Image: Installation by Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña, ‘Quipu Womb (The Story of the Red Thread)’, 2017 (source)

Since September last year, I’ve been studying for a (part-time) Master's degree at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in Degrowth: Ecology, Economics and Policy. The course, filled with teachers, entrepreneurs, farmers, artists, scientists, and activists, covers a huge range of topics under the degrowth umbrella, from environmental justice, ecological economics and ecofeminism to the history of capitalism, urban planning and the sociology of what gives life meaning. It’s fascinating, and overwhelming. My interest in degrowth, as a means, as an ends, and in particular as a lens for understanding the fashion industry, has long lingered beneath my work. But as systems of power are increasingly being unmasked and upended, this course has connected the dots further still.

I still have far more questions than answers, and feel less confident than I probably ever have about sharing my thoughts publicly, but this seems like a good place to start sowing some seeds again. With that in mind, let’s explore where things currently stand on degrowth and fashion.

A recap - what is degrowth?

Degrowth is, in short:

• A critique of the global capitalist system which pursues economic growth at all costs

• A proposal for a new economic system which prioritises social and environmental wellbeing

This description (abridged here), which does not use the label ‘degrowth’, offers a broad overview of what degrowth entails. It was recently shown to more than 5000 people in the UK and USA, and 82% of these people said they support it!

On the one hand, high-income countries must scale down non-essential forms of production and consumption to achieve faster decarbonization and reverse various forms of ecological damage (e.g., biodiversity loss). This includes reducing things like SUVs, private jets, mansions, luxury goods, industrial meat, advertising, and fast fashion; cutting the purchasing power of the very rich; shifting from private cars to public transit; ending the practice of planned obsolescence by designing products that last longer; and extending product lifespans through repair and reuse. 

On the other hand, social progress and human well-being must be improved by ensuring universal access to high-quality public services (e.g., healthcare, education, public transit, childcare), affordable housing, and living wages. A public job guarantee, where the government guarantees employment to those willing and able to work, would end unemployment and empower people to contribute to the most important projects of our generation: building renewable energy capacity, improving public transit, insulating homes, and regenerating ecosystems.

Crucially, this economic system would have an impact beyond the high-income countries where it would be implemented. Currently, the overuse of resources in these countries is sustained through the unfair appropriation of resources from the Global South. As a consequence, the countries in the Global South are more susceptible to various detrimental environmental and social consequences (e.g., biodiversity loss, poverty) and are drained of resources that are necessary for human development. The economic system we are describing is about ending this process of plunder. It calls for a fairer international economy so that all people on the planet can achieve decent living standards within planetary boundaries.

Fashion is often cited as both an archetype of the destructive growth system, and as a key sector for potential cultural change to the contrary (see Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham’s ‘Earth Logic’ and Sandra Niessen’s ‘Defashion’).

Unequal exchange: Fashion’s foundation

The term ‘unequal exchange’ is an economic concept that describes the capture and transfer of a vastly disproportionate amount of labour and natural resources from the so-called ‘periphery’ (Global South) to the so-called ‘core’ (Global North). In this system, core nations enjoy surplus value while peripheral nations suffer surplus costs.

In a basic sense this is very obvious for the fashion industry - think of it like a T-shirt being sold in Europe for 20 euros, while just 5 euros has been paid to workers and for raw materials in Asia. In this case, Europe has net-appropriated 15 euros worth of value from Asia. Most importantly for this concept, rather than those labour hours and kilograms of cotton being used to meet local clothing needs, or reorientated to other socially necessary production, they have been used to fulfil the desires of Western consumers, without sufficient payment to remedy the social and environmental impacts of producing that T-shirt.

The fashion industry as we know it is built on this unequal exchange, with a long and shameful history of chasing the lowest possible labour costs (with slavery of course, this became zero), and the weakest possible environmental regulations, to extract maximal profit for any given textile product.

Which brings us to an excellent new report from Research & Degrowth International and War on Want, Extraction Fashion: Unequal Exchange and Degrowth Explored. Here’s the always brilliant Tansy Hoskins with an overview:

The report aimed to quantify the material footprint of the fashion industry in 2021 to demonstrate the frankly insane amount of resources used to make clothing that we mostly do not need, benefiting the few at the cost of the many. For example:

• The land used to fulfil EU fashion consumption amounted to 226,927.80 square kilometres. 90% of this land is in Asia and Africa, not Europe.

• The fossil fuels used to fulfil EU fashion consumption amounted to 40,976 kilotons, plus 45,889 kilotons of metals and 189,261 kilotons of minerals, mostly from China.

• The freshwater used to fulfil EU fashion consumption amounted to 5.45 billion cubic meters, mostly from Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

The report also measures the many millions of labour hours it takes to fuel fashion consumption, again showing clear patterns of unequal exchange. Its data suggests that 90% of labour hours embedded in EU fashion consumption in 2021 are in China, India and ‘Rest of Asia'. The report notes that: “Every one of these hours spent in a factory in China, India, Indonesia or Turkey is an hour not used for family and care work, practising agroecology (sustainable farming that works with nature) for domestic manufacturing for local fashion industries, for people’s material needs of food and natural goods, building flood defences, protecting and restoring habitats, education, health, community building and political engagement as well as rest, leisure, music, literature and creativity.”

These trends reflect the findings of this study which concluded that across all sectors, the Global North net-appropriated 826 billion hours of embodied labour from the Global South in 2021, with a wage value of €16.9 trillion euros.

In other words, this is not ‘news’, and it is not fashion-specific (read A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things for a much broader explanation of the topic), which means we cannot view this sector in isolation from the bigger picture of the world economy. This is why the dominant individual brand-driven approach in fashion is a totally unsuitable frame for exploring degrowth, even when great examples of post-growth inspired business models and grassroots practices abound.

So what do we do about this wicked problem?

With that big-picture approach in mind, I don’t have space here to explore the massive range of (often contradictory) proposed solutions to fashion’s relationship to unequal exchange, but the Extraction Fashion report’s conclusion is a good baseline to understand the mammoth global political changes (ie. ‘delinking’) that would need to happen to make it possible to de-grow fashion in the first place:

“A just, equitable and ecological transition along degrowth lines means removing the barriers for countries currently locked into fashion exports as their economic lifeline to make genuinely sovereign decisions about economic development….fundamentally, a rebalancing of global economic power - through a fair shares approach and reform of debt, trade, tax regimes…The fiscal freedom for countries in the Global South to enact their own alternative low-carbon and green industrial economic strategies would constrain the fashion industry’s ability to extract so relentlessly for profit - as instead those natural goods and human labour would become organised to provide for the material needs of their people without perpetuating cycles of climate breakdown, environmental degradation, poverty and inequality.”

Again, no answers, just more questions. But maybe we can at least agree on a starting point, a fundamental common sense that, according to Anne Oudard writing for Cotton Diaries on Substack, “responsible sourcing strategy without systems change is just gardening”.

Image source

Finally, if the topic of post-growth fashion sparks your interest, I highly recommend subscribing to Katia Dayan Vladimirova’s Post Growth Fashion, a fountain of excellent resources and thought-starters from academia and beyond.

Post Growth Fashion

Your ultimate source of curated quality research insights and opinion pieces on fashion, sustainability, and social change - sprinkled with my (oh so hilarious) takes on serious matters in this space

By Katia Dayan Vladimirova

One quote

“Because I want to know! Sometimes, you can use what you know, but that’s not what counts most. I want to know everything there is to know. Not because it’s any use, but for the pleasure of knowing, and now I demand that you teach me everything you know, even if I will never be able to use it.”

― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

Three links:

• I’ve been listening to a lot of Planet Critical recently, in large part for the skill of the interviewer, Rachel Donald, who really challenges her guests (and listeners!)

• The Rana Plaza Solidarity Collective are protesting in London on 28th March as a ‘Fashion against Fascism’ bloc at the Together March

• Grace Blakeley’s Substack is great. Give this a read:

I’ll also leave you with this (very lo-fi) short film I made with some fellow classmates about textile waste as an environmental justice issue in Accra, Ghana. It follows the global textile waste stream, its impacts on communities, and some proposed solutions from the field of degrowth and unequal exchange. It includes an interview with James Mensah.

Threadbare is a newsletter I started during the first Covid lockdown as an outlet for my musings on ‘sustainable fashion’, as making and consuming social media content about the topic increasingly left me in an apathetic doom spiral. I haven’t written here in a long time, but I remain in the ‘industry’; for the past 3 years, I’ve been campaigning for a fossil fuel-free fashion supply chain at climate NGO Action Speaks Louder. Since September, I’ve also been pursuing a master’s degree in Degrowth (more on that another time).

In 2026 I’m going to try and write semi-regularly again, although I don’t think I’ll commit myself to any particular schedule. If you would like to receive the occasional ~500 word newsletter, closing with one quote to ponder and three links to explore, please consider subscribing.

Subscribe now

David Shrigley: Untitled (It Was Worthwhile Doing This), 2022

I would bet that anyone whose work involves critiquing existing systems and pulling on levers to try and change those systems feels one of three ways right now:

1. Cynical, jaded, often wondering why they even bother

2. Hopeful, motivated, but frustrated at the pace of change

3. A dizzying fluctuation between all of the above

There are thousands of think pieces detailing why we feel this way - surpassing 1.5°C, escalating extreme weather events, Trump’s deranged reign of denial, the genocide in Palestine, AI slop-mania, take your pick. You don’t need to hear it from me.

So, is it still worthwhile doing this?

Yes. Here are my reasons, today at least:

• Fuck doomerism. Fuck collapsism. Despite 1.5°C, the climate crisis is not a specific threshold beyond which the world is not worth saving. Ditto any given social or environmental issue. Every fraction of a degree, every handful of soil, every sip of water, every child, every inch of this planet we call home and its 4.5+ billion years of history. I refuse to see any of it as a lost cause.

• Every day, people are using their one wild and precious life to make our world the tiniest bit better, even in the tiniest ways. A rich pluriverse of alternatives to destructive, extractive growth logic is genuinely thriving everywhere you look, all of the time. Succumbing to messages that these alternatives don’t matter because of their scale is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I choose not to succumb.

• I need a home to live in and energy to live in it. I have a body to nourish, relationships to nurture, a world to experience. And if I have the choice not to fund this with work that requires me to deny the many intersecting crises or knowingly contribute to them, I will continue to make that choice, even when it’s (very) imperfect.
  

Please, tell me, what are your reasons?

Leave a comment

One quote

“The known world is crumbling. That’s okay. It was an edifice stitched together with denial and disavowal, with unseeing and unknowing, with mirrors and shadows. It needed to crash. Now, in the rubble, we can make something more reliable, more worthy of our trust, more able to survive the coming shocks.”

― Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World

Three links

• Beyond Growth, Towards Alignment - an article by The Minority Report with a theory of change for transitioning to a post-growth economy

• Shell Game - a podcast experimenting with agentic AI to build a bullshit tech startup.

• Antidote - a big map of alternative community energy, housing and food projects across the UK

I used to feel that Fashion Week was the epitome of cool, and went to extreme lengths to attend events just to feel like I was part of it. Ok, maybe multiple overnight £3 megabuses to London in one weekend, when I couldn’t afford a hotel or time off work, wasn’t extreme, as much as it was kind of tragic in how desperate I was to get my foot in the door.

Now? It’s hard to stomach seeing the constant churn of collections and collaborations and parties with hardly a nod to sustainability, when no one can honestly still claim to be unaware of how urgently we need to get off this train. This season so far, with notable exceptions (like second-hand shows from eBay, Oxfam and Remake) the general feeling is that ‘we missed the moment’. continues, “Much of it was beautiful, and some of it was even moving. But the question is: does it matter when the larger takeaway is to sell clothes within a deeply flawed system that prioritises overproduction and capital over everything?”

Amongst the meaningless recycled polyester dresses, the headlines keep coming. Just this week, new research from Greenpeace found that the burning of textile waste in Ghana’s Kantamanto Market, as a result of an influx of synthetic clothing from the Global North, has created toxic air pollution in the form of carcinogenic compounds.

One of the key interventions to this overproduction problem, together with strong extended producer responsibility legislation, is for brands to disclose their production volumes and commit to reducing them. But according to the What Fuels Fashion report, most big fashion brands (89%) do not disclose how many clothes they make annually, and less than 1% disclose a commitment to degrowth.

Here are a few examples of production volumes from a single year disclosed by 9 brands, together which could clothe more than 15% of the entire world’s population (well over 1 billion items).

Every product-making and selling business knows how many products it makes and sells. Any teenager working in retail knows that every product has an individual SKU. So why can’t brands just share their number?

To show how simple this disclosure really should be, The Or Foundation are asking folks to count the number of clothes in their wardrobe and share the message - I can count, why can’t you?

I decided to take it on and count my clothes. Which was tricky, logistically (sharing overstuffed storage space with my partner) and psychologically (an undeniable reminder that I have too much stuff, even after a recent clearout). The results are in, and including workout clothes and PJs but not including bags, scarves, underwear or socks, I have:

• 69 tops (including jumpers/cardigans)

• 29 bottoms (including skirts/shorts)

• 37 dresses (including jumpsuits/dungarees)

• 18 coats and jackets

• 15 pairs of shoes

• Total: 168

Over the years, I have regularly recommended doing a wardrobe audit in order to address overconsumption. Once we rediscover what we have, we can commit to buying less. But the larger purpose of this challenge is to ‘nominate’ brands who haven’t yet shared their number to do so before Black Friday (29th November 2024) as part of the Speak Volumes campaign.

I nominate three brands that perform relatively well on climate and decarbonisation, but without this crucial piece of data, accountability and impact is limited: H&M, Puma and Decathlon.

I have also signed onto this important letter that The OR Foundation have sent to 19 brands (Marks & Spencer, Next, Nike, Gap, Primark, George, F&F, H&M, Boohoo, TU, New Look, Authentic Brands Group (inc Reebok & Forever 21), PVH Corp. (inc Calvin Klein & Tommy Hilfiger), Gildan, Zara, Asos, Frasers Group (inc Slazenger & Everlast), Puma and Disney).

@jumanjoe

Here’s how you can get involved to contribute the goal of getting 100 brands, including at least one major brand, to disclose their production volumes before Black Friday.

1. Nominate a fashion brand using this simple #SpeaksVolume form.

2. Use your social media channels to share the campaign, making sure to tag the brands you nominate. Here’s a creative toolkit.

3. If you have connections to people at major brands, reach out to them, or connect them to speakvolumes@theor.org for a conversation. You could also use this email template. If you work for a brand of any size, why not bring this up with your sustainability team?

