Clothing giant and legislators clash over green rules
for fashion
One side warns of ‘greenwashing’ while the industry
argues for light-touch regulation.
The EU wants to set out stricter rules for how
products, including textiles, are produced and consumed |
BY LEONIE
CATER
April 12,
2022 11:00 am
https://www.politico.eu/article/clothes-kering-eu-legislator-clash-green-rule-fashion/
Luxury
fashion house Kering is on board with making the textiles industry more
sustainable — as long as brands can decide for themselves how to make that
happen. The EU has other plans.
Brussels
wants to set out stricter rules for how products, including textiles, are
produced and consumed in a bid to slash related emissions and their impact on
the environment.
Last year,
textiles consumption in Europe had on average the fourth-highest impact on the
environment and climate change, after food, housing and mobility, according to
the European Environment Agency. The sector also had the third-highest impact
on water and land use, and was the fifth-worst performer when it comes to raw
material use and greenhouse gas emissions.
But Kering,
whose brands include Yves Saint Laurent, Gucci and Balenciaga, argues binding
legislation won't solve the problem.
Regulations
targeting textiles should be about setting out a "framework and a
strategic point of view" within which companies can work to reach green
goals, rather than setting mandatory requirements, said Marie-Claire Daveu, the
company's chief sustainability officer since 2012.
Daveu, who
was previously chief of staff for the French ecology ministry, said her
experience in the public sector showed her that legislation isn't the most
effective way to get companies moving. Too often, she said, mandatory measures
are just not applied.
Designers
understand the importance of sustainability and seize the creative opportunity
to green their designs without the need for "technical criteria,"
according to Daveu. Imposing too many constraints through legislation risks
hampering innovation and could prove counter-productive, she added.
Green
groups aren't swayed by that argument and say the industry has been left to its
own devices for too long. A report released last month by the NGO Changing
Markets slammed the various certification labels and voluntary schemes set up
by companies to prove their green credentials, saying those efforts amount to
"greenwashing."
“As long as
progress remains voluntary, sustainability in the textiles sector will remain
optional, with the actions of a few progressive brands dwarfed by the continued
pursuit of growth at any cost by the majority,” according to the report.
Not
everyone in the industry is against legislation. Former fashion entrepreneur
and founder of the New Standards Institute think tank Maxine Bédat said she is
favor of more oversight, noting that some accreditation schemes "are
developed by the industry themselves, which makes no sense.”
It would be
a "radical change" to require fashion brands to abide by mandatory eco-design
rules, but "that's not to say that that shouldn't be the case," she
said.
"We
ultimately have to have an industry that exists within the bounds of the
planet, and it currently is not doing that," she added, stressing that
there also need to be efforts to reduce overall consumption.
Greens MEP
Anna Cavazzini is similarly calling on Brussels to do more to "incentivise
an absolute reduction" in the use of materials, for example with a tax on
virgin materials.
Kering's
Daveu acknowledged that regulation has a role to play, but insisted the
industry needs to remain profitable. "In a nutshell, we need regulation
[and] we need commitments from the private sector," she said. "And
they really [need] to work hand in hand."
‘I felt nauseous in Topshop’: why a fashion editor
gave up buying new clothes
The truth about mass-produced dresses - that
everything is commodified and nothing is sustainable – did for me. I decided
that if I really wanted a new dress, it had to be old
Morwenna
Ferrier
Wed 2 Jun
2021 10.00 BST
It was
April 2019. I was seven months pregnant and in Topshop, looking for something
large in which to rehome my body.
I was
wearing a maternity dress that, if you had seen me pregnant, you would have
recognised – a cheap, pleated wraparound in a red floral print that expanded as
I expanded. I imagined Issey Miyake, but increasingly looked more like an
armchair. It had served me well, but I was determined to buy something,
anything, to see me through the next few months.
I had been
inside for 20 minutes, moving slowly between the rails like an icebreaker, when
I started to feel breathless, then nauseous. Neither was unusual in my
pregnancy, so I left the shop looking for a bench. There was no need – once
outside, I suddenly felt calm. I realised it wasn’t the baby making me sick. It
was the stuff – the rows and rows of stuff.
I couldn’t
quite explain what had happened until I read Mark O’Connell’s 2020 book, Notes
From an Apocalypse. In it, O’Connell described a similar experience at a branch
of Yo! Sushi, as he watched a conveyor belt go round and round: “I thought
about the volume of animal and human flesh required to keep the system going,”
he wrote. Suddenly, he, too, became breathless, “experiencing a kind of
abstract terror … at the delirium of commerce”.
