it, that does describe the worst of the hyped-up market.) So, stop being force fed fashion, and be the co-designer of your style. This means taking ownership and responsibility for the clothes pets you have adopted into your home. When you\u2019re bored with that new LBD, or any outfit, don\u2019t dump it, resell it, or rent it out \u2013 it\u2019s just a matter of time until a luxury peer-to-peer rental platform pops up near you. Or start one! Resale really is booming, and it has already lost any vestigial stigma or dreary feeling of secondhand being second best. Huda Kattan, the Dubai-based beauty billionaire, recently invested in the Luxury Closet, part of a \u201csustainable fashion aggregator\u201d (read: posh second-hand sales), called Reluxable. Global Fashion Exchange produced the first high fashion swap in Riyadh last December \u2013 an addictive opportunity for cashless, painless style renewal that is bound to catch on.<\/p>\n

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