Let me know how you get on! And make sure to check out speakvolumes.org and @theorispresent for more information and FAQs. This op-ed by Liz Ricketts, The Or Foundation’s co-founder, is also an excellent call-to-arms.

Thank you for supporting Threadbare by reading, subscribing, liking, commenting and sharing.

Key findings

Of 250 brands and retailers reviewed (all of which have an annual turnover of at least $400million USD)….

• The top scorers were sportswear brand Puma (75%), luxury brand Gucci (74%) and high street brand H&M (61%), while an appalling 60 brands scored 0%, including high fashion’s Tom Ford, athleisure leader Fabletics and fast fashion brand Fashion Nova. The overall average score was 18%.

• Nearly a quarter of the world’s biggest fashion brands disclose nothing on decarbonisation, while only four out of 250 have emissions reduction targets that meet the level of ambition called for by climate scientists.

• At least 42 brands report increased scope 3 emissions against their baseline year, which undoubtedly is related to the majority of companies lacking targets on coal phase-out and renewable energy for their supply chains.

• Just 10% of brands disclose information about their energy procurement, allowing false solutions like unbundled RECs, carbon offsets and unsustainable biomass to dominate, and failing to meaningfully contribute to grid decarbonisation.

• 89% of brands do not disclose how many clothes they make annually, while just 2 brands make a commitment to degrowth (reducing absolute production volumes).

• More than half the brands have sustainable material targets but only 11% reveal their supply chain’s energy sources, meaning so-called ‘sustainable’ products could still be produced using fossil fuels in manufacturing, where the majority of a product’s carbon footprint originates.

• 94% of brands fail to disclose how much they are investing in supply chain decarbonisation, while just 13% of brands disclosed evidence of renewable energy advocacy in their supply chain regions.

Recommendations

• Brands must invest at least 2% of their revenues into a just energy transition, ideally through a shared Fair Climate Fund (this is a conservative estimate based on credible calculations, and would ideally be topped up by supplier contributions and blended finance from banks, development organisations and other investors). Maeve Galvin, Global Policy and Campaigns Director at Fashion Revolution, explains:
  "By investing at least 2% of their revenue into clean, renewable energy and upskilling and supporting workers, fashion could simultaneously curb the impacts of the climate crisis and reduce poverty and inequality within their supply chains. Climate breakdown is avoidable because we have the solution - and big fashion can certainly afford it.”

• Brands must set robust short and long term targets for the reduction of scope 3 absolute emissions, including a target for phasing out coal and detailed decarbonisation plans. Brands should also commit to 100% renewable energy (wind and solar) in the supply chain by 2030 and help accelerate this by advocating for policymakers in garment-producing and importing countries to enable access to high-quality renewable energy.

• Other stakeholders, including policymakers, investors, shareholders, journalists, academics and civil society, should use the research to scrutinise brands’ claims in order to hold them accountable and incentivise good practice.

• Citizens can take action to demand that major brands and retailers put their money where their emissions are using this simple email-a-brand tool.
  

Some more interesting nuggets

• The climate crisis clock is ticking and we cannot afford to waste time determining chains of responsibility. But supply chain traceability remains poor, with just 52% of brands disclosing their Tier 1 suppliers, 34% disclosing processing facilities, and 8% disclosing raw materials.

• The recommendations for financing decarbonisation follow the Polluter Pays principle, meaning those responsible for the biggest contribution to greenhouse gas emissions should be responsible for the biggest financial contribution to mitigating them. It also means that financing should be proportionate to turnover and ability to pay, which translates to multi-billion dollar fashion brands supporting their suppliers, often SMEs, who create their value in the first place.

• Relatedly, decision-making should also be shared across the value chain, with suppliers holding the most relevant contextual expertise for developing effective decarbonisation strategies. Suppliers and worker representatives should be consulted and engaged in constructive dialogue to ensure climate targets and plans for achieving them are carried out fairly, feasibly and effectively.

• The majority of financing solutions currently available to suppliers are debt-based and incentivise low-hanging fruit like energy efficiency rather than high CapEx projects like electrification of thermal processes. This not only hampers carbon reduction potential but can burden suppliers with loans to meet brands’ climate targets, and ultimately perpetuates existing power imbalances. Long-term investment is key to decarbonising fashion’s supply chains, including building long-term supplier relationships through fair purchasing practices, grant-based funding and contract incentives.

• Executives at fashion brands are not sufficiently incentivised to act on climate, with just 18% of brands disclosing how executive pay and bonuses are linked to climate targets. Carbon pricing could be one mechanism to help shift this system, but currently, just 9% of brands say they use an internal carbon price to guide decision-making. Environmental harm must no longer be externalised by companies and should be penalised in the same way financial losses are at the C-suite level.

• Because climate change is already impacting workers and communities across the fashion supply chain, adaptation must be on the industry’s radar in addition to mitigation. However, the report found that only 3% of brands disclose efforts to

  financially compensate workers affected by the impacts of the climate crisis and 6% disclose how they engage with workers, local communities, and other affected

  stakeholders to co-create local solutions.

• Without reducing absolute production volumes, we are highly unlikely to sufficiently reduce carbon emissions in line with 1.5-degree pathways. But currently, many brands are setting intensity-based targets, meaning emissions can still increase as production volumes grow. Brands must set absolute emissions reduction targets and find ways to create value other than virgin resource use, wasteful and excessive overproduction and manufacturing demand for overconsumption.

• Multi-stakeholder initiatives, certification schemes, lobby groups and other collaborative projects can risk offering safe harbours for inaction to fashion brands. For example, the report found that many brands claim to have a coal phaseout plan by dint of being signatories to the UN Fashion Charter but have failed to disclose any kind of target under their own name. I’ve previously spoken about this issue here and here.

• RECs (renewable energy credits/certificates) are increasingly being shown as unlikely to contribute to meaningful decarbonisation, yet many fashion brands rely heavily on unbundled RECs (ie. no direct link between renewable energy generation and consumption) to claim they run their operations and supply chain on renewables. Without contributing to additional renewable energy capacity, such as through onsite solar panels or PPAs (power purchase agreements) from offsite solar and wind infrastructure, and without matching the renewable energy generation to consumption on a 24/7 basis, the credibility and integrity of decarbonisation claims remain unclear.

• It’s not just fashion - CDP just revealed that only 15% of corporates across multiple sectors have set a supply chain emissions target despite (or because of) these emissions being 26x higher than their own operations on average.

• Finally, the best quote of the morning: “This isn’t a question of feasibility. It’s a matter of willpower.” The green transition is scientifically sound and brands can afford it. The time to act is now.

Hidden data is delaying progress on climate action

By Ruth MacGilp, Fashion Campaign Manager at Action Speaks Louder

Climate scientists are increasingly alarmed by just how quickly climate models are being outpaced by record-breaking temperatures and extreme weather events. Even the most optimistic predictions risk being surpassed as we smash through six out of nine planetary boundaries and already exceed 1.5°C of global heating.

How could this be? In part, it is because we really don’t know the true scale of our global carbon footprint, due to a system of mostly voluntary, unregulated emissions accounting. 

Several calculations have attempted to estimate the fashion industry’s emissions, largely based on incomplete fibre production data, ranging from 1.8% to 4.6% to 8-10% of the whole economy. But as this report shows, almost half of brands do not even disclose their Scope 3 emissions. There are also huge gaps in our understanding of fashion’s climate impact because of the top-down nature of the sector, where supply chain emissions data is largely based on secondary averages pulled from flawed lifecycle analysis (LCA) studies. Meanwhile, brands only report emissions from products that reach the shop floor, leaving cancelled orders as ghosts in the machine.

Out of the 117 brands that disclosed science-based targets, 42 have reported an increase in their scope 3 emissions compared to their baseline year. What’s more, 24% of brands disclosed absolutely nothing about their decarbonisation plans, and most brands failed to commit to phasing out coal, electrifying thermal processes or transitioning to renewable energy. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recommends, emissions of all sectors must halve by 2030 to mitigate the most catastrophic climate impacts—which are already being experienced by communities and workers in brands’s own supply chains—so we must call out these major brands for their climate inaction, just like the fossil fuel companies they rely on. 

So much of the problem, and therefore the solution, lies with the rules of the game - aka the non-binding nature of emissions disclosure and decarbonisation plans. Accounting loopholes, misleading reporting, corrupt funding and false solutions - like carbon offsets and renewable energy credits - dominate the corporate sustainability landscape. Certification schemes and multi-stakeholder initiatives provide smokescreens for inaction. PR-friendly promises are substitutes for implementation and investment. While I’m under no illusion that a corporate entity will have pure intentions for the challenging and expensive work of climate mitigation, integrity and transparency are essential to align with the harsh reality climate science is screaming at us.

It is positive to see tangible signs of progress in this year’s report, like a growing number of brands setting emissions reduction targets across all scopes. Time-bound, measurable targets are essential to driving investment, enabling accountability, and signalling change across the industry. Still, it’s difficult to celebrate these incremental improvements when emissions continue growing beyond an already sky-high baseline.

Looking forward, we need to see brands prioritise three actions. First, setting short and long-term targets aligned with a 1.5°C pathway. Second, developing credible, strategic roadmaps to meet these targets, including renewable energy procurement plans. Third, integrating the climate strategy into the business strategy by backing up these targets with financial investment— brands must provide substantial support and fairer purchasing practices for suppliers to access decarbonisation and ultimately address the short-term profit-driven fast fashion business model that drives overproduction and waste. Where should companies start? By publicly disclosing each of these steps.

For every sustainability claim we see, we need to ask one fundamental question. Does this actually make an impact on reducing emissions, ditching fossil fuels or scaling up renewable energy? If not, the Earth simply cannot tell the difference. 

Thank you for reading Threadbare! Make sure to subscribe if you haven’t already.

I strongly encourage you to take a couple of hours to dive deeper into the What Fuels Fashion report to discover all of its rich takeaways. You can download it here.

This week, while my home in Edinburgh was flooded with a month’s worth of rain in 36 hours, I was in Copenhagen for the Global Fashion Summit for my work pushing fashion to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. The organisers at Global Fashion Agenda did an absolutely fantastic job at convening the ‘sustainable’ fashion industry for talks, panels and, more importantly, behind-the-scenes meetings (and gossip) while celebrating its 15-year anniversary. But as I reflect on the hectic few days of networking - hell for a clandestine introvert - I keep coming back to a question: are we overcomplicating this?

Why yes, that is the Queen of Denmark

I have been told, repeatedly, that my views are oversimplistic. Only by men, I might add. Whether it’s degrowth (you don’t understand economics!!), Palestinian liberation (there is not enough nuance!!), Scottish independence (emotions are clouding your logic!!) or ending all new oil and gas extraction (there are exceptions to the rule!!). I have bitten my tongue and held back tears, as I know I will fail to satisfy devil’s advocates on any given political issue.

However, this week reminded me of the power of simplicity in cutting through corporate bullshit. I am well aware of how complicated solving intersectional social and environmental challenges in the fashion system can be, but here are my fundamental (and simplified) beliefs - fossil fuel extraction, overproduction, and low pay are the foundations of every sub-topic we discuss at conferences, from cotton traceability to eco-design principles. Unless the KPIs of our sustainability initiatives are reducing fossil fuels and production volumes, and increasing wages for workers, we might just be overcomplicating the conversation. As Follow The Money’s Yara van Heugten reflected, “The bigger picture was oftentimes missing. Where is this solution or project bringing us in terms of progress?”

On the other hand, there was often a lack of detail to serve the production of soundbites. Inspiration is important, particularly when we’ve been running only on vegan salads and coffee all day, but we desperately need technical expertise and practical takeaways. I think more input from engineers working in textiles, land and energy systems could be helpful to address this.

Of course, we are all tempted to take individual credit where positive progress has been made (big brands most of all but NGOs are also guilty of this). Inspired by Donella Meadows’ Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System, I would encourage conference-goers and onlookers alike to consider: What is the gap I can fill with my very complicated expertise and experience in order to solve the very simple problems at hand? Perhaps we might realise that billionaire-owned brands and Silicon Valley startups might not always be best placed to intervene, and that there could be a pluriverse of small, local and transformational and most of all simple solutions to leverage, too.

Share Threadbare

To wrap up, here are some of my key takeaways from what was said onstage at the conference sessions themselves:

• It was great to see representation from manufacturers and farmers (although of course there were limitations - this is an English-speaking event in one of the world’s most expensive cities) whose main messaging to brands was: a) Visit your factories and farms to understand issues more tangibly, and b) Help us invest in the solutions we are already experts in. There was also a lot of talk about operationalising sustainability (one of five points on the CEO Agenda this year) in terms of getting out of sustainability team siloes and embedding practices and policies across the entire business. In my conversations with brands, getting finance teams on board with putting money behind climate promises is the biggest barrier to progress. They desperately need a business case for decarbonisation (and I’d argue, reverse incentives through punitive policy), unfortunate as that may be for us ‘naive’ climate activists, systems change advocates and critics of limitless growth and shareholder capitalism.

• Paul Polman’s (ex-Unilever) speeches focused on ideas such as ‘less bad is not good enough’ and ‘set targets to win, not just not to lose’. I agree, and I think this speaks to the problem with the panel discussion/trade show/conference circus - we spend a lot of time celebrating incremental progress, and calling targets and initiatives that are both entirely necessary and entirely feasible ‘ambitious’. It reminded me of this tweet:

  

• Very few panellists disagreed with each other (lots of talk of ‘preaching to the choir’), with one important exception in the form of my brilliant friend Emma Håkansson, activist, author and founder of Collective Fashion Justice. Her clear, concise and challenging indictment of the leather industry began with the basic premise that slaughtering animals for a product inherently breeds exploitation and extraction throughout the entire value chain of the product. I uploaded some clips here if you fancy watching. Huge props also to both Emily Stochl from Remake and the inimitable fashion critic Vanessa Friedman for being some of the only people I witnessed who named the elephant in the room - we make too much stuff. There is simply no way to polish that turd with circularity initiatives, or with an equivalent volume of more sustainable materials.

• Lots of tech startups, innovation, collaboration, DATA. But as Ganni’s co-founder Nicolaj Reffstrup said on a panel, “We didn't need to wait for some multi-stakeholder initiative to do this.” In other words, transformational business decisions can be made without ‘permission’ from peers, and without perfect data or perfect third-party providers - brands can invest today in the relatively low-tech existing solutions that we know work (solar panels, solar panels, solar panels!). Similarly, GFA’s Peder Michael Anker-Jorgensen warned: “So-called collaboration has been a fig leaf for inaction…incremental change, not transformation” when discussing fashion’s failure to put their money where their mouth is on climate, and watering down ambition by hunting for consensus and win-win solutions.