While it
was sushi that did for O’Connell, it was mass-produced dresses that did for me.
Everything is commodified and nothing is sustainable. This truth overwhelmed
me. Two years later, that cheap red dress is one of the last new things I own.
The only clothes I buy are secondhand.
The
operative word here is new, because what happened in Topshop wasn’t so much a
Damascene moment as a corrective to something already in motion. I really love
clothes, but I have always tended to buy used ones. As a student in Leeds, it
was fashionable to dress as if in the past, so I bought my frayed Levi’s 501s
in vintage shops. In my first job in journalism, in 2007, I was earning minimum
wage, so I went to charity shops out of necessity. When I started earning a bit
more, I upgraded to vintage from Beyond Retro, because the jeans had the high
waists I so desired.
Occasionally,
I felt the siren call of the high street or, when I entered fashion journalism
in 2013, sample sales. But, in the end, I always return to eBay or, lately, the
fashion resale site Vestiaire Collective. I don’t look for vintage, an
amorphous term that usually means it costs more, and I am unsure about the
marketing terms “resale” and “preloved”, which feel loaded. I prefer the term
“used”, because that is what they are. And, generally speaking, used clothes,
even designer ones, are good value – old Chloé lasts longer than new Zara and
costs roughly the same.
It helped
to create a plan that was clear, but not so drastic that I would immediately
give up – I could buy new underwear, or trainers for sport, but nothing else.
If I really wanted a new dress, it had to be old. The key, I realised, was to
value appetite over principle, to go with the carrot, not the stick. If I
cracked – which I did, twice – I would simply move on.
It helped,
also, that I had a baby. I didn’t gain much weight, but my belly became a
souffle and the idea of buying in-between clothes – returnitywear, if you will
– bummed me out. Plus, few things prevent you from wafting around shops like
having a toddler. It goes without saying that my son wears only old clothes or
hand-me-downs.
Lockdown
has helped, too. Over the past six months, I have had more time to look at what
I already own, to get trousers re-hemmed, or just iron stuff so that it looks
better. I conduct inventories, weighing up what I need (trousers, thermal
vests) and what I don’t (everything else). I try to operate a one-in-one-out
policy, donate to clothes banks or sell things on eBay.
It also
helps to not look. Over Christmas, I wanted a yellow beret I had seen in a shop
window. I have a navy beret, but this was … yellow. I thought about it a lot.
Then, suddenly, I didn’t – and now it is summer. Once you look past the want
and are honest about the need, desire dries up pretty fast. “Capitalism is for
children,” says the author and psychotherapist Adam Phillips, in the sense that
it preys upon how our desires are easily exploited. “If people are not given
time to find out what they want, they tend to grab things.”
If I do
land on something appealing (usually algorithmically on Instagram), I simply
note the designer and look on eBay. I find that this has the useful effect of
either sharpening or dulling that desire. There is a thrill in the hunt. You
have to really want something to bid on it for days on end. Not everyone has
the time to do this – I do it while cooking, waiting for the kettle to boil,
sitting on the bus – but often I lose interest, which decides for me.
The fashion
industry is one of the world’s great polluters. Initially, buying used clothes
was a financial imperative, but working in fashion gave me a heightened
awareness of the carbon, water and waste footprints of clothes production, as
well as the working and living conditions of many of the people who make the
clothes. It has become a difficult square to circle. At some point, resisting
consumerism becomes the only ethical choice.
This
situation is not confined to fashion. It defines our economic system. With its
supply chains, developing-world factories and ceaseless creation of trends,
fashion is at the sharp end of 21st-century capitalism, but it is not an
outlier.
Some
clothing companies have begun to modify their practices. Sustainability has
shifted from buzzword to normality. This is commendable, but at times it can
feel like a loophole – new stuff is still new stuff, no matter how sustainably
you dress it up. On average, 40% of the clothes in European wardrobes are not
worn.
It probably
sounds unusual that someone who until recently had spent seven years as a
fashion editor would give up new clothes, like a pusher renouncing drugs. In
some ways, it is about separating church from state – I write about what people
are wearing and why, rather than what they should. Fashion’s role is to reflect
the world and provide visual cues about someone’s identity. Fashion should be
fun, a form of self-expression, while clothes can reveal cultural trends, even
sociopolitical ones. That is why we care about Trump’s Maga hat, or Billie
Eilish in a corset in Vogue. Even if you don’t have an interest in what you
wear, you are communicating as much.
