The devil not only wears Prada, she also wears Louis Vuitton, Nike, H&M and Forever 21. While the decision between a cowl or halter neck top is being contemplated by the common consumer, in an eight-storey building outside Dhaka, deep cracks and the begging of garment factory workers to not be sent inside to work are ignored. Killing 1,134 people the building’s collapse exposed to the world the dirty face of fashion. This maelstrom of the fast fashion cycle is what designers Sarah Garrett-Hodoniczky and Nisha Abey are challenging, making sustainability the new black.
“You can make ethical fashion cooler and really mainstream and if you can’t tell the difference between a fast fashion item and an ethical fashion piece in affordability and style, I think that’s the key.”
Sustainability seems to be the latest ‘buzz’ word in fashion, and for good reason. What used to be a cycle of 4 seasons in fashion, has evolved to be 52 seasons where each week there are new styles being released adding to what is ‘new’ and ‘on trend’. This is the height of the fast fashion hierarchy; created purely to shift more products to more people.
Queensland University of Technology Senior Lecturer in Fashion and Researcher Dr Alice Payne explains that “fast fashion is relatively recent in Australia, only in 2011 we started seeing the big multinational fast fashion firms come here.”
Clothes currently lie in wait in boxes, on plastic hangers, wrapped in plastic awaiting the day they see fluorescent lighting again. Worldwide the average number of times a garment is worn before it is discarded has decreased by 36% compared to 15 years ago. The Circular Fibres Initiative analysis estimate that one garbage truck of textiles is landfilled or incinerated every second.
While the thread of the fast fashion empire unravels the seams of the industry are expanding making room for a new wave of designers committed to creating fashion without workers or the environment paying the price.
In the creative community of Byron Bay UK taught designer Nisha Abey is sewing up a storm with her sustainable and ethical brand Liar the Label on a mission to design smart and deliver big fashion. “Liar started as a way to change how you can perceive fashion,” Nisha says. “You can make ethical fashion cooler and really mainstream. If you can’t tell the difference between a fast fashion item and an ethical fashion piece in affordability and style, I think that’s the key.”
Consumer habits are largely to blame for textile waste. Annual production forecasts from PCI Fibres found that while Australia sat just behind North America's need for new clothing, the number of textiles consumed annually was twice the global average amounting to 26 kilograms per person per year.
Nisha has seen a shift in consumers as millennial buyers come into power being aware of where their clothes come from and wanting to purchase ethical, sustainable and Australian made items. “At the end of the day if it’s not a good design and they don’t like it then they’re not actually going to buy it and they’re not going to support you,” Nisha says. “We want to keep on trend as much as possible and being as ethical as we can.”
“It’s so easy to just buy what is new and the latest trends. But I do think we need to know where our clothes are coming from,” Ali Page a millennial consumer says. “I don't think it’s good enough anymore to just turn a blind eye. It’s us, the consumers who are contributing to the issue because we the ones buying the products.”
Nisha has also seen the stigma around sustainable fashion shifting “I think it has massively changed since I started the brand because it’s been such a trend in fashion,” she says. “It’s been a trend because of plastic waste and the vegan movement. This is conscious living which is why fashion has also come into it.”
Liar the Label started out with bikinis made out of recycled plastics “it’s a circular process that’s never going to waste, you just keep reusing it.” Moving more towards fashion and clothing Nisha is “starting to make some bits and pieces from old op-shop finds and repurposing them,” she says. “But I don’t want to create new fashion, because I think that’s just as wasteful.”
While textiles made of natural fibres are biodegradable, the majority of fast fashion textiles are made of synthetic fibres. Looking at post-consumer waste purely pragmatically how can waste be taken and turned into a resource? “It’s a huge logistical challenge,” Dr Payne says about how textiles have the potential to be recycled. “One to separate them, two to actually disassemble them and then three to reconstitute them into useful materials.”
Nisha is challenging the multinational fast fashion firms and believes “There is really amazing ethical fashion out there that is as affordable as fast fashion. You can buy clothes that you can wear for years and years and years.”
While Nisha is making waves, in a fuel-efficient diesel van humming around Brisbane’s leafy suburbs designer Sarah Garrett-Hodoniczky has been creating sustainable fashion before it was ‘cool’. Starting up her label ‘Rant’ 15 years ago, mother to not one, but two sustainable fashion labels Sarah introduced ‘Bestowed’ coming about from watching the industry change in 2011. “All the sewers didn’t have work, the whole industry was falling down around it here in Australia because of everything going off to China.”
Sarah has taken what she has learnt over the years and continues to challenge the stigma of sustainable fashion. She believes that sustainability “has to be made out of eco-friendly fabrics, it has to have minimal amount of packaging as possible and it has to be made with as fewer travelling miles as possible.”
Each garment is chauffeured by Sarah’s partner Jason making up to five stops until the pieces come together to form a sustainable and ethically made piece of clothing. “Everyone works from home, under their own house,” Sarah explains emphasising the importance of knowing exactly how her clothing is produced. From the baby steps of drawing the pattern, to putting the pieces together Sarah can name exactly who did what in the timeline.
A gamut of design innovation, consumer movements, education and pressure on global retailers have arisen across the globe in recent years, united in their mission to eliminate the detrimental consequences of fast fashion. A major trend of 2018 predicted in The State of Fashion Report is the increasing importance of sustainability for both consumers and in the fashion business model.
A shift in attitudes towards waste is key to a more circular fashion cycle. Circularity of the fashion industry means that clothes are designed, sourced, produced and provided with the intention to be used and circulated responsibly for as long as possible. “In terms of how we actually think about waste garments it’s about how can we find a way to embrace the old and the unloved and really enjoy that patina of use that old things get because that’s a way of revaluing and retransforming the waste,” says Dr Payne.
The rise in social media, particularly the Instagram culture has resulted in a new wave of mass consumption of fashion. “So you have a whole group of people that might not want to be photographed more than once in the same outfit. You have this coupled with the ability to be able to get this constant refresh and look and feel of things. The two have come together as a perfect storm,” Dr Payne says.
“You can have that newness fix through other ways; by swapping, by sharing, by drawing on the enormous pools of resources that already exists,” explains Dr Payne. “With fast fashion it’s not as if we’re seeing a new thing each time.” By keeping clothing in circulation for longer the environmental impact and implications can be significantly reduced. “A second-hand garment that has multiple lives will also have a lower environmental impact overall than any new garment.”
At the Copenhagen Fashion Summit in Denmark last week the likes of Burberry, Nike and H&M joined the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Make Fashion Circular Initiative. With the trend of sustainability being ‘in’, large companies such as H&M are quick to jump aboard the sustainability train, however their practices are yet to show any real change.
Savvy shoppers will be aware of the greenwashing in the industry becoming a significant challenge for consumers and sustainable designers as these larger companies are now labelling their practices as eco-friendly and ethical. Yet it’s easy enough to talk-the-talk. As a result, boundaries are blurred to what extend these large fashion chains are taking sustainability into their practices. Although a company may say they are ethical and sustainable “with greenwashing they are just trying to hit the trend. At the end of the day it’s not what they care about in the fashion industry, it’s just a massive marketing strategy,” says Nisha.
“Closing the loop in whatever way, whatever kind of circular approaches are absolutely going to be an essential pathway but it’s one pathway of many,” says Dr Payne. “You can embrace the patina of oldness and decay as an aesthetic and fashion can apply that to a new thing.”
Not only do designers and large fast fashion firms hold the responsibility for change “customers buying it really need to force the change,” Nisha believes.
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