• Eva Kruse, the original founder of the Copenhagen Fashion Summit, left brands with an inconvenient reminder: “We need to make choices that hurt.”

Five quick things

A new little segment to draw your attention to important, inspiring, interesting stuff that caught my attention this month in the realm of fashion, labour and climate.

• The Washing Machine project

• Lauren Macdonald’s speech at Equinor’s AGM

• Why greenhushing isn’t a real threat

• Fashion recipes for the future

• Tansy Hoskin’s anti-capitalist fashion advice column

+ A bonus thing! Rachel Arthur’s new Substack, Owning It:

Owning it with Rachel Arthur

Musings and guidance on working in sustainable fashion.

If you’re interested, you can read last year’s post about Global Fashion Summit to compare…

Recently, I’ve been followed around by a bad smell. A gassy one.

Everywhere I look in the supply chains of some of fashion’s most powerful and profitable companies, gas is fuelling the production of billions of new garments every year*. From LNG (liquified natural gas) tanks permanently installed at textile processing facilities in Taiwan, ready to be burned to heat water for batch dyeing fabrics, to Bangladesh importing expensive LNG from India to meet the skyrocketing energy needs of thousands of RMG factories. A lack of transparency from fashion brands on the energy consumption profile of their supply chains makes reliable statistics impossible to find, but we know that fossil fuels reign supreme in fashion. We also know that gas is a fossil fuel that’s becoming increasingly popular amidst pressure to reduce emissions.

*How many billions? We’re not sure. That’s why we needed brands to #SpeakVolumes.

Before we start, a note on ‘natural’ gas from climate reporter Emily Atkin, who says it much better than I can:

“After all, most people think things that are called “natural” are good for the environment—and natural gas is objectively not.”

…and check out Atkin’s recommended resources on why we should probably avoid playing into the hands of fossil fuel companies by calling it ‘natural gas’:

• The end of natural gas has to start with its name

• How the gas industry aims to rebrand as ‘clean’ energy to appeal to Black and Latino voters

• Different names for “natural gas” influence public perception of it

• Fossil fuel executives see a ‘golden age’ for gas, if they can brand it as ‘clean.’

HEATED

A newsletter for people who are pissed off about the climate crisis.

By Emily Atkin

Gas as a credible decarbonisation strategy (or more like a ‘not-good-but-less-bad’ bridge fuel) is a surprisingly popular narrative in the fashion industry. Despite the fact that fashion manufacturing is far from a hard-to-abate sector like aviation, shipping, steel or cement. For example, a new book entitled The Path to Net Zero for the Fashion Industry suggests that the first step to decarbonisation should be to ‘remove coal and replace it with natural gas, which will immediately reduce GHG emissions by around 50%’.**

While it may be tempting to say ‘look, we don’t have all the answers for 100% renewable electricity right now, so let’s switch out burning one fossil fuel for another while we figure it out (mostly so our sustainability reports still look good)’ - this argument is a classic example of short-termism that fails to consider the consequences on people (toxic air pollution from burning gas, land rights exploitation from fracking), politics (foreign gas dependence, resource conflicts) and planet (even with gas, absolute emissions will continue to rise!!!). Ultimately, we need to set our sights on a just energy transition that sets us up for long-term success, which means breaking up with all fossil fuels and investing in clean, green energy.

As Rachel Cernansky remarked in a 2020 article on coal phaseout in fashion supply chains: “Energy experts worry the industry will focus on making existing boilers more efficient or turning to greener*** fuel options, like natural gas, that may reduce coal consumption but not ultimately solve the problem.” Fashion decarbonisation expert Michael Sadowski added: “We can’t afford to do this on a stepwise basis. Gas will reduce emissions, but it’s not a path to decarbonisation.”

It makes sense that gas is being used in this way because textile and garment suppliers are struggling to meet climate targets dictated to them by brands, without any financial support for cleaner alternatives****. But instead of accepting this status quo, we need to look at the science. Climate scientists have told us in no uncertain terms: fossil fuels cause climate change, and we must phase them out in order to mitigate the most catastrophic effects of the climate crisis. So even if gas offers a quick emissions reduction on paper, can we really afford to lock the fashion industry into more fossil fuel reliance if we are serious about ‘net zero by 2050’, as corporate sustainability reports and countless multi-stakeholder commitments claim to be?

**When burned, gas releases about half as much carbon dioxide as coal, but methane traps about 85 times more heat than CO2 over a 20-year period.
***Maybe we should try switching out ‘more sustainable’ with ‘less unsustainable’ in more of these conversations.
****Obviously, fashion brands need to cough up. They can afford it.

The root problem here is the framing of gas as a ‘bridge fuel’ towards a beautiful, clean 100% wind and solar-powered fashion industry that will somehow magically materialise even if we invest no time, energy and money into it (?!?). This framing within the fashion industry directly feeds into the carefully constructed PR efforts of fossil fuel executives. No really - Ryan Lance, chief executive of ConocoPhillips said at a conference recently: “Gas is something that’s going to be more than just a bridge fuel. It’s going to be around for a long time.” Commenting on this, reminds us:

“The fossil fuel industry’s growing campaign to brand gas as “clean energy” is no different from its old campaign to brand climate change as fake. Both were created to dampen public demand for effective climate policy, which would necessitate the phase-out of their highly profitable products.”

Which brings me to my final point - we need to take more care to scrutinise corporate narratives. This is because, although it may seem like more companies are ‘waking up’ to the reality that they are contributing to climate change and need to do something about it, many of them are still cleverly clinging to the broader framework of climate denial. The ‘new climate denial’ is not outright denying the existence of climate change, but delaying real climate solutions and distracting with false ones. If you’d like to understand this dynamic a little better, this comic adaptation of the Discourses of Climate Delay study by Céline Keller is a great place to start.

Some further reading…

Thank you for reading Threadbare. There are now over 700 of you!

Subscribe now

FYI, I’ll be taking a break of undecided length from this newsletter for a while. If you want to see why, follow my new Instagram :)

AI-generated image via Vestiare Collective, who recently banned users from selling ‘fast fashion’ on its (luxury-focused) resale platform.

‘Tis the season for new years’ resolutions! Despite their high failure rate and generally cringy quality, I’m actually a big fan of using January for goal-setting and working towards changing habits or trying new things. I think it helps my brain make sense of the linear progression of time throughout my life. Or maybe I’m just a victim of internalised capitalism and the endless drive for productivity, individual responsibility and the ladder of self-improvement. Who can tell.

But what I wanted to talk about here is the connection between the non-stop growth of fast fashion (despite headlines of ‘resale taking over’ and ‘green is the new black’, fast fashion’s market value continues to explode), and the deeply entrenched health and beauty related norms and expectations in our society at large. In short, the factors that drive our consumption of fashion (the lack of public data about impacts, filling the void left by isolation from community, manipulative marketing that preys on low self-esteem, the culture of comparison from social media’s highlights reel, false presentations of cost and value, etc.), are identical to some the factors that drive us to buy anti-ageing skincare products, go on fad diets, shave our body hair, get cosmetic surgery and botox, overexercise, undersleep - the list goes on.

Part of this line of thinking comes from personal experience. I know that despite my better judgement, I often find myself zoning out and buying ‘stuff’ to improve my appearance in some way, and that beneath this is a desperation to not fall behind the expectations of me as a woman in the world. I know that my own battle with an eating disorder for well over a decade has at times produced something like a fast fashion and beauty product addiction, numbing emotions and physical needs with the acquisition of yet more ‘stuff’. I know that the real, authentic desire I have to be a better version of myself is often co-opted by the lie that this optimised self can be achieved through the consumption of products and services that put profit in the pockets of, let’s face it, mostly men who benefit from a bottomless pit of potential for women’s desire to be ‘better’.

So, this January, as many of us strive, in big or small ways, for self-improvement, can we direct some of that energy towards improving the system that keeps us questioning our worth? In some ways, I think the fashion system is the perfect microcosm of these issues, so maybe we could start there.

I’ll leave you with a call to arms from iconic fashion activist and academic Caryn Franklin, who recently asked on a panel “What if women said no to buying stuff for just one day?” She asked us to ponder, not the power of buying something but the power of not buying it. If this aligns with any of your new year’s resolutions, ’s Rule of 5 could be a good framework to take action.

To round off, here are three recommendations to read and listen to that may help you get fired up around this topic and explore your own relationship between self-image, self-optimisation and fashion/beauty consumption.

1. Jessica Defino’s fascinating articles about the phenomenon of beauty products being marketed like food, and how skincare preys on the logic of diet culture.

2. These Maintenance Phase podcast episodes roasting the awful fashion/diet crossover books The Karl Lagerfeld Diet and French Women Don’t Get Fat

3. This Paris Paloma song with the following lyrics:
   
   Every time you are succeeding

   There's an old man somewhere, seething

   And spite's as good a reason to take his power

   When you hate the body you are in

   Oh love, you're acting just for him

   As he counts his gold and green in his ivory tower
   
   (this song about men’s weaponised incompetence is also great to scream-sing to)

Speak Volumes

Keeping on the ‘fuck fast fashion’ theme of today’s newsletter, here is a quick action you can take to tell brands to stop overproducing clothing that floods communities without the systems to manage it. The Or Foundation’s Speak Volumes campaign has a tool for emailing brands to challenge them to disclose how many garments they produce every year, a vital step towards slowing the flow and closing the loop.

EMAIL A BRAND

For some context, at Fashion Revolution back in 2022, we found that amongst the pathetically low 15% of major brands that disclosed annual production volumes, those volumes were gigantic. Inditex, for example, produced 450,146 tonnes of garments in 2021, equivalent to about 2.25 billion t-shirts, or 90,000 elephants (about a quarter of all the elephants left on earth, if that helps). That’s enough to dress more than a quarter of the world’s population (of humans, not elephants).

Thank you for reading. If you’re a new subscriber to Threadbare, you can catch up on previous posts for free by exploring the archive. See you next month!

In the meantime, please donate what you might have spent on a Substack or Patreon newsletter like this one to Medical Aid for Palestinians, and please, use your voice on social media, in letters to your local representative, with friends and family or in the streets, to call for a permanent ceasefire. Check out Anti-Sweatshop Activists Against Apartheid for information about the role of sustainable fashion advocates to help fight for justice in Gaza.

Hello! Thanks for subscribing to Threadbare in 2023. It’s been fun getting my newsletter up and running again, and I hope to develop this space further in the new year. Please do like, subscribe, comment, share this newsletter with people you think would find it interesting or useful. For now, it’s time for a bit of a break - wishing you all a wonderful Christmas and a happy new year!

I’ve just returned from an exhausting but fascinating COP28 where I joined my friends at Fashion Revolution to hold the industry accountable for its role in the climate crisis and crucially, its role in climate solutions including a just transition away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy and regenerative materials - see our joint demands here. I won’t go into the somewhat historic, somewhat disappointing COP outcomes here, but I highly recommend the coverage on Vogue Business from Rachel Cernansky, Maliha Shoaib and Bella Webb about what this means for fashion. I also wrote about fashion’s role at COP here.

I have a full book of notes from my 7 days in Dubai representing Action Speaks Louder, but I thought it would be most valuable to share some of my insights from a a panel event called Exploring a Just Transition in Fashion that I spoke on alongside Stand.earth, Fashion Revolution, Eco Age, Solidaridad East & Central Africa, Institute for Sustainable Communities, Diamond Denim and Transformers Foundation, whose recent report informed much of the conversation. This was a crucial discussion focused not just on the steps we need to take to reduce fashion’s significant carbon footprint - some of which is enabled through existing solutions and some of which are not yet possible through technical, financial or legislative barriers - but also on how we need to do it.

The key takeaway? Decarbonisation will not happen without close collaboration with and tangible support of the suppliers, from farms to mills to factories, who implement solutions on the ground.

What is a just transition and how is it connected to fashion supply chains?

When thinking about sustainability in fashion we need to think about impacts and dependencies. Obviously fashion brands depend on manufacturers to supply their products, they are the ones creating value for these brands. Because of that dependency, the majority of emissions - more than 99% in some cases - are produced in the supply chain and those brands who reap the benefits of that created value are responsible for reporting those emissions and ultimately supporting suppliers to reduce them. 

Because of the demands of mass production in our fashion system - not just fast fashion but also luxury brands which benefit from similar speeds and volumes - it is also the responsibility of those brands to be held accountable for the impacts upon the communities that surround those manufacturers. The manufacturing hubs in South and Southeast Asia in particular are in the very same regions most vulnerable to climate impacts such as flooding and extreme heat, as well as toxic air pollution from the burning of coal, biomass and in some cases, even textile waste. Brands source from these regions because of the low labour costs and weak social and environmental regulations, but they are now facing the reality that their business model is putting the future of their own supply chains at risk. (Source for below graphic)

In this way, I believe that decarbonisation in the fashion industry can be a form of climate justice in action, if it's done in a fair and just and ‘supplier led, brand supported’ way. We don’t want brands to reduce emissions just because it looks good on their latest sustainability report, we want them to do it because it will reduce the harm already caused to the communities upon which they extract value from.

It is their responsibility to take immediate and urgent action to phase out fossil fuels and ramp up renewable energy, instead of scapegoating the substantial carbon footprints - of the products they profit from - to the suppliers who they squeeze on margins and deadlines and then ultimately the workers who are paid far less than a living wage, leaving them very little resilience to the impacts of the climate crisis that they are providing labour for the corporations driving this destruction. 

Describe how you want the fashion industry supply chain to look like in terms of the just transition 3 years from now.

Someone in our industry shared recently on Linkedin that the solution to fashion’s “climate problem” is surely just onshoring to countries with cleaner grids. But a just transition to a decarbonised fashion supply chain would bring the existing suppliers and workers along with it, to a more efficient, cleaner, greener and most importantly fairer system that benefits the communities without whom fashion as we know it would not exist.

It is also important to note that even if we used 100% sustainable materials - which we don’t - and even if we used 100% renewable energy in supply chains - which we don’t - we would still need to face the inconvenient truth that there is simply too much stuff. Brands like to focus on product-level improvements and intensity-based emissions reductions, but the reality is that we must reduce production volumes, and this is a key area where efforts towards a just and equitable transition must be focused because of the direct impact on garment and textile workers. I believe the The Or Foundation’s Speaks Volumes campaign is a great place to start - we need the fashion industry to own up to its overproduction and waste, and the impacts this has on communities around the world, as well as its ability to achieve climate targets. I hope that in 3 years time, we’ll see more brands be more transparent about production volumes and absolute emissions footprints, and that we’ll have more public pressure and support around the limits to endless growth.

