Brands are proud when they are able to produce individual garments more efficiently, but that’s irrelevant as a climate solution when total volumes continue to increase. “Many [lifecycle assessments] and impact metrics are based on the unit (in our industry, this unit is a garment), and forgo evaluating the full system,” says Esponnette. “If we only evaluate the unit, we ignore overproduction — which is a mistake.”
And most of the industry’s manufacturing is done in countries — China, Bangladesh and India among others — where the grid is powered almost entirely by coal and other fossil fuels. Promises of decarbonisation and transitioning to alternative energy sources are increasingly common in the industry, but have yet to materialise at scale in the countries where it matters most.
Veronica Bates Kassatly, an independent analyst and former World Bank economist, says that even if a brand cuts its raw materials footprint in half, that will only have a 5 per cent impact on the lifetime total of greenhouse gas emissions — hardly the drastic emissions cuts the planet needs and that brands have promised. “To tell us that that’s what we need to look at is quite simply wrong. It’s not substantiated by the data. The big ticket item is the manufacturing.”
For the most part, the clean energy transition is not something that requires technological innovation or futuristic ideas — much of it is almost exclusively dependent on funding.
Growth of “circular services” — but not circularity
Circularity might hold the crown as 2022’s biggest buzzword, with a lot of the conversation centred on resale — even Zara and Shein are now in the game — but while it’s touted as a sustainability move, there’s little indication it’s being deployed for that purpose. Reports from both Thredup and The RealReal found that customers are increasingly treating resale like fast fashion — craving constant newness and buying more than they need — while brands are adding it to existing business models, not looking for it to replace sales of new products. Another Tomorrow, with its own resale launch in May, is a rare exception.
“I’ve seen a lot of companies this year say: ‘We want a circular business model’ — but they don’t want to do the full value chain of circularity. There’s no plan for taking it back, no plan for repair, for reuse,” says Phillips.
While brands are, in fact, dabbling increasingly in repair services as well as rental, they show little intent, as with resale, for those offerings to displace the need for new production and, more importantly, they offer it in a very limited capacity. What is still sorely lacking is a plan for when products are not easily repaired — a true end-of-life strategy. Brands and repair companies repair the products that can recoup enough value to justify the time and expense involved in the repair itself. For products that are too damaged to be repaired in a cost-effective manner, and for lower-value products regardless of the extent of the damage, landfill is still their most likely destination.
That is far from what a circular economy would require, and that’s not an accident, says Nicole Bassett, co-founder of The Renewal Workshop, which restores or reworks unsellable apparel to make new products and was acquired by logistics company Bleckmann this year.
“Brands, when push comes to shove, are doing everything in their power to protect their existing linear business models. I see how quickly brands rushed to protect their own assets when Covid hit, and then continued business as usual when the supply chains struggled,” she says. “In my opinion, brands don’t have the skills to do anything different than they do now.”
The growth in take-back programmes, similarly, has raised concerns that brands are more concerned about the appearance of reducing waste — and in the process, shifting it elsewhere — but not actually eliminating it.
Meanwhile, the industry as a whole remains focused on newness and star appeal — with no better example than fashion’s runaway moment of the year, the Coperni spray-on dress, which came with its own implications for the environment. With a few notable exceptions, such as Chloé, the industry appears largely ignorant of its potential to influence culture and shape society with sustainability as a priority.
In the long run, measuring progress is complicated. There’s little doubt the industry scored some wins this year. The question is more about how, or whether, it will leverage those wins moving forward.
“It’s hard for me to view progress linearly. Sometimes, taking steps back can also propel us forward in other areas,” says Sustainable Brooklyn’s McGuire.
Vogue Business