Many personalities have been advocating for years to shift the mindset shift of the fashion industry.
Back in 2015, Lidewij Edelkoort published her famous anti-fashion manifesto where she claimed that "fashion was obsolete", which gave birth to the anti-fashion project.
In February 2019, Fashion Act Now , an activist group linked to Extinction Rebellion and calling for "defashion", was born with their first action targetting the fashion industry at London Fashion Week.
That same year, University of the Arts London (UAL)(1) professor Kate Fletcher released her EARTH LOGIC Fashion Action Research Plan, in which she argues that fashion must cut its resource use and waste by a factor of four in order to exist within planetary limits.
As a matter of fact, fashion is one of the main polluting industries. Here are some statistics, published by the UNEP and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation to give you the magnitude of the problem:
Every year the fashion industry uses 93 billion cubic meters of water — enough to meet the consumption needs of five million people.
Around 20 % of wastewater worldwide comes from fabric dyeing and treatment.
Of the total fibre input used for clothing, 87 % is incinerated or disposed of in a landfill.
The fashion industry is responsible for 10 % of annual global carbon emissions, more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined!
If demographic and lifestyle patterns continue as they are now, global consumption of apparel will rise from 62 million metric tons in 2019 to 102 million tons in 10 years.
Every year half a million tons of plastic microfibers are dumped into the ocean, the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles. The danger? Microfibers cannot be extracted from the water and they can spread throughout the food chain.
This article by Al Jazeehra sheds a gruesome light on the backstage of the fashion industry: parts of the beautiful Atacama desert in Chile have been turned into a landfill for fashion refuse from all over the world!
Sustainability is a major issue for the industry which is caught between the business machine and consumers, educated in newness, pressured by the social media and their peers and oblivious of the environmental and human impacts of their choice.
Things are moving (slowly!) but there are so many interests at stake...
The global fashion industry produces more than 100 to 150 billion items of clothing per year. Worldwide consumer spending on clothing and footwear amounts to an estimated $2,032,403.47 million dollars 2021 and could amount to an estimated $2,571,939.42 million dollars by 2025. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation states that globally, the clothing industry employs more than 300 million people along the value chain, which can be understood to also include people that work in design, distribution and retail divisions of the fashion industry.(1)
The industry urgently needs to reinvent itself but the good news is that there is no shortage of creative talents to do so.
Hence the discussion about devising new business modeIs and « degrowth ».
What does "degrowth" actually mean? In very simple terms, it means reducing both our consumption and our production.
When translated into business terms, it means taking a long-term view of your business and balancing your vision with the planetary and social limits. It's voluntarily limiting the growth of your company and embracing other measures for success than just profit.
Profit is necessary - I cannot stress this enough - but it's no longer enough.
It's about building a brand that makes sense to the customer (their wants and problems) and the world (respecting the planet and people).
There are many ways for a company to get on board the "degrowth" ship as analysed in this Vogue article.
But companies cannot do this alone: shifting the mindset needs to educate the consumers, to call on them to be vigilant and stop buying from businesses like SHEIN that are sadly choosing to go the other way.
(1) UAL is home to the prestigious Central Saint Martins
(2) Sources BOF Mckinsey the State of Fashion 2022, Ellen Macarthur Foundation, World Bank, FashionUnited.com,
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