What are some examples of the false solutions in the realm of fashion supply chain decarbonisation, and what do you want to see more investment in for solutions?

Firstly, the same amount of attention must be paid to fossil fuel powered manufacturing as to 'sustainable materials'. Its not just what fabrics are made from but how they are made, and tier 2 processing must be an area that we as a movement rally around as the biggest source of emissions. Our biggest ‘problem’ can become our biggest ‘solution’, rather than incremental progress on things like bio-based materials, or renewable energy for brands’ own operations only. These aren’t false solutions as such, but sometimes take up too much space in the conversion relative to their actual climate impact.

In terms of supply chain decarbonisation’s false solutions, I would draw attention to RECs (renewable energy credits), carbon offsetting, and biomass burning. The problem for all 3 is flawed accounting that allows companies to claim net zero while emissions keep rising. We need to triple renewable capacity (largely wind and solar) by 2030 and corporate procurement needs to support genuine additionality with strong renewable energy commitments and credible decarbonisation strategies.

We need to see a much, much larger corporate commitment towards investment in solutions, such as onsite solar panels, electrification (especically boilers) and zero combustion technology (eg. waterless dyeing, heat pumps) paired with robust policy advocacy for things like cPPAs (corporate power purchase agreements), larger scale onsite generation and cleaner grids overall.

All of this must be backed up by increased transparency on renewable energy procurement, taking into account the societal impacts of certain types of renewable energy production (eg. forced labour linked to solar panel production), health, land and nature impacts of biomass sourcing, and of course ensuring renewable energy and emissions reduction claims are credible. Where this isn’t currently possible, again we need to see these brands using their power, particularly in countries like Bangladesh where the fashion industry contributes such a significant % of GDP, to influence policymakers, and use their profits - of which they have billions - to fund their suppliers to make those necessary improvements on site and invest in new technologies that could also help them to remain competitive. 

Overall, the lack of investment in renewable energy even where it is fully available must be our focus rather than just short term fixes, so bringing it back to filling those financing, policy, technical gaps is really key . We must avoid being distracted from the vision of a fully electric, zero combustion, low carbon future for the industry, which is a vision that needs all of our attention to realise.

Who pays for decarbonisation?

What the brands who we talk to are in large part unable to admit is their failure to set up proper financing mechanisms for their sustainability initiatives and therefore they lack the access to funds that are desperately needed in order to meet their own sustainability targets. Someone said to me yesterday that if a brand doesn’t have a climate investment plan, it simply doesn’t have a climate plan.

Ideally, we want to see at least 1-2% of revenue dedicated to decarbonisation and climate action. Profits are soaring, businesses are expanding and emissions are rising with it - we need financial commitment here backed up by proper mechanisms enabling suppliers to access financing/share financial risks/overcome barriers like currency and credit - there various examples from fashion and other sectors, such as H&M’s green fashion fund and Apple’s supplier clean energy fund.  But we also need better purchasing practices - not just one-off funds but higher prices and longer term contracts on an ongoing basis - we need sourcing and buying teams to be included in these conversations - not only to provide the money for suppliers to invest due to a bigger margin, more confidence in longer commitments and therefore reduced risk, but also for the just transition to allow workers to reap the benefits of these hopefully increasing investments - without fair living wages, the decarbonisation conversation becomes redundant.

Individual brand actions are also not enough because we need to see multiple brands collaborate together, as they share suppliers and therefore can share costs and risks, and where they aren’t at the scale needed to access larger renewable energy projects, they can group together on PPAs or rooftop solar panels or renewable energy p infrastructure projects or finance new technologies like dry processing to scale up and be implemented in their supply chain. Aii’s Fashion Climate Fund and GFA’s new Bangladesh wind project are positive examples of this, but generally we need to see financing massively scale up in order for projects to move beyond that pilot phase, and ensure that headlines aren’t scooped up by ‘solutions’ that will not benefit the suppliers who need them most.

In general, it also comes back to purchasing practices, so understanding that in order for suppliers to make investments in decarbonisation, they need to be confident in their long-term, trusted relationships with brands including margins that allow them some wiggle room, and that as we travel further down the supply chain, suppliers will not be abandoned at the drop of a hat because they couldn’t afford to upgrade their factory.

This is where the main do-say gap is between the narratives brands push about their support for climate action vs the narratives their sourcing teams push upon suppliers to do more, faster, cheaper. In this way, responsible purchasing practices must be a part of any brands’ climate strategy.

How do we ensure accountability?

Brands often hide behind voluntary schemes when we ask them about their decarbonisation strategy, citing membership of RE100, verification with the Science-Based Targets Initiative, or association with the Fashion Charter, Textile Exchange or Sustainable Apparel Coalition for example, or even just the emissions factors in the GHG protocol. But as Changing Markets previously revealed in their excellent report on certification schemes, we must scrutinise who sets the rules, and who is ‘marking their own homework’. This is not necessarily to criticise any specific multi stakeholder programme, but to point out that they should not be substitutes for corporate accountability including full transparency on what brands are doing in their own business.

What would help ensure that brands are providing that information in order to be held accountable by civil society is robust legislation mandating, for example, scope 3 emissions reporting, emissions reduction targets, environmental due diligence, and at some point, hopefully a fossil fuel non proliferation agreement which Eco Age is working on with their brilliant Fossil Fashion campaign. I’m excited by The Fashion Act in New York, the new legislation in California and some of the developments around corporate accountability laws in the EU, and I hope that in 5 years time the landscape will be one of mandatory compliance rather than just voluntary schemes.

As an advocacy group in this space, we encourage people to join our campaigns in order to push brands to be held accountable for not just their negative climate impacts but their ability to enact positive change and be leaders that raise the bar for everyone. We’re currently working towards getting lululemon to commit to 100% renewable energy in their supply chain, and in a collaboration with Kpop4planet in Korea we are pushing luxury fashion brands like Dior, Saint Laurent, Celine and Chanel to set more ambitious emissions targets and be more transparent about their RE procurement and their support for suppliers to decarbonise. Ultimately, these brands’ scope 3 emissions are rising year on year, so without addressing that, we have to take sustainability claims with a pinch of salt and keep pushing for more transparency and more accountability for investing in solutions.

Thank you for reading!

If you’re a new subscriber to Threadbare, you can catch up on previous posts for free by exploring the archive.

“There is one innovation which doesn’t require technology that we haven’t tried: treating each other as equals.”

I have always loved this quote from my old boss and mending hero Orsola de Castro, because its simplicity reminds me of how much time we all spend intellectualising sustainable fashion, when at its root, basic human decency is the key to unlocking a better system. Unfortunately, kindness and compassion can’t be monetised by our big tech feudal overlords, while virtual outfits in the metaverse, handbags with matching NFTs, AI-powered commerce and automated manufacturing, biomaterial hacking and ugly digital dresses certainly can.

Every time I see a headline gushing over these ‘innovations’ in the fashion press, usually being invested in by luxury brands under the guise of ‘sustainability’, it boils my blood to know that these very same brands claim that decarbonising supply chains, or you know, paying living wages to garment workers, is too expensive, resource-intensive or technically complicated. While hunting for the next shiny new thing to grab hold of for short-term profits and positive PR, brands are enabled to avoid changing anything fundamental about the exploitative, polluting and wasteful business models which pump out physical - not digital - products at an exponentially growing rate.

Behind the buzz that new tech generates, there is the simple fact that our clothing is made by human hands and made with materials from the earth. Fashion has an inherent connection to the land and to the people, plants and animals that depend on it, no matter how much Patagonia gilet-wearing Silicon Valley tech bros want us to transcend our disgusting bodies on our disgusting planet to live in the cloud, or on Mars. At the end of the day, we need to clothe ourselves. And apart from a few very niche circumstances, that clothing is made from fabric and sewed together with thread.

As Muchaneta Ten Napel says in this episode of the Conscious Chatter podcast: “If we are planting these great ideas in bad soil and expecting it to flourish, well, of course we’re going to fail.” If we don’t fix the flaws inherent in the fashion system - which could be naively summarised as: too many fossil fuels, too few human rights - everything else will fail to provide any meaningful solution. Of course, this problem with techno-capitalism is not unique to the fashion industry, but the lack of critical media literacy in the fashion press towards tech creates a uniquely effective distraction and delay tactic towards real systemic change.

One of my favourite pastimes is ranting about tech billionaires, and as a result my favourite podcast at the moment is Tech Won’t Save Us from Paris Marx, which dives into the deep-rooted issues with the tech industry, from ‘AI is taking over!’ scare tactics to crypto currency money laundering scandals and everything in between. Recently, they put out a mini-series about Elon Musk which presented a fascinating story about how we create heroes out of villains, and also a cautionary tale for the fashion industry’s search for a silver bullet solution to the climate crisis which will allow them to skirt incoming legislation and still create shareholder value. There was a great quote in this episode that Musk ‘only wants the world to be saved if he can do the saving’. This made me think of how sustainability improvements in the fashion industry are led by suppliers, but brands would rather leave them to it while they take the credit for small circularity pilot projects with no calculable climate impact instead.

This week, garment workers in Bangladesh received the news that their fight for an increased minimum wage of 209 USD per month in the RMG (ready-made garment) sector was met with a measly offer of 114 USD. This will not lift the most vulnerable workers out of abject poverty. How can we look at a fashion industry where people are shot dead just for asking for a pay rise, and spend valuable column inches praising billionaire fashion executives for incremental investments in shiny tech add-ons?

I’ll leave you with a snippet from an article in The Interline, ostensibly a publication that promotes the intersection of fashion and technology, but which vitally considers ‘How Many Casualties Is Clothing Worth?’ as the only question that really matters for our industry. Ben Hanson writes:

“Safety is a luxury that’s continually being denied to the people on the other side of these questions – the ones who keep the cogs of fashion turning, and, in this case, the network of direct and indirect suppliers who support them. Because for all our talk about microfactories and circularity and robotics and molecular engineering for materials, the majority of the product fashion moves is still made in regions where human effort is sold at dramatically cheaper rates than it is in the markets where those products are actually sold. That, after all, is where a good amount of margin comes from.”

In light of the horrific violence and oppression happening in Palestine and the urgent need for a ceasefire, I have signed the anti-sweatshop activists against apartheid statement. You can read the text below and find out more on this website.

As trade unionists, activists and campaigners who raise our voices against injustice, racism, and the legacy of colonisation in the garment industry, we will not stand by in silence and watch the ongoing brutality of settler colonialism unfold. This is an issue of land rights and self-determination.  

Israel’s continued colonisation of Palestine has been achieved through apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.  

WHY IS THIS A FASHION INDUSTRY ISSUE?  

Exploitation in the garment industry is deeply ingrained in racist business models that rely on underpaid labour in the Global South.  

This sustains the harsh legacy of colonialism, as this continued extraction of wealth under capitalism depends on subordinating non-white communities.  

The exploitative practices of the garment industry in Palestine illustrate the stark reality for workers under Israel’s occupation.  

Israeli garment manufacturers outsource production to Gaza, where equally skilled workers are paid significantly less than their counterparts in Israel.  

Israeli manufacturers take advantage of the high unemployment rate in Gaza, forcing workers to accept any wage or working condition.  

Here we see how race is intrinsically linked to capitalism in the garment industry and how this operates via colonialism. Israeli companies profit by driving down the wages of the Palestinian people, perpetuating their subjugation.  

The once thriving Palestinian textile sector has been severely hit by challenges arising from the ongoing occupation.  

Among other obstacles, checkpoints in all territories delay deliveries and the current siege in Gaza limits access to essential resources such as electricity and materials.  

As a result, factory owners are forced to make tough choices, including reducing wages, in order to survive. Brands profit from the continued colonisation of Palestine by:  

• Sourcing from manufacturers with factories on stolen and illegally occupied land,  

• Operating their own stores on stolen and illegally occupied land,  

• Through sponsorship deals that legitimise the continued building of illegal settlements on Palestinian land (see BDS Movement page on PUMA for more).  

We follow the calls for international solidarity issued by Palestinians from Gaza and beyond and call for:  

• An immediate ceasefire and end to the attacks on Gaza  

• The urgent restoration of all essential supplies and humanitarian aid  

• An end to Israel’s evacuation orders for hospitals in Gaza  

• The siege on Gaza to be lifted  

• An end to the continued western export of arms, military technology and economic support for Israel  

• An end to the illegal occupation of Palestine.  

In response to Palestinian trade unions’ call for international action against companies complicit in implementing Israel’s brutal and illegal siege, we commit:

1. to expose and take action against fashion brands profiting from Israel’s occupation of Palestine;

2. to pass motions and take action against the manufacture, transportation and handling of garments used by Israel in its occupation of Palestine, e.g. military, police, prison officer uniforms. 

Find out more

Thank you so much for reading Threadbare. If you are are not subscribed yet to the free monthly emails, you can do so here. Please also share this post with friends and colleagues, and feel free to leave a comment or reply with thoughts and questions. Or take to social media to share your feedback, like this guy did!

Share Threadbare

Be Human. Be Well. Be Planet.

This is the vision for the impact agenda of Lululemon, the seventh largest fashion brand and fourth largest sportswear brand (by market cap), and arguably the most popular yoga brand in the world, if the logos on the back of people’s leggings in most classes I attend are anything to go by.

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly if you’re familiar with Big Fashion’s greenwashing tactics, Lululemon’s carbon footprint soared 22% last year and their ever-growing product range is 62% plastic, despite lofty sustainability promises and a cult-like community obsessed with ‘wellness’. I’m personally a bit obsessed with debunking the wellness industry (Maintenance Phase podcast is a great place to start), and for me, the main problem with wellness or ‘self care’ marketed through products is that its all about the individual. Not the community, not the environment, not the people with whose hands the industry produces its ‘solutions’ to an unwell society.

As my friend Emma Håkansson writes in her brilliant new book Total Ethics Fashion:

“…the wellbeing of the planet and all those who live here must be prioritised before profit or production.”

So if Lululemon was really set up for humans and the planet to ‘be well’, would selling 80% nylon, 20% elastane (aka ‘Nulu™ fabric’) leggings dripping with forever chemicals be the best human- and planet-saving strategy?

