Can Green Washing Really Wash Your Dirty Linen?

A closer look at sustainable fashion claims

The setting for Raf Simons final collection for Christian Dior, October 2nd, 2015

“Sustainable fashion” has come to dominate almost all narratives around contemporary fashion production, collection, and consumption. Brands are quick to embrace overt cues of sustainability and eco-friendly practices and materials, everything from trees lining runways to plastic bottles being recycled into fabrics. 

Much of these, however, appear to be little more than cosmetic cover-ups with little to no changes in structural and systemic reform. Is holding a carbon-neutral runway fashion show enough? Does mere virtue-signalling mitigate the threat that the fashion industry poses over the environment? 

Gucci’s parent group, Kering, announced during fashion month that the whole company would become carbon neutral

As this Vogue article points out, “a major show in New York or Paris is planned months in advance, and probably ending with a dumpster of plastic water bottles, press notes, invitations, flowers, and decor. To say nothing of the planes, trains, and automobiles required for everyone to actually get there.” Add to this, there is simply no data currently available that offers the total carbon footprint of a fashion show.

So, how reliable are the sustainable credentials and claims of fashion brands?

Sustainability, in industry sectors other than fashion, is in fact a critical need of the hour and businesses have rapidly reoriented themselves by changing business models, supply chains, feedstock materials, emission norms, etc., to actually meet sustainability goals. As a result, “sustainability” has gained a tremendous amount of economic and moral virtue currency.

Not to be left behind, the fashion industry is moving rapidly to meet the expectations of these new “woke” consumers who now expect the same kind of responsible, eco-friendly, and sustainable processes from their fashion brands.  

Yet, as McKinsey’s Saskia Hedrich notes, few consumers are even aware that sustainable fashion has to mean more than just using organic fabrics or pasting green labels; there are aspects beyond the dimensions of environment and natural use of resources, such as labor rights, fair wages, decent working conditions, and responsible sourcing that are important components of a sustainable, closed loop, development process.

Therefore, brands claiming to be sustainable need to be more transparent in their communication of about their structural and operational models of sourcing and manufacturing. Cutting down on the use of plastics, for instance, does little to advance the labor rights of garment workers in Sri Lanka. The use of cotton and natural fabrics might be a favourite of sustainable-fashion consumers, but its highly water intensive production is bound to have a negative impact on the communities around where such cotton is grown, especially in developing countries like India.

So, we are still left with the question, can fashion really be sustainable?

The answer perhaps lies in going beyond the overt cues of sustainability. Perhaps, only when brands willingly go against their market impulse to sell more and sell often will there be a real, meaningful realization of sustainability. As Leigh Mapledoram, programme area manager for textiles and public sector at Wrap, believes: “the answer is to invest in fashion that is timeless and can be adapted and updated to change with the times. ‘If the average life of clothes could be extended by just nine months it could reduce carbon, water and waste footprints by 20-30%.’” 

Batsheva Hay, who founded the brand Batsheva in New York, says, “The focus should really be on buying less and wearing what you own over and over again, rather than buying too much cheap, disposable clothing.”

People think of fashion as being a cultural signifier of contemporary times, and if our current planetary and political pressures are anything to go by, then contemporary fashion needs to discard its system of seasonal trends and promote more enduring alternatives. 

Otherwise, sustainability in fashion will remain nothing more than just greenwashing of dirty linen.