In a recent post, I mentioned one of the reasons as to why it’s important to curate unique pieces; it puts fast-fashion on the decline. That made me think of how sustainability today is going beyond separating containers into a different coloured bag, sustainability goes further than what you may realize.
In the past few years, it’s become increasingly popular to live a sustainable life through various means. To live a sustainable life today, means you’re also keeping up with technology.
In particular, fashion has been developing sustainable techniques for quite some time (long before it was cool to reuse). It takes a long time for anything to be put into the masses for so many reasons, in this case for fashion it’s research and development.
Bamboo was one of the first organic textiles we were introduced to as a different, sustainable fabric aside from cotton and everyone wanted to try it and incorporate it into their lives somehow. Now, we have access to incorporating recycled bottles, seaweed and corn into textiles and companies are promoting their donation campaigns in aid to recycle the donations and create new fabrics from them.
The new wave of sustainability has ultimately stemmed from consumers and their demand of wanting to take care of the earth and making it heard that they want to see certain things in their purchases. It’s given a new wave of power to the average consumer; their demand has led to companies restricting their ethics and production lines to serve their customer better. The demand has reached a point, that the consumer will publicly shame the company if they don’t have sustainable practices in place.
One of these companies, is Zara. Zara has a large reputation for “high-end” fast-fashion; they’re able to produce the latest trends from production to shelf in under 6 weeks. They’ve developed a model that relied on fast, and the fast model caught up to the consumer and now they’re changing their ways.
The fashion industry is skeptical because of their well- known reputation and being the pioneer of what we know fast fashion to be.
Creating sustainability in fashion is like ripping off a band-aid; there’s more of an impact if it’s across the entire way the brand operates. Zara’s new sustainability plan is being implemented with all 8 of their brand- they’re ripping off the band-aid.
While there’s an effort by these large companies to become sustainable, it’s also about how they’ve trained us as a consumer and our expectation of constantly having something new to buy and own. As a society today, we consume way too much which has led to our outcry of wanting to become a sustainable society; there’s 7 billion possible consumers with over 150 billion clothes being manufactured every year. We’ve become used to the idea of purchasing a piece for a trip, a night, an event, a date- and then we move on. Clothes are worn as little as 10 times before we discard them forever.
To a company that’s attempting to become sustainable, it’s not just about recycling and incorporating sustainable fabrics, it’s about how their assets become sustainable to make those pieces. How many times can they re-use the water in their dyes or the stones to make denim? Becoming sustainable for a fast fashion brand can help their bottom line too by making their assets last longer.
There’s many ways to incorporate sustainability into daily life, there’s no excuse anymore to not have some of it mixed into your daily routine. It’s become a rewarding action and, in some ways, a reliving action to incorporate more sustainable practices.
Every time you spend money, you’re casting a vote for the kind of world you want.
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