Beyond the usual STOP BUYING STUFF BRANDS TELL YOU IS NECESSARY FOR ANY GIVEN ACTIVITY (in this case, you don’t need ‘weightless’ leggings and fancy asymmetric sports bras to do a downward dog), the deeper problem here is that the principles of yoga, upon which Lululemon has made its billions, explicitly nurture ahimsa or non-violence. The exploitative, wasteful and toxic business model of fast fashion is violence. And I think deep down, the yoga studios, teachers and influencers endorsing Lululemon and similar brands through sponsored partnerships, ambassador programmes and affiliate marketing know this.

TikTok creator @sunainaleon makes a lot of great videos about this topic, calling out the so-called ‘yoga clothing industry’ for its hypocrisy and urging people to do their research before buying, or even better, just buy less. This is part of a much wider conversation about cultural appropriation in yoga (including corporate appropriation), which yoga teacher Angie Tiwari also talks about extensively.

None of this is to say that you shouldn’t buy and wear clothing that makes you feel confident and comfortable in a yoga class. I understand how amazing it can feel to wear something that really supports your movement. Hence why I practice mostly in clothing from Girlfriend Collective, Organic Basics, Carrot Banana Peach, Yogi Bare and second hand Nike/Adidas. I just think that those of who regularly do yoga, not just as a form of exercise through asana practice, but who understand its underlying philosophy, might benefit from some critical thinking about the companies we share our money with, and how we might be able to use our voice to demand better for people and the planet. In the meantime, showing up to your next yoga class in a raggedy old t-shirt could be a fun little act of fast fashion rebellion.

Share

I am a yoga teacher now! If you’re in Edinburgh, you can join me for yoga classes at OMH Therapies in the West End on Thursday evenings and Sunday mornings from 22nd October - 10th December. Newsletter subscribers can use code FREECLASS1 for your first class free (£10 thereafter). Book here :)

Thank you for reading this month’s newsletter! Also thank you to the people who said that they’d be willing to pay a couple of quid for an subscriber version of Threadbare! I’m thinking about starting this in the new year with an extra newsletter and mini-podcast episode each month for paying subscribers, so keep an eye out for that if you’re keen.

In the meantime, here are some videos from the Shein pop-up protest I joined in London last month from Venetia la Manna, and please check out Labour Behind the Label to get involved in more UK fast fashion actions like this one.

@venetialamannaSHE-OUT. We staged a protest outside the Shein pop up in London to hold the ultra fast fashion brand to account for their garment worker exploitation and overproduction. #shein #sheintheknow #sheinxlondonpopup #meetshein #sheincares #protest #sustainablefashion #shein

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

@venetialamannaMore information about our disruption at Shein Oxford Street. Irrespective of how you buy, we need your help! Please learn about exploitative fashion and spread the message far and wide. #shein #protest #sheinxlondonpopup #sustainablefashion #sustainability #fashion

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

“The will to act is itself a renewable resource.” - Al Gore

This new TED Talk is well worth the 25 minutes for a damned account of how the fossil fuel industry has pulled the wool over our eyes and an inspiring call to put it back in its place. For me, the talk was a stark reminder that anything endorsing the continued extraction and combustion of fossil fuels is putting a seal of approval on the devastating impacts of the climate crisis. You guessed it, that includes fashion.

A social license is defined as the acceptance of a practice by the general public. It fits nicely into the Overton Window, a framework used in campaigning to look at how policies or positions are viewed over time. It’s a handy way to think about how to move positive things (eg. eating less meat is good for the environment) into the ‘acceptable’ segment and negative things (eg. deforestation is good for the economy) into the ‘unacceptable’ segment.

One good example of this is the gas lobby cleverly rebranding fossil gas 'as ‘natural gas’ and then manipulating consumers into believing gas cooking creates better food with a decades-long marketing campaign starting with the ‘cooking with gas’ slogan coined in the 1930s. In this way, cooking itself provides a social license for the gas industry, because rather than associating gas cooktops with fossil fuels, we associate them with wholesome home-cooked food or delicious restaurant dishes. Fortunately, the brilliant Global Cooksafe Coalition is tackling this epidemic of misinformation with their major campaign to turn stoves electric (and they’re hiring!).

In a similar vein, the mainstream corporate fashion industry (which Venetia La Manna defines simply as ‘Big Fashion’) provides a social licence for Big Oil (and big gas, and big coal) to operate without the same level of scrutiny that, for example, the auto or aviation industry receives. This is because the majority of consumers do not understand that the clothes they buy, wear and dispose of are made from fossil fuels, in a supply chain powered by fossil fuels. And therefore, because fashion is seen as fun and frivolous (a whole lot of misogyny there which we can get into another time), the fossil fuel industry can rely on the industry to provide a pretty little smokescreen.

There are two important areas that link fashion to fossil fuels; although there are more than two if you count single-use plastic packaging, HFO-fuelled shipping, international air travel and others. The first is the fossil fuels that power the factories and mills that make our clothing, shoes and textiles, and the second is the fossil fuels that synthetic fabrics like polyester, nylon and acrylic are made from.

The first issue is arguably the most important, because while it’s associated with the vast majority of fashion’s greenhouse gas emissions, there is so little transparency of fashion supply chains that brands can sweep this HUGE problem under the rug. The new Fashion Transparency Index talks about this in detail, finding that only 6% of brands tell us what fuel is used in the manufacturing of their clothes. I wrote a viewpoint for the FTI about exactly why this matters - you can read it here.

Meanwhile, some brands are making bold claims about getting rid of coal, but failing to mention that in many cases, coal is simply being replaced by our good friend gas because it produces comparably less emissions, therefore lending another big win to the fossil fuel industry. Another tactic we see is brands refusing to invest in electrification until fossil-heavy grids are cleaned up, rather than the other way around, passing the blame to their suppliers and the governments of the countries they source from, therefore yet again allowing the fossil fuel industry to continue business-as-usual.

Moving onto the second issue, materials, the social license is much more obvious because fashion is so visible in our day-to-day lives. Every time we admire a friend’s outfit or follow a fashion influencer on Instagram, every time we simply get dressed, we are most likely wearing synthetic materials made from petrochemicals and therefore, by dint of looking great and thinking others look great, we’re extending the social contract of Big Oil. While petrol-guzzling SUVs are going out of style, oil companies are increasingly investing in plastics to keep demand growing, and this includes plastic fabrics.

The Plastic Elephant, a new report from Consumption Research Norway (SIFO), exposes an additional element to this social license, linking the problem of overproduction directly to synthetic materials by framing the low price of synthetics as the condition for unsustainable growth of the fashion sector. So yet again, the fossil fuel industry is empowered by fashion’s profit-driven seal of approval - we grow, you grow, everybody grows. The graph below shows this relationship quite starkly:

I’ve only scratched the surface here, but hopefully it provides some food for thought about who we’re really defending when we defend the actions of Big Fashion, the friendly frontline of the fossil fuel industry. I’ll leave you with this quote from the brilliant new War on Want report, Fashioning the future:

“Many garment producing countries have sought to expand their own fossil fuel-based industries, not with the primary intention of meeting the needs of their citizens, but in order to produce ‘cheap energy’ for the industrial sectors. Yet, the fashion industry remains unaccountable for the environmental impact of this expansion.” - Asad Rehman

Ahista Stories

My brilliant friend Zainab Mahmood has launched a brand new South Asian sustainable fashion community called Ahista Stories (‘ahista’ means ‘slow’ in Urdu). Here, she writes about Ahista’s inaugural South Asian sustainable fashion festival. Check it out!

In partnership with Sustainably Muslim and Two Billion Strong, Ahista Stories brings you Ahista Stories Live, London’s first South Asian sustainable fashion festival. Sponsored by WUKA, Ahista Stories Live consists of panels, workshops and market stalls celebrating traditional South Asian clothes and the people who make them.

Panel discussions on topics such as garment worker exploitation will educate and inspire attendees to take action; market stalls of sustainable brands will offer practical alternatives to mindless shopping; and workshops on mending, upcycling and embroidery will teach skills to help celebrate and extend the life of clothes. Tickets for Ahista Stories Live start at £5 and can be booked here.

Location: Poplar Union, 2 Cotall St, London E14 6TL
Date: Saturday 7th October
Time: 11:30-17:00

Follow us on Instagram @ahista.stories and sign up to our mailing list for updates.

The cost of living crisis is crisis-ing. So please forgive me for the brief advertising interlude. Two brands I am a regular paying customer of have offered up discount codes for my subscribers. Just follow the links below:

Homethings - Plastic-free refillable cleaning products
Use code ‘RUTHMACGILP’ for 15% off

The Body Shop - Cruelty-free skincare, hair and beauty
Use code ‘14315’ for 20% off

Finally if you’re a long-time subscriber you’ll remember I used to offer a paid version of this newsletter once a week. While this has been on pause for the last couple of years, I want to know whether you’d be interested in subscribing for extra content. I’m thinking about this content being in the form of mini podcast episodes, because a) My frazzled attention span can barely handle long-form writing anymore, and b) I miss Common Threads. The free monthly newsletter would still be available. Please fill in the survey below to help me out!

Thank you for reading! See you next month.

Share Threadbare

Subscribe now

Today’s email will be a lazy one because my brain is very full after a busy month moving cities. But I wanted to touch on something I’ve been thinking about recently as I go through a bit of a quarter life crisis trying to figure out a routine that works for me. How to balance work, relationship, friends, family, exercise, hobbies, money, housework, travel, rest, mental health and all the other stuff. Who knows how anyone keeps up.

Anyway, with an excess of my non-work time currently being mis-spent on a) scrolling through TikTok and b) going out drinking, I’ve noticed that fashion trends are more recognisable to me than usual. As an ex-fast fashion addict, I like to think I was starting to develop an immunity to trends, learning to feel more comfortable in my own rather simple style without agonising over what strangers thought about someone so ‘plain’ claiming expertise in fashion. But while queuing for a bar a few weeks ago, I spotted that at least 50% of the clientele, most of whom were significantly younger than my friends and I, had their jackets or jumpers tied diagonally around their torsos, like this:

While searching for this picture (source), I realised just how out of the loop I am, because this method of jumper-tying is clearly a well established micro-trend, perhaps a natural and pretty practical follow-up to the viral Uniqlo cross-body bum bag. After pretty much completely detoxing from Instagram this year, I had obviously missed this one, and I felt a pang of FOMO that surprised me. Although this micro-trend is less about consuming a new product and more about styling existing items, it reminded me that education alone can never be the antidote to a compulsive shopping habit, nor a tendency to value oneself on the ability to present a certain image. Going inwards is the only way to unpack the ‘fast fashion’ mindset, as despite nearly 10 years of work in this field, I still find myself sometimes falling back into the negative cycle of: Feel nothing —> Buy something —> Feel nothing.

There are two tools that have helped me to process these patterns of thinking and consuming which I’d love to share with you. The first is a model I learned on my degrowth course last year (currently enrolling for this year if you’re interested), which I cannot for the life of me remember the name of. But it’s pretty simple - just draw some concentric circles on a piece of paper, and label each one as its own ‘sphere of influence’ in your life. For mine, I did: a) myself and my home, b) partner/friends/family, c) local area/workplace, d) city/country, and e) world. It looked a bit like this:

Then, in each circle, we added post-its with different things that we are influenced or impacted by , or that we could impact or have an influence on. Nothing groundbreaking here, but I think its a really helpful exercise to make you feel a little less cynical about your capacity for positive change, both internally and externally. Particularly in this new era of climate doomerism, we all need a little reminder of the things we do have the choice to make a little better.

The second thing that I wanted to recommend is The Unpublishable, a newsletter by Jessica DeFino. It’s primarily about the beauty industry, but you won’t find any affiliate links to plastic-wrapped products. Instead, DeFino unpacks themes like patriarchy, colonialism, climate and capitalism in such a nuanced way that it’s now the only Substack I pay to subscribe to because her writing has fundamentally shifted how I view and interact with the industrial complex of Making Women Feel Bad About Themselves. For anyone interested in sustainable fashion, its a must read.

I would love to hear your thoughts and recommendations for how you’ve tackled your own relationship to fashion or consumerism in general. Thank you for reading and supporting Threadbare!

Leave a comment

Amongst the packed agenda, Dr. Hakan Karaosman’s inspiring talk on the limits to growth offered an important reminder that a just transition means co-creating climate targets and strategies with, not for, suppliers, and refusing to jump ship when things get challenging. I also got a dose of hope from Dr. Anna R. Kelles’ speech about the New York Fashion Act - a supply chain due diligence law that if passed, would fine companies up to 2% of annual revenues for non-compliance. I also cheered at Dr. Katia Vladimirova’s invitation to build a sufficiency wardrobe of just 5 new items per year, and Seema Joshi’s call for brands producing in Vietnam to advocate for the release of Vietnamese climate activists being sent to prison.

Overall, there wasn’t any tangible action talked about by the most influential speakers, beyond re-stating the urgent need for collaboration. One of the best reviews of the summit I’ve seen is from BoF’s Sarah Kent:

“On the sidelines, many conversations focused on what was left unsaid on the main stage, where large brands were often allowed to put an optimistic sheen on slow progress without challenge. What wasn’t much discussed was the question of money — a critical and divisive issue. Meeting fashion’s sustainability goal is going to cost billions of dollars and most of that is going to need to be spent in the supply chain. Who should pay and how is a live issue made particularly delicate by the broader gloomy economic climate. Manufacturers say they are facing an impossible squeeze from brands who are demanding lower prices, while also pressing for major eco-investments. But the subject got little air time at the summit. Until that question of climate funding is really addressed, it’s hard to see action taking place at scale.”

Interestingly, this paragraph is followed by a disclosure that LVMH holds a minority interest in The Business of Fashion. This uncomfortable conflict of interest reminded me of the recent news that LVMH has attracted 1,200 ESG funds that have amassed a combined stake worth more than US$17 billion. As Ken Pucker commented on Linkedin, with 5.7million metric tonnes of CO2e (equivalent to 1,268,423 petrol-powered cars driven for one year) from scope 3 produced by LVMH in 2022, ‘what is the connection between an ESG fund and planetary welfare?’

LVMH also sponsored the Global Fashion Summit’s celebration dinner, and its billionaire nepo-baby Head of Image and Environment (what?) Antoine Arnault led the first conference session on ‘luxury’s sustainable development’, where cutting remarks were made about luxury fashion being ‘inherently sustainable’ unlike fast fashion (lol), and #humblebrags were offered about Louis Vuitton’s traffic-stopping Paris Fashion Week show, which rumours suggest cost over $350million to produce - but wait! The set designs are sometimes recycled or reused in stores!

