by The year 2023 has been a year of hyper-fast fashion, extreme prices (both high and low), and toxic spills of polyester clothing. It was the year the zombie in the room (the sheer volume of clothing we produce and buy) took on a life of its own.
The connection between fossil fuels and the synthetic materials in our clothing really hit us. “Fossil fashion is at the center of many of fast fashion’s worst problems: cheap materials, overreliance on synthetics, a growing waste crisis and rising emissions,” said Fossil Fuel Fashion, a new organization that It launched at New York Climate Week in September. , which brings together a coalition of organizations seeking to phase out fossil fuels from the industry.
Fossil fuel-based polyester is cheap and the fiber of choice for hyper-fast fashion, which has continued to dominate the market, despite a torrent of criticism in June after top producer Shein paid six fashion influencers. fashion so they would travel to their stores. factories in China. Then influencers posted rave reviews behind the scenes and the $66 billion fashion brand continues to seduce us into buying clothes we didn’t know we wanted and definitely don’t need. However, the race to the bottom has only just begun. Chinese shopping app Temu, which is rivaling Shein with its 99% off “flash” deals, has been downloaded more than 7 million times since its launch in the UK in April.
But it hasn’t all been bad news. The link between agriculture and fashion has never been more talked about; “Regenerative” is one of the biggest buzzwords of the year. As Safia Minney, founder of Fashion Declares, which calls for radical change in the industry, explains, fashion is not just about ensuring farmers keep carbon in the soil, but about the entire process, from the way cotton , hemp, flax, wool and leather are grown until the end of their useful life.
A victory for regenerative fashion came in October, when Justine Aldersey-Williams introduced the first woven jeans in the UK, made from flax and woad grown on wasteland in Blackburn, Lancashire.
With a few distractions (thank you, Louis Vuitton, for the million-dollar bag, the price of which is still not enough to justify the Crayola-colored crocodile it’s made from), it was also the year that saw a new approach in the horrible pollution of throwaway colonialism. In February, The Or Foundation – based in Kantamanto Market in Accra, Ghana, and dedicated to addressing the injustice of the fashion waste problem – published its Stop Waste Colonialism report. He explained how “the fashion industry uses the global second-hand clothing trade as a de facto strategy for waste management.” In May, a group of clothing traders went to Brussels to discuss European extended producer responsibility (EPR) legislation with policyholders, to ensure that the Kantamanto market is part of the conversation, because The fashion of the world ends at its doors. .
Artist Jeremy Hutchinson took the idea of having trash on your doorstep a step further when he became a “monster of post-consumer imperialism” in the form of an eight-foot-tall, suffocating textile zombie called Dead White Man. collaboration with The Or Foundation and made reference to the Ghanaian phrase obroni wawu, that is, dead white man’s clothing, which is how Kantamanto market traders refer to their stock of waste from the global north. Dead White Man performed at the British Textile Biennale in Blackburn in October and then made impromptu visits to all her favorite clothing suppliers, including Marks & Spencer, where she was filmed by bemused shoppers as she walked up the escalator to the lingerie department. M&S is one of the brands whose labels frequently appear on Accra beaches.
In September, Clare Press, founder of the Sydney-based podcast Wardrobe Crisis, essential for anyone interested in sustainable fashion, published her latest book, Wear Next: Fashioning the Future, exploring some of the solutions to many of these problems. “Overproduction and hyperspeed are two of the biggest problems facing the fashion industry,” she says. In its annual Fashion Transparency Index, Fashion Revolution reported that 88% of major fashion brands still do not disclose their annual production volumes. According to the Index, globally there is enough clothing in the system to clothe the next six generations of people (if the planet does not break down before then).
But this was also the year that European legislation began to delve deeper into the regulation of fast fashion. In December, the European Parliament agreed to ban the destruction of unsold clothing, accessories and footwear as part of its new “eco-design” framework, which will also see clothing given a Digital Product Passport. A QR code is expected to come into effect in 2026 and will give buyers greater transparency about materials, manufacturing and even advice on how to repair their item. Without regulation, brands still do not take responsibility for their products, the materials they use and their supply chains. Legislation will begin to push them to take collective action.
This year has also seen the continued exploitation of garment workers around the world. 2023 marks 10 years since the Rana Plaza factory disaster, in which 1,134 people died and at least another 2,000 were injured when the factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, collapsed. In December, more than 50 brands signed the newly expanded International Agreement, which has contributed to safer working conditions for more than 2 million garment factory workers in Bangladesh; 48 signed the Bangladesh Security Agreement and 88 the most recent Pakistan Agreement. Agreement.
But there remains a lack of transparency. In November, a woman in Derbyshire found a Chinese prisoner ID card in the sleeve lining of her Regatta coat, prompting warnings about modern slavery hidden in supply chains. And the poverty wage remains the industry norm. As the Clean Clothes Campaign reported, on June 25 of this year, union leader Shahidul Islam was beaten to death for his labor rights activism in Tongi, Bangladesh. Ongoing protests against the new minimum wage in Bangladesh led to the death of four workers in November and the imprisonment of at least 115 workers and union members. According to Maeve Galvin, director of global campaigns and policy at Fashion Revolution, “we are so far away from workers achieving social justice that it is shameful.”
On a more hopeful note, young people continue to buy second-hand clothes, online or at car boot sales. Fast fashion brands are seeing Depop, Vinted and eBay as their biggest competitors and have begun to cede valuable retail space to second-hand clothing. As Press observes in Wear Next, as fashion consumption accelerates, we’re also seeing the parallel rise of the slow fashion movement with the repair revolution (including repair and modification apps like Sojo and The Seam) and DIY fashion continuing. thriving. Now that is progress.
