Fashion's 'Sustainable Movement' Won't Save Climate Change

“The world is increasingly at risk of ‘climate apartheid’, where the rich pay to escape heat and hunger caused by the escalating climate crisis while the rest of the world suffers.”

Climate change and labor rights are two issues I’m very passionate about, and have been for a few years now. And with age of transparency, the fashion industry is beginning to take more note into these two topics coming to the forefront. Sustainability, in particular, has become a huge buzzword in the industry and has become a huge component of how fashion companies design, produce, and operate now. Being eco-friendly through utilizing biodegradable/recycled textiles, attempting to reduce waste in the production process, promoting organic materials, upcycling, and reducing water usage through the supply chain have become new ways of producing and manufacturing, and will possibly eventually be “normalized” within the design process. Better yet, lots of companies also “do good” for the environment by “offsetting their carbon emissions” and “planting trees” to offset rapid deforestation.

Being in the industry, I’ve been privileged enough to hear a lot (and I mean…a lot….from textile manufacturers to corporations to independent high end designers) of fashion industry professionals talk about their goals, actions, and missions in an attempt to “revert climate change” and thus “change the world.” After all, fashion is supposedly the second largest polluter in the world, right after the oil industry. So, because of this, as an industry, we bear the responsibility of trying to revert our actions and stop climate change before it gets worse.

This is where the potential for great ideas and innovation tends to get lost. To begin, since a lot of these panels are presented by company/corporate representatives, there is already an inauthenticity to it. The people are leading these talks to promote their companies and businesses, and are promoting ideas to protect their companies’ images, public image, and profitability. In turn, because they have to maintain a certain image and reputation for their company, the “solutions” they propose are ultimately to protect the profits of the company and to maintain capital.

With that in mind, the focus of a lot of these talks on “sustainability” often focus on the same issues: overproduction, supply chain/textile waste, pollution, carbon emissions, water usage, etc. These issues are all valid, and to many people, these are the direct causes of climate change, and if we “fix” these issues, then climate change will be reverted.

Something that I have found interesting as a spectator of all these panels is that panelists hardly ever address labor rights and workers’ wages. When they do, it’s on the basis of ending child/slave labor, which is valid, but is also a low standard for what supply chain workers deserve. Often times, when you bring this up with companies, they assure you that all of their factory workers are “paid a living wage” and that their factories are “audited and up to standard.” As mentioned in a previous blog post, these audits often times are more for company/corporate credentials than it is for actual workers’ safety, as proven with the collapse of Rana Plaza (an audited factory). Also, as anyone who even works in the US knows, minimum wage does not equate an actual livable wage. And these companies saying that their supply chain workers earn a “livable” wage is very vague (is it minimum wage? Or an actual ‘livable’ wage? What even constitutes as a ‘livable’ wage? Who determines these wages, the factory owner or the factory workers?). Additionally, many companies will state that they recognize garment workers’ labor unions, but it makes you think how much of that ideology is enforced when supply chain workers are still fighting for their rights.

So how are labor rights and climate change/sustainability intertwined?

As Ashfaq Khalfan from Amnesty International states, “Climate change is a human rights issue precisely because of the impact it’s having on people.” According to a UN human rights expert, “the world is increasingly at risk of ‘climate apartheid’, where the rich pay to escape heat and hunger caused by the escalating climate crisis while the rest of the world suffers.” The geographic areas most prone to climate change are often times areas deemed as “third world” or “less developed” by western standards, and have lower pay wages and standards of living than “developed” countries such as the United States.

(Disclaimer: I hate using terms like ‘third world’ and ‘developed’ nations, but I’m also trying to emphasize how ridiculous and xenophobic this terminology is)

In turn, the people in our supply chain (the factory workers, the farmers cultivating crops to grow into textiles, the people working in fabric mills) will be way more affected by climate change than, say, CEO’s of corporations and fashion houses/parent companies. Even as privileged New Yorkers, we probably won’t even get the worst of it, other than limited supply of certain foods or unstable weather patterns. But even within the US, those who live in poverty or even lower income areas will get (and have gotten) hit the worst, as they (systemically) don’t have as much access to resources as the wealthy do.

Here are some examples of how fashion designers and other industry people think they can “save” the planet through the fashion design process.