All this is to say, there is an increasing threat that mega-brands like LVMH have been allowed to define the problems, propose the solutions, and control the narrative, not just about their own business, but about sustainability and circularity in the entire fashion industry. What can we read between the lines?

Subscribe now

The conversations at this conference, and every conference, have become so complicated that they require endless sustainability executives and experts detailing their unique and well-branded approaches to the problem of climate catastrophe. But too often this clouds the simple, inconvenient truth that science sets the limits for us. Science tells us what we need to do, and when we need to do it. Anything that’s not drastically cutting greenhouse gas emissions, eliminating fossil fuels, reducing resource consumption, and restoring biodiversity is a misguided distraction at best, and a deliberate misdirection at worst.

Maxine Bédat summed up this issue perfectly here, which was echoed by Ken Pucker in this brilliant podcast:

Will we continue accepting the crumbs that Sustainability Inc., feeds us?

Share The Ethical Fashion Roundup

Thank you for reading this email and apologies for the delay this month, I’m blaming the stress/chaos of moving house/city 🥱 Until next time, I’ll leave you with three reading recommendations:

• Sophie Benson’s brand new book Sustainable Wardrobe comes out 7th September, and the hardback is available to pre-order now. I can’t wait to read Sophie’s undoubtedly fresh take on taking a more responsible approach to our individual fashion habits. Huge congratulations to Sophie for this important debut!

• The UNEP has released its new Sustainable Fashion Communications Playbook which covers in detail how fashion communicators from all corners of the industry can transform traditional narratives that promote overconsumption and enable greenwashing, and promote a more regenerative and inclusive fashion future through storytelling.

• I met the wonderful Tanita Hecking in Copenhagen, who together with Lavinia Muth writes The Crisps newsletter - aptly named for providing ‘snacks’ of sustainable fashion analysis and crisp (see what I did there) critiques of myths and misinformation in the sector.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

So far, so ordinary. But what I remember from that innocent time is the cold warehouse where I would meet delivery vans and unpack cable-tied bundles of crumpled flannel shirts. This warehouse was at least twice the size of the storefront itself, packed to the brim with more clothes than we could ever reasonably sell. This excess was my small glimpse of the sheer volume of clothes that already exist, let alone the new ones being churned out every day.

Of course, what I was seeing was a snapshot of a global business model utterly dependent on overproduction and overconsumption, from high street to high-end and even second-hand. You only have to peek at LinkedIn to see that this industry actively recruits its workforce from fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), like groceries and toiletries that we buy quickly and regularly, with convenience as a much bigger behavioral driver than quality. In amongst this ‘incomparable churn’ of mass-produced clothing, it can be easy to forget that this incredible access we have to whatever we want to wear is not fulfilling a human right to decent, sufficient clothing. It is nothing more than a luxury, an absurd excess.

Last week, experts gathered at the European Parliament in Brussels for the inaugural Beyond Growth conference, which confronted the EU on its own destructive growth logic and brought conversations about degrowth to mainstream policy, exploring meaty topics like universal basic income and services, just transition, wealth tax, the economics of care, democratic governance and more. I’ve been slowly working my way through the livestream, and although it was, of course, imperfect and incomplete, it certainly feels like a pivotal moment for addressing our relationship with excess.

Unsurprisingly, the blossoming degrowth movement is continually met with accusations of being anxious luddites desperate to crawl back into the cave. This response to The Economist’s critique ‘“Meet the lefty Europeans who want to deliberately shrink the economy” (lol) from Timothée Parrique is particularly good at dispelling that myth. It reminded me how grateful I am for the experience I had last year studying with the Centre for Human Ecology in Ullapool, which introduced rich new narratives of degrowth that really helped me to move past this tired debate and toward real-life examples of a prospering, post-growth society.

Meanwhile, this brilliant article from Rachel Arthur considers a fashion industry that slows down its relationship with the growth paradigm, suggesting that we need a “controlled reduction [of production] to align output with planetary boundaries as well as a social foundation.” To achieve this, Fashion Revolution argues that brands must first disclose their huge volumes of production (eg. Inditex produced 450,146 tonnes of garments in 2021), of which 85% currently do not. This report from Hot or Cool Institute published last year also addresses this topic from a consumer point of view, proposing hard limits on fashion consumption in rich countries.

Share The Ethical Fashion Roundup

While tinkering around the edges of sustainable fashion creates jobs, drives corporate profits and gives us plenty to write about, it’s clearer than ever, I think, that total system change is not only necessary but inevitable, whether by choice or as a result of disaster. I want to see every factory powered by renewable energy, fossil fuel fabrics phased out of every design, and every brand repairing, recirculating and recycling their products, and of course, living wages and decent work for every person connected to the supply chain. But even if we achieve all of this, the fashion industry will still need to face the elephant in the room. It is a business of excess, and our planet can no longer afford that luxury.

So what can we do about this wicked problem? It may not be much, but I believe we should start with interrogating the self. Creators like Aja Barber, Besma Whayeb, Kate Caric and Cora Harrington have long championed critical engagement with our own consumption habits, which requires letting go of ‘whataboutism’ and a pretty long, hard look in the mirror.

On a collective level, one of the most important things that everyone who cares about slowing down and scaling back fashion’s monstrous impacts can do is to sign on to the Stop Waste Colonialism campaign from The OR Foundation. Their vital work on Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) at the EU level needs your support.

Thank you so much for reading. I’ll be back with another newsletter next month. In the meantime, here are some podcast recommendations I’ve listened to recently if you want to explore some of these issues in more depth:

• Tipping Point: The true story of The Limits To Growth

• The BoF Podcast: The world is on fire but we’re still buying shoes

• Tech Won’t Save Us: Why tech billionaires want to shape our future

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

This newsletter has been on a two-year hiatus, but I’m excited to use this space again after some much-needed breathing room from various ‘side hustles’, and more importantly, new insight and experience on all things fashion, ethics, and sustainability that I hope I’ve gained since we last spoke.

First, a little (re)introduction. My name is Ruth MacGilp, and I live in London but call Edinburgh home. I’ve spent my career so far working at the intersection of fashion with labour and the environment. This has taken various forms, including social media, podcasts, articles and digital marketing, copywriting, consulting and communications for sustainable fashion brands, publications, and non-profits, most recently of which was Fashion Revolution. A few months ago, I started working with Action Speaks Louder, a new climate campaigning organisation focused on corporate accountability. My role here is to run fashion campaigns that hold big brands to account for their climate promises, with the aim of accelerating the global transition away from fossil fuels. Outside of work, I am training to be a yoga teacher*.

I plan to use The Ethical Fashion Roundup (which will probably need a rebrand in the near future) to share my thoughts on fashion in the age of the climate crisis. Some topics I’m interested in exploring over the next few months include decarbonisation, degrowth, greed, solidarity, cultural sustainability, transparency, renewable energy, craft, commons, waste, commerce, and a whole lot about the lies, manipulation, doomerism, techno-optimism and false solutions being pushed our way.

This won’t necessarily be sent on the most predictable schedule, because I’m keen to avoid another burnout. But I’ll aim for roughly once a month, so don’t worry about being spammed too much, and do share with your friends/family/colleagues if you want to help it grow.

Share The Ethical Fashion Roundup

Today I wanted to talk very briefly about optimism, hope, imagination, or whatever you want to call the ambition, belief, and desire for a better future that sometimes feels lacking in sustainability circles.

I’ve been thinking about this topic since joining a Sustainable Fashion Scotland workshop all about the Fashion Fictions project. Created by Dr. Amy Twigger-Holroyd, Fashion Fictions invites us to create alternative worlds in which our relationship with fashion is totally different from the status quo. Since launching in 2020, hundreds of hopeful people have submitted their own 100-word fictional futures which imagine, explore, and enact alternative fashion cultures and systems.

While we all strive for better, what we often forget to do is think about what ‘better’ will really look and feel like. This kind of radical imagination will help us to make ‘better’ real. I’m not the only one who feels this way. Books like It’s Not Too Late, It’s Not That Radical, and All We Can Save explore how harnessing the power of hope can help us not just paper over the cracks that social and environmental crises have caused, but to strive for something so much better than what we’ve accepted as our fate. The Fashion Fictions project offers some great ways to start thinking like a stubborn optimist. Here is one of my favourites:

This week (22nd-29th April) is Fashion Revolution Week, which presents another opportunity to put a hopeful hat on. By signing the manifesto for a fashion revolution, you’re joining a shared vision for a fashion system that enriches people’s lives. It’s important, I think, to say that out loud. Manifest, if you will. This doesn’t mean assuming everything is going to be wonderful. It means believing that things can be better and committing to making that happen. It means being a realist and meeting people where they are, while supporting them to grow. It means avoiding doomerism and apathy, and it also means avoiding perfectionism and too-good-to-be-true silver bullets. As Rebecca Solnit puts it so beautifully in this article, “hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away.”

Thank you for reading, and for sticking around. I’d love to know what you think!

Leave a comment

While you wait for the next email, here are some brilliant fashion newsletters you should subscribe to:

• Titian Threads

• Curiously Conscious

• Fashion, Disrupted

• Line Sheet

• Articles of Interest

• Back Row

• True Style

• Tansy Hoskins

• The Unpublishable (beauty not fashion but so relevant)

*If like me you’re a yoga student and/or teacher, check out this open letter to lululemon urging them to phase out coal from their supply chain and invest in renewable energy. The brand loves profiting from yogis but seems to forget the principles of non-harming and care for people and planet that yoga embodies.

Buy me a Ko-Fi

After an intense few weeks wrapping up at university and manning Fashion Revolution Week campaigns, I finally have a little more headspace to write, but I’ve been feeling increasingly disillusioned by showing up online and finding it tough to burn through burnout and use my voice in a valuable way outside of work. This, combined with my concerns about the ethics of our Silicon Valley Substack overlords, means I may take a little time to evolve this newsletter, perhaps using this space instead to amplify others. In the meantime, moving away from freelancing means that the pressure of content creation is waning, and with it, some reflection on where we are as a movement of people whose careers depend on hot takes about this hot planet.

As May Day approached last week, the chasm between the grassroots labour movement and the influencer industrial complex became increasingly clear. When we fail to centre the experiences of workers directly impacted by fashion’s exploitative and extractive business model and the stories of solutions and hope, we fall into the infighting trap, over and over again. Imagine if the energy we spend picking apart the specificities of sustainable fashion messaging instead was channeled into meaningful efforts to expand the movement and direct action that holds those in power to account - executives and policymakers making decisions that impact supply chain workers. Imagine if our narrative of inclusivity extended to acceptance of beginners, the rejection of shame as a tool of change, the understanding of a wide spectrum of ideas and the patience to resolve conflicts away from social media.

All this is to say that we have a lot of work to do to protect the positive progress that has been made over the past eight years since Rana Plaza. To progress beyond this current snail’s pace of change means we urgently need to step back, to think bigger, to shift the burden where it counts. Which leads nicely on to the #ProtectProgress initiative from Clean Clothes Campaign, an appeal to some of the world’s most powerful brands to extend the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety, ensuring safe working conditions for the people who make our clothes.

The Bangladesh Accord is a legally binding agreement between apparel brands and global trade unions, ensuring that disasters like Rana Plaza never happen again. Unfortunately, the agreement expires on 31st May 2021. If the Accord is not renewed, the safety of over 2 million workers in 1,600 garment factories will be left in the hands of voluntary, non-enforceable Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives, which as you can imagine, have been categorically unable to prevent mass casualties.

Brands must stop dragging their feet and sign on to the renewed Accord. The internationally binding agreement should also expand the proven model to other countries where garment workers still face unsafe working conditions. We shouldn't have to wait for another Rana Plaza for change to happen, because no one should die for fashion. Find out more and get involved.

In other news, a helpful tool to help you realise your power as part of the movement:

And this is a pretty urgent message for us all:

Reading list

• How far away are we from downloading our clothes?

• Your cotton T-shirt could be made with Uyghur slave labor

• One year on, what has the pandemic taught the fashion industry?

• Cancelling fashion orders: The legal rethink

• Do you know the name of the sheep that made your sweater?

• This is what really happens to your donated clothes

• Fashion is chasing carbon neutrality. Carbon positive is better

• Facing fashion’s overproduction issue: Solutions, new models and alternatives (paywall)

• UK garment sector needs watchdog to stop brands abusing suppliers

• MPs call on fast fashion giants to step up living wages for garment workers

• What it means to be a fashion activist in the pandemic era

• Can a fairer fashion industry emerge from crisis?

• India’s fashion artisans face ‘extreme distress’ in pandemic

• Is there a market for menswear rental?

• Pre-loved fashion moves from niche to mainstream

• Greenwashing: a guide for confused beginners (paywall)

• What digital clothes could mean for the environment

• Maxine Bédat urges fashion to make a change now, not in 2030

• The next generation of leather alternatives

• The human cost of fashion is taking its toll - Why can’t we understand the value of people?

Listening list

• We released a mini bonus episode of Common Threads during Fashion Revolution Week. The new series - and some big news - is coming soon!

• This episode of Wardrobe Crisis with Canopy founder Nicole Rycroft is a beautiful and urgent reminder of the need to protect the world’s forests.

• Hot Take is such a fantastic podcast about the climate - this episode covers Big Tech's approach to climate change and climate journalism.

• I’d highly recommend catching up on ‘Fashion and Degrowth’ pt 1 & pt 2 from Fashion Act Now, and also this gamechanging event from Cultural Intellectual Property Rights Initiative about how Indigenous communities combat cultural appropriation and conserve biodiversity.

Join a union

“The only effective answer to organized greed is organized labour.” - Thomas Donahue

Collective action = collective liberation. One of the oldest but most powerful tools to fight oppressive systems is by joining and supporting unions and collective bargaining organisations, in fashion and beyond. Freedom of association is one of the eight fundamental conventions of the International Labour Organisation, and has been since 1949. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights also states that the right to organize with others to fight for better working conditions is a universal human right: Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests. 

Thanks to the work of my dear friend Sinead McNulty, I am proud to be a member of Scotland’s tenants union, Living Rent. This movement increases tenant power by resisting evictions, rent hikes, private housing monopolies and supporting us to stand up ourselves and our homes.