Ferrier
with shoes and trainers from her wardrobe.
Ferrier
with shoes and trainers from her wardrobe. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The
Guardian
The
photographer Kate Friend is one of the best-dressed people I know, yet owns
very little. “I don’t like a lot of stuff in any aspect of life,” she says.
Like wearing an old mink coat while condemning fur, she believes buying any
clothes, new or old, is counterproductive to sustainability, because it creates
desire. “The greenest product is the one you don’t buy. By not buying, you
attempt to rewire the need for new,” she says.
Friend buys
two items of clothing a year and tops up underwear every six months. “Last
year, I got two Acne jackets, one short and shirt-like, one very long and
oversized. One or both will get worn most days a week over something very
basic,” she says. If these items fulfilled certain criteria (“I have to be sure
I’ll wear it weekly, if not daily, and it has to be adaptable to all sorts of
situations”), she will wear them until they fall apart.
Her mindset
is driven by her work as a nature photographer. “I like to wear uniform things
that I can move around in and are easy to pack,” she says. “And if spending
time among plants or landscapes informs what we really ‘need’, it definitely
isn’t a ton of clothes.”
Of course,
there is a difference between not buying things and not being able to. Rebecca
May Johnson, an Essex-based writer and academic, has bought one thing so far
this year. She spends most of her disposable income on her allotment. When she
has money for clothes, she prefers to buy from Old Town in Holt, Norfolk, which
“makes clothes to order (not to measure), so there is no waste, and the clothes
are sent to you after six weeks. They last a long time and are beautifully
made.” The clothes are not cheap, but they “really suit how I live and feel in
my body”, she says.
Johnson
says this is simply her choice. “I do not attribute any moral value to buying
or not buying things. People take their pleasure where they can in the ways
they can, especially if choices are limited by income and working conditions,”
she says. “Buying nice stuff is nice, nothing more.”
I told my
Topshop story to Patrick Fagan, a behavioural psychologist at Goldsmiths,
University of London. “Were you overwhelmed by the futility and nihilism of
consumerism? I’d say so,” he says, pointing me towards “a change of thinking
dating back to at least the 1960s that says that we have become consumers,
rather than producers, and have less control over our lives”. This, he says,
has created a hole that consumerism can’t fill.
“There is a
subconscious rule of thumb that if something is new, it must be good, and in
some cases that’s true,” says Fagan. “But it’s also about having autonomy –
buying new things feeds into that.” Make something new, but familiar, and
people will buy it.
There are
times when I have “failed”. The first was when I returned to work from
maternity leave during lockdown. I wasn’t at home and had only a few
breastfeeding T-shirts with me, so I bought a gaudy blue silk shirt, which was,
on reflection, a panic-buy “Zoom” shirt. (I rarely wear it.) The second time
was late last summer, when I was caring for my ill mother during the lockdown.
Shopping was impossible, but also, because of mum, unthinkable.
On one
particularly dark day, as she lay dying upstairs, I went online and bought a
coat. It was oversized in navy wool, not unlike a blanket. I don’t know why I
bought it – I imagine now it was some sort of salve – but when it arrived,
wrapped in crisp white paper, with me knowing my mother would be dead by the
time it was cold enough to wear it, I could barely look at it. Then, and truly
then, the fantasy of easy acquisition was exposed for all its emptiness.
Rather than
buying new ones, I wore her clothes to the funeral (they are nice and we were
the same size). This is quite common, says Fagan: “When people are faced with
mortality, they want to hold on to nostalgic things with meaning.” By wearing
her clothes, I felt connected to her.
Paola
Locati is a fashion consultant who has worked in the industry for more than 20
years, yet she has barely bought anything new in five. Like me, it was a
perfect storm of personal events – turning 50, putting on weight, her mother
dying – that changed her outlook. “You think: ah, I’ll buy clothes in the hope
of losing weight, but it’s a false economy,” she says.
Now, Locati
follows a few arbitrary rules. She buys clothes only to replace ones she has
worn out. She repurposes clothes she already owns. And she tries to wear the
clothes she inherited from her late mother.
I know I am
still scratching a consumer itch, but, in cutting out the new, I value what I
have already. As Samuel Delany wrote in his 1979 memoir Heavenly Breakfast:
“It’s nice to have most of the people knocking around in something once
beautiful, with wear grown comfortable.”
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