Shifting from fast to sustainable fashion

Crises change con­sump­tion pat­terns and force peo­ple to adapt to new cir­cum­stances. We are now im­mersed in crises that will also trans­form our way of life and our way of re­lat­ing to the en­vi­ron­ment: an in­creas­ingly se­vere cli­mate cri­sis and an en­ergy cri­sis char­ac­terised by un­sus­tain­able price in­creases and a scarcity of re­sources. One of the ways so­ci­ety has to adapt to them is, first of all, to be­come aware of mis­takes made and the need to change to­wards health­ier and more sus­tain­able habits. There is no sec­tor that does not feel the pres­sure to adapt to the new sit­u­a­tion. The way we con­sume is one of the things that chal­lenges us most di­rectly. Do we con­sume too much? Do we con­sume badly?

The an­swer is prob­a­bly ’yes’ in both cases. That’s why, for­tu­nately, there are pro­fes­sion­als who are work­ing to re­duce the eco­log­i­cal foot­print caused by ex­ces­sive con­sump­tion by call­ing for a re­turn to the local and bet­ter qual­ity as el­e­ments to con­tribute to chang­ing long-term bad habits. If this is clear in sec­tors like the food in­dus­try, it was not so ob­vi­ous in fash­ion, where glob­al­i­sa­tion at its max­i­mum po­ten­tial has com­pletely trans­formed the in­dus­try and the mar­ket. Yet more and more en­tre­pre­neurs un­der­stand that there is a grow­ing need to sat­isfy eco-con­scious and so­cially re­spon­si­ble con­sumers who want to make a con­tri­bu­tion, with the way they buy and con­sume to end­ing the bad en­vi­ron­men­tal and eco­nomic prac­tices of glob­alised fash­ion and its se­ri­ous en­vi­ron­men­tal im­pact – the in­dus­try is re­spon­si­ble for a shock­ing 10 per cent of global green­house gas emis­sions every year.

Talk­ing about sus­tain­able fash­ion can no longer be con­sid­ered a rar­ity; there are in­creas­ingly more choices avail­able, and de­mand for it is grow­ing. Aware­ness that we need to com­pletely re­think our pur­chas­ing habits and the way we con­sume clothes is al­ready a re­al­ity. The pro­fes­sional op­tions are grow­ing, too, which al­lows us to think that the fash­ion sec­tor can face changes that no one would have imag­ined until re­cently. Hope­fully, the new gen­er­a­tions of con­sumers will take an ac­tive role in mak­ing a change from fast to sus­tain­able fash­ion and make the choice to act re­spon­si­bly in order to pro­tect the en­vi­ron­ment ( see our fea­ture on sus­tain­able fash­ion on pages 14-23 of this month’s issue for more on this issue).