In the fashion industry specifically, I’d highly recommend supporting the work of IndustriALL Global Union and Awaj Foundation. Union power for fashion supply chain workers is absolutely key to fight exploitation and abuse, negotiate wages and improve working conditions for themsleves and for future generations. More than 90% of workers in the global garment industry have no possibility to negotiate for their wages or conditions. If we want a fair system that offers decent pay, safe working conditions, and upholds the human rights of all workers, we need to demand that workers in every country and every factory and every industry access the power of union representation.

“And the thing is, none of this is very radical. Governments and policies can totally enable all of this and more. But we need to organise for this change. We especially need more solidarity across all scales, from local unions to national and transnational. Because as much as many of us suffer under shit working conditions etc, we also profit of the even worse working conditions of others. We have more in common than we think, and we are definitely more than they are - if we organise.” - Josephine Becker

Take action: Ask #WhoMadeMyFabric?

Fashion is not just made by garment workers in the country listed on the clothing label. Millions of people around the world grow fibres, process raw materials, mine minerals, spin yarns, weave cloth, dye, print, finish, embroider and embellish fabrics and much more. But the ethical fashion conversation often fails to recognise just how vast and complex the global supply chain really is. Most brands do not trace and publicly disclose the suppliers, sub-contractors and informal workshops, which can enable exploitative working conditions to thrive while obscuring who is responsible.

That’s why our new @fash_rev campaign supports grassroots organisations to demand justice for workers in textile mills and processing facilities. This is a great opportunity for citizens to reconnect with the materials that make up our clothes and really hold brands accountable - particularly the 60+ major corporations that are failing to take basic steps towards transparency beyond the first tier of the supply chain. This is also a chance for the small designers and home sewers to think about the fabrics they source and the questions they could ask suppliers to conduct real due diligence.

Click here to send an email to a brand to ask them #WhoMadeMyFabric?

Thanks for reading, I appreciate you.

Catch up on past issues of The Ethical Fashion Roundup here.

You can also sign up for the Fashion Revolution newsletter which I curate each week.

Ruth x

Buy me a Ko-Fi

“I would like to see the fashion and footwear industry treated in the same way as the tobacco industry… I want to see astronomical fines for corporations that are involved in industrial homicide and environmental degradation, and CEOs put on trial for crimes against humanity.” - Tansy Hoskins

“More often than not, the industry is marking its own homework. To challenge this dynamic and apply the pressure needed for accelerated change, we need policymakers and legislators to support sustainable products, services and business models through investment and incentivisation. We also need the flip side, a punitive framework for those totally unwilling to do the work.” - Samata

“People think it’s just clothes. They don’t see it as a political issue, never mind a humanitarian issue.” - Frances Leach

The fashion industry contributes around 4% of all global greenhouse gas emissions and is the second-highest risk category for modern slavery. What’s more, the industry employs an estimated 2.4 billion people, and in 2018, was valued at $1.4 trillion. So, as influential policymakers across the world turn their attention to climate change solutions at this year’s COP26, why isn’t fashion - an industry that relies on both agriculture and fossil fuel extraction - on the agenda? My latest article about fashion’s colossal regulation gap tries to find out why.

Despite this gap, fashion is political. It has been throughout history, and currently, we’re living through an intense wave of political events that fashion is intrinsically linked to. Take the military coup in Myanmar that garment workers are leading protests against - in a Zoom call this week, the activists themselves were pleading for international brands to condemn the coup and support their fight for democracy. But despite its creativity, fashion can be frustratingly partisan, particularly when its bottom line is threatened by political instability in sourcing countries. That has also been made clear by the ongoing forced labour crisis in the Uighur region of China. Here, a number of cowardly brands sourcing cotton from linked to the genocide have been bowing to pressure from the Chinese government and state media to continue business-as-usual in order to avoid market restrictions, as seen with the likes of Burberry and H&M.

Recently, we’ve also seen the largest protest in history across India, where millions of farmers took to the streets to oppose new government regulation on agriculture. The fashion industry kept quiet, despite the funds it pours into unjust farming systems that prioritise corporate power and threaten worker livelihoods. But for fashion, the protests are an invitation to take accountability, rather than take sides. We’ve seen demands for binding agreements on gender-based violence after H&M has come under fire for a horrific incident in one of its garment factories (#JusticeforJesayre). We’ve even seen legislation hoping to transform the supply chain, like the EU’s new mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence law.

Each of these situations is unique and complex. The more I learn, the less I know. Sweeping statements about solutions from Western influencers and activists - myself included - often fail to fully consider the demands of the workers (which are rarely unanimous), the inner workings of the industry and the intricacies of economic structures. Oversimplified and reactive floods social media every day, and it is becoming more and more difficult to navigate. When we call for systemic change, what exactly do we mean? All this is to say, fashion is so much more than just production and consumption. Fashion is political.

If you’d like to find out more about the role of regulation in fashion, I’d highly recommend subscribing to the new newsletter from New Standard Institute, Rewoven.

Reading list

Catch up on the top headlines

• Fashion factory disasters are still happening regularly - here is why

• Solving fashion’s biggest issues: Overproduction and overconsumption (paywall)

• Five garment workers discuss the impact of the pandemic

• Fashion and nature: Biodiversity for beginners

• The sad reality of sustainable fashion: ‘Exaggerated, false, or deceptive’

• A conversation with Giorgos Kallis about degrowth and fashion (all of the past issues of Denier are also on my reading list)

• Luxury fashion is returning to its long history of repair and refurbishment (paywall)

• Garment workers win historic victory to transform the fashion industry

• The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and the fight for $15

• Boohoo severs ties with hundreds of UK manufacturers after critical review

• Workers accuse ‘ethical’ British brand of ‘extremely unsafe’ conditions

• UK Modern Slavery Act is not working as intended

• Tracing a garment: industry looks to shine a light on its blind spots (paywall)

• The business model that could save fashion—and why it isn’t everywhere

• Will you wear it 30 times?: The experts’ guide to online shopping

• Meet Aditi Mayer, the sustainability activist decolonising fashion on Instagram

• Brands are adopting regenerative agriculture. Is that a good thing? (paywall)

• Brands say they want to keep workers safe, but they’re not willing to pay for it (paywall)

Podcast lineup

Bit quiet here as I have basically only been listening to ehfm

• Common Threads is still on a Spring break, but catch up on our latest episodes with Orsola de Castro on her radical wardrobe manifesto and Lora Gene on the contentious role of brands in transforming the fashion system.

• The Yikes Podcast has some great new episodes with conversations about abolishing the monarchy, greentrolling and white supremacy.

• Naomi Klein on the Owen Jones podcast was excellent.

God save the queens

This work can be pretty serious, so when the wonderful Gina Tonic asked me to interview the two Scottish queens of the Drag Race UK final, I went for it. Queue a Zoom call in which I’ve never felt so underdressed in my life to meet Ellie and Lawrence for a quickfire interview for Polyester, accompanied by the coolest illustrations by Vernon Luna.

In other extra-curricular activities, I joined Lekker for a fun Q&A about my favourite words, shared a wardrobe love letter with Francine Heath, and chatted with Bianca Foley about greenwashing and ethical fashion. I’ll also be joining Emily Stochl for an Instagram Live on Tuesday 20th April at 6pm to talk all things Fashion Revolution.

Take action: #PayYourWorkers

10% of the apparel workforce may have already been laid off since the start of the pandemic. Millions more are at risk of being fired and have not received their full wages for months. The vast majority of these workers are women, in jobs with no respect for their labour rights, leading to a massive imbalance of power in the industry. Many report skipping meals, borrowing money to buy food, and struggling to afford vegetables or meat for their families as the pandemic’s economic crisis rages on. Sign the #PayYourWorkers petition from Clean Clothes Campaign to demand that brands like Nike and Next…

• Pay the workers who make their clothes their full wages for the duration of the pandemic.

• Make sure workers are never again left penniless if their factory goes bankrupt, by signing onto a negotiated severance guarantee fund.

• Protect workers’ right to organise and bargain collectively.

Thanks for reading! You can catch up on past issues of The Ethical Fashion Roundup here, and buy me a virtual coffee to support my work.

You can also sign up for the Fashion Revolution newsletter which I curate each week for more content in your inbox.

Ruth x

Buy me a Ko-Fi

“In 2025 the greatest competition to a brand will be the products it has already sold.”

- Kalkidan Legesse

Kalkidan, the founder of independent ethical fashion retailer Sancho’s, spoke to me recently about her new venture Shwap, launching in April 2021. In her mind, brands would be ill-advised to ignore the rising tide of fashion’s sharing economy, a marketplace where clothing is swapped, rented and resold on a peer-to-peer basis long after it has left the shop floor.

“The sharing [economy] business model is crucial for sustainable business in both an environmental and financial sense. The challenge, however, is that without a full understanding of a product’s lifecycle, it is hard to optimise when an item should be shared, swapped, sold, rented or recycled. Shwap aims to provide that crucial insight to business so they can optimise their product delivery, and to customers so they can see a transparent picture of where their clothes started and where they end up.”

We’ve also seen dozens of brands lately jumping on this sharing economy trend, from Urban Outfitters to Patagonia to Levi’s. As usual, there is a fine line between greenwashing and positive change, particularly when resale, rental and recycling do little to offset production volumes. But if the commercialisation of the sharing economy could help scale up sustainable fashion, how do we get more people on board? And what are the barriers preventing mass-market adoption of sharing? For the last six months, I’ve been trying to find the answers to this for a university research project. So far there have been some interesting findings, including:

• Some forms of sharing have ‘rebound effects’ that offset any environmental impact reduction, for example, dry cleaning and shipping for rental fashion.

• Sustainability can be the least appealing aspect of sharing. Consumers are much more driven by budget, style and community.

• Monetisation creates barriers to entry, like competing with the professional sellers on Depop or property moguls on AirBnB, or investing significant sums of money in short-term clothing rental. High-street fashion shouldn’t be destined for landfill just because its deemed low value.

• Successful sharing is all about long-term habit building, not short-term transactions.

• The biggest challenge for sharing to be widely accepted is trust. Trust in the provider, in the other participants, in the products, in the system.

• Fashion sharing providers shouldn’t be trying to mimic fashion brands. They should be looking to tech, such as dating apps, for inspiration on building trust.

• Older women can feel excluded from the mainstream fashion sharing economy as it doesn’t cater to their needs.

• For sharing to ever be a realistic replacement for traditional consumption, clothing needs to be designed to last. Designers should be thinking about the afterlife of their clothes from the beginning, in style and in substance.

• Ultimately we need a diverse set of solutions to re-circulate a diverse range of products. No single startup can ‘solve’ this alone.

More to come. In the meantime, read my beginner’s guide to the sharing economy and what it means for the future of fashion in EcoCult.

Newsflash

Apologies in advance for the longggggg list

• Indonesian village turns red as floods hit dye manufacturing hub

• At least 24 workers die in Moroccan textile factory flood

• Why fashion has a stake in India’s farmer protests (paywall)

• What India’s farmer protests can teach fashion about accountability

• Bribes, fake factories and forged documents in China’s factory audits

• Designers fight for a more inclusive adaptive fashion industry

• The International Labour Association is failing garment workers

• Could Brexit destroy British fashion?

• High-performance activewear without the toxic chemicals

• The Modern Slavery Act, six years later

• Sweatpants sales are booming, but what about the workers?

• Beyond harm mitigation: innovations in positive impact materials

• Industry experts on what’s next for "sustainable" fashion?

• If Gen Z killed fast fashion, why is it still booming?

• A month-by-month guide to making your wardrobe more sustainable

• TikTok is shaping how Gen Z sees sustainable fashion (paywall)

• Sustainable fashion: How to tell the difference between genuine and jargon

• New tech innovation for fully traceable fibres

• The impact of ASOS purchasing Arcadia brands

• Hidden risks of antimicrobial and antiviral clothing

• President Biden, appoint a Fashion Czar

• Ultra-fast fashion is eating the world

• Contextualising cultural appropriation at Louis Vuitton

• Outdoor gear found to shed “forever chemicals” into the environment

• Waste is not a future fashion goldmine

• Fashion trends are often recycled. Now more clothing can be, too

• Sustain: An essay by Professor Dilys Williams

• Women of colour bear the brunt of British high street collapse

• Modern slavery surges in the fashion supply chain

• Sneaker drops keep coming. Are they sustainable?

• Influencer Danielle Bernstein rips off independent designers (paywall)

• Can H&M undo the environmental devastation it has caused?

Podcast lineup

Plus a couple of sneaky videos

• We’ve released a bunch of new episodes of Common Threads to round off the second series. Listen back while we’re on a little hiatus:
  - Mending a Broken System with Ros Studd and Siobhan McKenna
  - Transforming Fashion Waste with Holly McQuillan and Cassandra Belanger
  - Loved Clothes Last with Orsola de Castro
  - How to Start an Ethical Fashion Brand with Lora Gene

• I learned a lot from this episode of Wardrobe Crisis with Jason Hickel on what degrowth means for the fashion industry, and this episode of the BoF podcast with Kalkidan Legesse on racism and inequality in fashion.

• Slow Factory has been running another semester of their brilliant Open Education programme that makes learning about sustainability accessible and inclusive. Liz Ricketts on fashion waste colonialism was eye-opening. Register for their free classes here, and donate to the foundation if you can.

• Catch up on this panel discussion with Elizabeth Cline, Samata, Aja Barber and Eshita Kabra:

A life update

You may have already seen this, but just announcing it here that I am officially leaving the freelance hustle behind, having started a new job at Fashion Revolution, the world’s largest fashion activism movement campaigning globally for a fashion industry that conserves and restores the environement and values people over profit and growth. Last month, I joined the team as their Communications and Content Manager, a role that combines all the things I love - copywriting, comms, collaborations, content. This comes after many years of volunteering for the Fashion Revolution Scotland team, and it’s remote so I’m still living in Edinburgh for now.

Although it’s been difficult to leave many wonderful freelance projects and clients behind, particularly my faves at Delicate Rébellion, I’m excited about this next chapter. I will still aim to send out this newsletter once a month, although you should definitely also subscribe to the weekly Fashion Revolution newsletter which I now curate. I’ve also got a couple of articles coming out soon but that side of things will down, and Common Threads is now on a break until the summer.

Sustainable fashion *action* of the month

Seamless segue… your action this month is to get involved in Fashion Revolution Week! Taking place from 19th-25th April 2021, Fashion Revolution Week is an annual mobilisation surrounding the anniversary of the Rana Plaza tragedy. The theme for this year is the interconnectedness of human rights and the rights of nature, and the campaign aims to amplify unheard voices across the fashion supply chain. Download the Get Involved guides for citizens, brands, producers, unions and students to find out more. You can also host your own virtual event and invite a friend to take part.