I’ve attended a panel where an established fashion designer promoted organic cotton as the solution to climate change in the industry (organic cotton being a ‘sustainable’ fiber has been debated because of its water usage and waste produced, and cotton in general has an extremely discriminating past in the U.S.) This comment was very laughable). This designer also promoted using a particular crustaceous animal as an alternative to indigo dyeing — but this could turn into over farming, which is also contributes to climate change. I also once went to an educational panel where the hosts were convinced that by utilizing renewable and biodegradable textiles/materials, then fashion’s climate crisis could be solved. And then, they promoted a new organization in which donations to the company would provide education to factory workers, as well convert factories into solar energy. While this all sounds great, it doesn’t hit the systemic issue of climate change and is just more of a bandaid for the larger issue. And, in general, the fashion industry enjoys fixating on smaller issues (examples stated prior) rather than tackling the bigger issue at large: capitalism.

Overproduction, overconsumption, and waste are examples of direct effects of capitalism. Because capitalism encourages financial growth and profit, companies constantly create more goods at the expense of cheap labor, and promote customers to buy more of their products in order to turn a larger profit. With fashion being a fast-paced industry, especially fast fashion, garment workers are forced to work endlessly for long hours to meet fashion show dates, market week deadlines, and in-store delivery deadlines. Consumers, especially with the rise of influencers and Instagram, are constantly encouraged to buy new things to stay on trend or to take pictures for social media. Many garments are only worn once or twice, and usually end up in the landfill. And if they have polyester in them, they basically will not biodegrade either (and also shed tons of microplastics that end up in the ocean and our drinking water).

With capitalism encouraging overconsumption, profit, and cut costs, factories are constantly producing, thus creating a lot of pollution and waste. Cotton being a sensitive crop, conventional cotton farmers are forced to breathe in the pesticides they use on these crops in order to grow the most amount of cotton at a time. Much of India’s drinking water is contaminated with chemicals from dyeing processes. China has taken measures to shut down their fabric mills and factories for certain periods of time each month to reduce carbon emissions. However, Americans are so quick to point fingers at our manufacturers (and blaming countries such as India and China, where a large part of our supply chain and clothing manufacturing is located) to creating so much pollution and waste, but fail to think around why there is so much pollution in our supply chain in the first place. Hint: it’s not just because we use polyester in our clothes, it’s because of the yearn for maximum profit and economic growth.

Utilizing “preferred fibers” (which are deemed as the most ‘eco-friendly/sustainable’ by the fashion industry), reducing water usage, having chemical management regulations, waste management, and offsetting carbon emissions are some major solutions being discussed and utilized right now in the fashion industry. And while all of these are great (and I’m not denying they won’t help with impact), people never want to talk about capital, wages, and profit, which are what fuel all of these problems in the first place. Furthermore, people fail to understand the intersections between climate change, race, and class, and that solar-powered factories won’t prevent the factory workers from getting f*cked over when the crisis gets increasingly worse (and we wouldn’t have cotton and linen crops for our clothes anymore, sorry.)

These band-aid solutions are what I like to call “green capitalism” or “eco capitalism," which is just a form of late-stage capitalism that is just a little less bad than the current state of capitalism (but barely). Even though all of these “small solutions” (which is also what every industry professional will encourage companies to do at these sustainability panels) will help reduce carbon emissions, it ignores the root cause. Furthermore, in a lot of these panels, industry professionals also emphasize the need for fashion companies to all “work together” in attempt to combat climate change because it will make a larger impact this way. However, while with good intentions, this solution will not work under capitalism because it is going to be very difficult to “work together” as an industry while everyone is competing against each other for profitability. Once we remove profit, the industry can then work collectively towards solutions. If companies weren’t reliant on profit, we could reduce the amount of goods produced, so that consumers would not be overbuying products that end up in the landfill. We could have a cap/limitations on production (as China is already doing), and the entire industry would work collectively and agree upon that. There would not be as much “duplication” of goods (why do we need 10 companies selling basic organic cotton T-shirts?) and companies would not fight over where to the cheapest place to produce goods is. Furthermore, crops would not be over farmed and there could be less deforestation, with the encouragement of only using natural resources to a certain degree in order to maintain ecological balance. Harmful chemicals would not have to be used as much in our clothing and crops; rather, allowing cotton manufacturing to be at the rate in which it allows without chemicals.

The fashion industry is deemed as a bunch of “creative” individuals but we aren’t maximizing the use of our collective creativity if we aren’t trying to figure out ways outside of an existing production model to create goods. Creativity is about thinking outside of the bounds and using that skill to encourage innovation. How creative are we, really, if we keep repeating the same patterns over and over again that created this climate crisis? Under capitalism, and being fed that that is the “only and best way of being” our whole lives (love American propaganda), it’s hard to think outside of that system to imagine a better system. But if you really are creative, I challenge you think outside of the bounds of capitalism and imagine/think about a new system where our earth’s resources are not drained to the point of crisis, and the people creating our goods are not exploited to only work long hours and then suffer when the climate crisis hits them first.