Fashion + Sustainability = A Conundrum

As we hope for a more sustainable future, fashion’s role might prove to be a challenge. And at times, perplexing.

- Asri Jasman

There’s an expiry date to everything—trends, that expensive bar of chocolate you tell yourself to savour one bite at a time, your favourite white shirt, a relationship—and our planet is no exception. It’s a morbid opening statement, especially for a story on sustainability in an issue about hope, but it’s the inescapable truth.

And we’re only slowly grasping at the realisation that our habits could hasten Earth’s expiry date; thanks, in part, to a sea turtle.

Sustainability is a rather broad and complicated term that involves a wide gamut of factors and influences. It’s a practice that ensures resources are carefully invested at a rate that doesn’t negatively affect any environmental, economic or social factors. Sustainable fashion businesses should aim, at every stage of their business, to minimise any negative impact their operations might have on the environment, as well as ensuring that good ethics are practised at the human resource level. One would think that the latter is a given, but as many incidences in the Third World have shown—one landmark example is the Rana Plaza collapse of 2013—that is not always the case.

It’s easy to immediately point fingers to fast-fashion brands, such as H&M, Zara and ASOS, as the main culprits. Companies that produce huge volumes of clothing (by huge, we mean at least 600 million pieces each year) at incredibly low prices would naturally raise questions about manufacturing and labour costs.

There’s also the nature of the fast-fashion business. In an effort to quickly produce style-fleeting clothes, new designs are introduced to the shop floor every alternate week, sometimes more frequently. They’re cheap and of-the-moment so they tend to become rather disposable. Let’s face it: you wouldn’t think twice about throwing away a cheap overstretched jumper and getting a new one from the same brand.