Food for thought for the first Monday of March: this tweet about how the cult of social media makes us chase other people’s idea of success, not necessarily our own.

Thanks for reading! You can catch up on past issues of The Ethical Fashion Roundup here, and buy me a virtual coffee to support my work.

Enjoy the Spring sunshine,
Ruth x

Buy me a Ko-Fi

Receipt art by @projectstopshop

“If you feel like you’re not allowed to participate in the conversation because of the way you shop, then we’re losing a lot of people that would otherwise be involved in fixing problems.” - Elizabeth Cline

Ten years ago, the phrase eco-guilt was not only an unknown term, perhaps even an unknown feeling, but would also probably be voted ‘least likely to appear in Vogue’. This week, Vogue published an article called Don’t Let Eco-Guilt Stop You From Taking Action, and it feels pretty refreshing to see the mainstream narrative finally shift from: “You’re a terrible consumer and the only way to absolved your sins is to buy better stuff!” to “It’s ok to feel bad, but it’s not all on you, and it’s not all about consumption.” In other words, it’s okay to be an imperfectly ethical consumer.

Fashion Revolution’s latest research into consumer perceptions of sustainable fashion shows that overwhelmingly, people want to buy clothing that doesn’t harm people or the planet. Their Consumer Survey Report highlights some interesting findings:

• 45% of people say it’s important that clothing is made without using child labour

• 62% of people wear clothing for at least a few years

• 80% of people think sustainability certifications are important for brands

• 74% of people think brands should disclose their suppliers

• 79% of people say that the law should require brands to respect human rights

This report and others like it show that the appetite for ethically-made, environmentally-conscious and long-lasting products remains strong. Despite all the bad news, it seems like a real shift is happening for shoppers, accelerated by our new lockdown lifestyles. TLDR: The intentions are there, we just need brands to translate this powerful mandate into meaningful action beyond the buzzwords.

It’s relevant to note here that a few ultra-fast fashion giants aside, the majority of the fashion industry is struggling to survive. The UK has seen the biggest fall in UK retail sales since 1995. Globally, fashion’s profits are expected to drop by 93%. Household names like Topshop have crumbled into administration, putting the entire supply chain at risk. But don’t let these headlines (nor the inevitable “Shop for Britain” messaging we’ll get from the Tories again once high streets eventually reopen) make you feel like boycotting fast fashion is bad for the economy. Do you know what’s really bad for the economy? A dead planet. Do you know what’s really bad for workers? Exploitation and abuse. Fashion needs transformation, not rescue.

Newsflash

Lots to catch up on - bookmark for later. I’ve found the Pocket app pretty handy for saving articles and listening to them as audio transcripts when my brain is too tired to read.

• Fashion retailers could burn products stuck in the EU due to Brexit

• Could other brands follow the success of Patagonia’s in-house upcycling?

• Secret sustainability: Why some brands keep quiet about their initiatives

• From reset to regeneration: Sustainability in 2021

• Inauguration cements sustainability as a new American value (paywall)

• The uphill struggle to make trainers more sustainable

• This new app is the Deliveroo of clothing repairs

• What brands are prioritising for sustainability in 2021 (paywall) / Similarly themed article here with some brilliant quotes

• US cracks down on forced labour / UK cracks down on forced labour

• Experts weigh in on how to fix the global fashion industry

• Garment workers are getting fired and rehired for lower pay

• Brands are paying customers to re-wear their clothes

• Chemicals: The hidden obstacle to circular fashion (paywall)

• 6 months after #BlackoutTuesday, did fashion square up?

• Exploring radical solutions to transform fashion

• The return of the designer-activist

Podcast lineup

Fill your ears with something other than pop punk from your pre-teen years

• Common Threads is back for 2021, and our first episode of the year features Bel Jacobs, the fashion editor-turned-fashion activist and co-founder of Fashion Act Now. Tomorrow we’ll have a new one on the feed all about repair with two very special guests. We’ve also created a Ko-Fi page, so if you’d like to support our ad-free podcast financially you can (thank you!)

• I haven’t actually listened to any ethical fashion podcast episodes this month (sorry), but I have been enjoying How To Save A Planet, which is arguably the most entertaining way to learn about the climate crisis. Their latest episode ‘Recycling! Is it BS?’ is excellent. It includes a very helpful explanation of why downcycling (eg. turning a plastic bottle into a fleece jacket, something fashion brands love to use as proof of circularity) doesn’t actually close the loop, it simply prevents the loop altogether because that recycled PET fleece cannot later be turned into another fleece or another plastic bottle.

• If like me you’re feeling a little worse for wear and just need some chatty people to soundtrack your day, You’re Wrong About is truly unbeatable. Plus you get to learn about cool shit that you’re probably wrong about, like Y2K, Stepford Wives, QAnon, the Stanford Prison Experiment and Marie Antoinette.

• FYI: Sancho’s co-founder Kalkidan Legesse has started a new podcast about race, sustainability and intersectional environmentalism called Well Now You Know.

Got anything for the wash?

If you’ve been in this space for a while, you’ll probably know that washing your clothes has an impact on the environment, and that all of us should probably do it a little less. Beyond the vast carbon footprint of cleaning and caring for clothes (11% or 186 million tonnes), we’ve also got the overwhelming level of microplastics leaching from our laundry baskets into the oceans, with polyester fibres recently found in the Arctic.

However, one thing that’s missing from this conversation is brands, and to some extent governments. In my latest article for Eco-Age, I investigate who is really accountable for rethinking the laundry cycle, plus what you can do at home to make a difference. Self quote incoming…

“In this utopia of a fully circular fashion system, where every garment is reused, recycled, resold or rented, we need to get back to basics. Remember that with each new owner or end-use, the quality of a garment quickly degrades, and fast fashion products are clearly not built to last. If you welcome the new year with one simple resolution, let it be this: quality over quantity. Only then will our washing habits truly make a difference.”

Sustainable fashion *action* of the month

Make ‘greentrolling’ part of your healthy morning routine!!

Venetia La Manna recently shared a thread of the latest fast fashion greenwashing antics and it reminded me just how pervasive and constant this problem really is. Luckily, there is something you can do to channel your frustration. Greentrolling is a term coined by Mary Annaïse Heglar in the climate newsletter Hot Take (also celebrated in another brilliant newsletter HEATED) to describe dragging oil companies like Exxon on Twitter, calling them out for their greenwashing and lies à la AOC and Greta.

“It’s like a gateway drug into more climate activism. Even if you feel like you can't do anything else to fight climate change, you can definitely talk shit to Shell.”

I reckon we could all bring a bit of Heglar’s energy to the fashion industry too, holding brands accountable for their actions with a little more rage and relentlessness. It’s something activists like Mayisha Begum from @ohsoethical do really well, and a reminder that sometimes collective ‘cancel culture’ can be channelled into something productive, like making executives at Missguided get a little sweaty about their social media sentiment analysis.

Thanks for reading! You can catch up on past issues here, and if you like, you can buy me a virtual coffee to support my work.

Ruth x

PS. Trump is gone and you’re allowed to feel joy. Biden has taken significant climate action already and you’re allowed to feel relief. Also, I have not yet tired of Bernie chair memes, nor his upcycled mittens and outfit repeating.

Buy me a Ko-Fi

Collage by @labyrinthofcollages

In fashion and every other global system, the pandemic well and truly pulled the rug, upending everything we thought we knew, exposing cracks we thought we fixed decades ago. But amidst the chaos, change is in the air for 2021.

Financial breakdown for retailers; PPE shortages; Covid outbreaks at warehouses; cancelled orders for garment workers; labour rights scandals at UK factories; racial reckonings in sustainable fashion; influencers being toppled from their thrones; the rise and rise of thrifting… these are just a tiny handful of the headlines we’ve seen in 2020. When I started writing several years ago, finding breaking news, reputable sources, speakers for events and even readers was a struggle. Sustainability was niche and quiet and rarely reached the boardroom agenda. Now, in a truly unprecedented way, sustainable fashion has finally reached the mainstream conversation, for better or worse.

Everything, and nothing, has changed. The problems fashion has faced this year are nothing new but simply harder to ignore. The solutions are the same ones campaigners have been shouting about since day one. While consumer habits have been transformed and eco trends have taken off, other areas like workers rights have mostly stagnated. “This year has brought about neither the end of sustainability nor its overwhelming triumph. Instead, the path toward a more environmentally and socially just fashion industry has morphed and shifted, revealing new areas of both gain and loss,” says Whitney Buack in Fashionista. In another piece, she reminds us that ultimately, it’s time to stop looking to brands to save us. True change, Whitney says, will come from citizens, not CEOs.

Too preoccupied with coinciding crises, 2020 wasn’t the year of transformation it was promised to be. So, can we go beyond empty promises and truly shift the fashion system next year? “The global apparel industry is broken and only urgent, drastic surgery can fix it. I am not talking about another initiative or another public relations exercise. I am talking about deep, systemic change to be agreed by all involved—by brands, by suppliers, governments, unions and NGOs”, Mostafiz Uddin pleads in his glance inside the lopsided nature of the industry. “Words are all well and good but, sadly for garment workers, they don't put food on the table.”

Alongside using our power as individuals and as communities to demand and enact change, the most important thing in our toolkit for 2021 is going to be hope. Like so many in the UK right now, I’ve been sitting at home, watching the news, and feeling hopeless. But somewhere hidden within that feeling is a slither of delicious, dangerous hope. Hope for not just a return to the world, but for a better world. And I am going to cling to that as long as I possibly can.

“The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

- Arundhati Roy in War Talk

Newsflash

Loads of important reads to catch up on - bookmark for later

• What 2020 taught fashion about sustainability

• From circularity to climate change: Sustainable fashion in 2020 (paywall)

• Boohoo selling clothes made by Pakistani workers earning 29p/hour

• Boohoo exits 64 Leicester factories over code of conduct breaches 

• Boohoo’s Leicester supply chain promises

• Fashion can’t solve the ocean plastic problem (paywall)

• Gone Vintage: How to build a better thrifting system

• Fashion Nova in the era of garment worker rights in California

• More than half a million forced to pick cotton in Xingiang

• Want to buy the best of the British high street? Try a charity shop (paywall)

• Is fast fashion an addiction? (paywall)

• Why Klarna’s millennial consumers are losing faith (paywall)

• Why sustainability must mean decolonisation

• Resale's contradiction: Selling ‘new’ on secondhand sites

• The rise and fall of Topshop: What went wrong

• “Sustainable” fashion is confusing consumers

• Weekday experiments with made-to-order fast fashion

• Fashion brands missed one-third of circularity goals this year (paywall)

Podcast lineup

Fill your ears with fashion

• We’ve been busy over at Common Threads with new cover art and three new episodes. It was a joy to be joined by Audrey Migot-Adholla to talk through ethics in the jewellery industry and Uzma Bozai for a festive deep dive into sequins and sparkle. We rounded off the year with a bumper solo episode covering six pervasive ethical fashion myths, like “made in the UK = more ethical” and “boycotting fast fashion means not supporting jobs for garment workers.” Stay tuned for more excellent guests coming in 2021.

• Clare Press has been passing the mic over at Wardrobe Crisis and the new episodes are so, damn, good. Start here: Aja Barber interviews Kalkidan Legesse and Aditi Meyer interview Alok Vaid-Menon.

• Some interesting listening: this episode of Tara Stewarts’s Dirty Laundry podcast featuring model Nyome Nicholas-Williams.

• Remember Who Made Them has a bonus episode with an insightful reflection on the impact of Covid-19 and consumer activism on the fashion industry with Elizabeth Cline, Andrew Tillet Saks and two garment workers in Myanmar: Tin Tin Wei and Thuzar Kyi.

• Manufactured is a podcast about fashion manufacturing and sustainability - I enjoyed the episode with Tara St. James and with Nurul Muktadir Bappy.

#IQuitFastFashionBecause

When is the last time you saw anything on sale for less than 10 pence? Maybe a Freddo when you were 5 years old? Hold my beer, said Pretty Little Thing. Fortunately, as these Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales loomed, a more powerful storm was brewing over on Twitter, where Aja Barber’s hashtag #IQuitFastFashionBecause spread like wildfire. Head over to The Flock to read my article on how the hashtag could help empower tomorrow’s shoppers, featuring bucketloads of inspiration from real-life fashion activists.

The mainstream media has also been talking about fast fashion a lot recently, but largely in relation to retail job losses as lockdown restrictions continue to batter the UK high street, and even historic household names like Topshop fall into administration. Many of these headlines fail to recognise the true victims of the crumbling fashion economy, so I wrote a deep dive into the real women impacted by Arcadia’s collapse for feminist publication Women On Top. If you’re in need of some lighter reading instead, my latest article for Eco-Age spotlights the creative new way that small, sustainable indie brands are staying afloat.

Sustainable fashion *action* of the month

Make a fashion resolution!

I took a grand total of 48 hours away from my email inbox over Christmas (progress!), and when I finally gave in, my Promotions tab was full to the brim with Boxing Day discounts. I’ve made a conscious effort over the years to unsubscribe from brand newsletters that use what I call “fast fashion language” (even sustainable brands do this) or send sales emails far too frequently, but they still sneak through the net if you’re not careful. In the dreich winter and barrage of bad news, I have been known to turn to retail therapy, but this year I’m making a new resolution. Less spending, less screens, less sponcon; more community, more reflection, more impact. It’s time to embrace the role of consumer activist, not just ethical consumer.

All of this year’s constructive conversation about systemic change can sometimes make you feel powerless as an individual. But remember, small actions still matter. The dawn of 2021 is an excellent opportunity to consider the small, but still important, changes you can make in your own fashion habits. Lauren Bravo has the blueprint to help get you started.

If you want a little more inspiration for making your own fashion resolutions, join us for the first Fashion Revolution Scotland virtual stitch & bitch of 2021. We’ll be mending and making while chatting about what we can all do better in 2021 to make a difference. It will be hosted by my fellow volunteer Louise Kelly who didn’t buy any clothes for the whole of 2019; she has some seriously good advice if you’d like to try a similar detox. Register for the Zoom call here.

Thank you so much for reading! You can catch up on past issues here.

Paid subscriptions to this newsletter are currently on hold, so these monthly emails will now include a link to my Ko-Fi page. If you like, you can buy me a virtual coffee to support my work. I’m aiming to relaunch the more in-depth issues of The Ethical Fashion Roundup in the new year on a biweekly basis so keep your eyes peeled.

Happy Hogmanay and see you in 2021!
Ruth x