Fair And Sufficient – Keywords For Climate-Friendly Fashion Consumption

What if you could only afford 85 pieces of clothing? That sounds feasible.

A new report from the Hot or Cool Institute, a sustainability-focused think tank, suggests that 85 garments should be enough for the average resident of a high-income country with four seasons. This 85-garment threshold is also in keeping with the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

Fashion is already one of the world’s biggest producers of greenhouse gas emissions. The trend is expected to continue as fashion prices fall, consumer consumption increases, and wear times for each item plummets.

The fashion industry needs to be transformed in order to avoid worst climate effects. This new research shows that it is possible to transform the fashion industry in a fair way: everyone can have enough clothes and sufficient income from clothing production for their own needs.

Fair

The report “Unfit, Unfair, Unfashionable: Resizing Fashion for a Fair Consumption Space” focuses on the G20 countries, finding that Australia has the highest fashion consumption footprint (503 kg of CO₂ Australians throw away nearly as many clothes each year as they purchase, which is equivalent to a total of 2.2 kg per year. India is the G20’s lowest at 22kg. In Indonesia, 74% don’t have as much clothing as they need.

While these are enormous divergences, it’s not just inequality between countries that matters. It is important to note the inequalities within countries. According to “Unfit, Unfair, Unfashionable,” the fashion habits of middle- and high-income consumers in Indonesia, though these are a minority, are out of sync with keeping to a 1.5°C temperature rise. You should also know that the G20’s richest 20% produce 20x more fashion than those in the lowest 20%.

There’s plenty of classist shaming of the spending habits of less affluent people; news producers love to gawk at hordes of people queuing outside down-market retailers during sales, for instance. However, it is clear that the most wealthy are doing excessive damage to our environment.

Among the relatively well-off, there’s a pretty simple fix, which sustainability advocates have been shouting from the rooftops for years: buy less, and buy better. Buy less to reduce the impact on the environment of making, washing and disposing clothes. And buy better to help distribute the profits back into the pockets of the garment workers. There’s more than enough to go around, if we even out the spread.

According to Lewis Akenji (managing director of Hot or Cool Institute), the best thing for rich people to do to lessen the impact of fashion on the environment is to not buy new clothes. The other measures – like buying secondhand, choosing more sustainable fabrics, renting clothes, and washing clothing less – are important, but pale in comparison to the sheer brute power of overconsumption.

For instance, secondhand shops aren’t a panacea. “This does not supersede the need to reduce consumption – and even more important, to reduce production,” Akenji says. For one thing, there’s the classic rebound effect of people feeling justified in buying more stuff because they think they can just drop off the excess at a thrift shop afterward.

All that excess helps to support the work of the charities running secondhand shops, it’s true. But it also contributes to vast piles of unwanted clothing ending up in landfills and waterways – and, if the clothing makes it to lower-income countries, to dependency and underinvestment in local garment industries.

Suffficient

Which amount should wealthy people forgo buying new clothes? While some suggestions range as high as 75%, “Unfit, Unfair, Unfashionable” recommends that cutting back on clothing purchases by 30% on average would barely affect everyday living standards (30% is the average proportion of unused clothes in German households), while being compatible with the 1.5°C goal. 30% may seem daunting, but it’s not actually that ambitious.

The report proposes a “sufficiency wardrobe” (how much clothing the average person needs) of 74 garments in a country with two seasons, and 85 in a country with four seasons. It does not include shoes or accessories.

Statistics about fashion emissions may seem abstract. That’s in stark contrast to the experience of buying a new garment, which can be both physically and emotionally satisfying. Fashion media and advertisers feed this idea that novelty is essential to contentment – for now. It is essential to grasp the psychology of consumption in order to break the cycle.

Alec Leach, a recovering fashionista gets it. Alec Leach, a former streetwear editor, has now written the “no-nonsense” book. The World Is On Fire But We’re Still Buying Shoes. Leach’s main takeaway regarding sustainable fashion? “Ask yourself what you really want from your clothes.”

That might be a sense of belonging, the thrill of the new, expression of status, a showcase of creativity – a love of fashion doesn’t have to be pathological. Certain groups such as women and people who are not gender-specific can feel that their appearance is a key indicator of safety, health, happiness, and even success.

Recognizing that clothing can be used to satisfy a need is an important step in addressing that long-term itch. Oxfam estimates that the average UK wardrobe lasts just four uses after the initial excitement from purchasing new clothes. Although it might sound like a goody-two-shoes thing, embroidery and pairing with different colors can make shirts last more.

Although fashion consumption drives the production of harmful emissions, policies are the key to reducing them. Leach points out that consumers should not be responsible for the supply chain or disposal of textiles. This has been integrated by the EU into its Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles.

France is a world leader in legal matters. There, it’s illegal to destroy unsold textiles, as part of a legal regime to increase manufacturers’ responsibility for the full lifetime of their products, rather than just up to the point at which the purchase is made. This contributes to France’s relatively low fashion-related emissions, when compared to other wealthy countries. Similar legislation is being implemented in Europe. It is important to reduce overproduction, overconsumption and not only the life-of-use.

Even though they don’t have any regulations to follow, companies can take steps to enforce their policies. One shopping site has limited customers’ purchases to 12 per year, for instance, while a design firm is preventing overstock by limiting production runs. But these individual schemes can’t make up for a lack of broader governmental oversight, including over the greenwashing that runs rampant in the fashion world.

Akenji is convinced that some form of fashion rationing, or quota, will be necessary. While this might sound like an alarming prospect, he says that “rationing really has a broad spectrum of possibilities,” including responsibility on both the producer and consumer sides. For instance, governments could ration the number of resources allotted to manufacturers or the amount of pollution they’re allowed to generate in the production cycle. The government could restrict new product launches from design firms or tax the frequent purchase of clothes.

There’s clearly plenty of scope for reimagining the role that fashion plays in our lives. That’s a worthy aim for the creativity and ingenuity that animate so many fashion lovers.