“Once you understand the destruction taking place, unless you do something to change it, even if you never intended to cause such destruction, you become involved in a strategy of tragedy. You can continue to be engaged in that strategy of tragedy, or you can design and implement a strategy of change. ”
– Michael Braungart, Willian McDonough, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
Introduction
The circular economy, championed by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the United Nations and many other academics and non profits is often defined as a design-driven movement that eliminates waste, extends product life cycles, and regenerates nature. While this sounds like an exciting mandate and one that’s easy to collectively rally around, it cannot be created upon the same foundation as the current, exploitative systems we function within. If we are to salvage the good, we’ll also need to weed out the inherited misperceptions, limits and exclusionary social hierarchies that constitute the invisible, but formative, subtext of industry.
This is nowhere more apparent than within the fashion industry, which both grotesquely reflects back to us the most damaging narratives in our culture, and carries a certain hope of its redemption. In order to successfully transition from mainstream fast fashion to a circular model, we need to better understand current breakdowns in power dynamics between brands & producers, imagine a new ecosystem, and think globally and courageously about solutions that empower individual expression, while honoring planetary limits.
Why Is The Supply Chain Slow to Change?
On the heels of the Covid crisis, Circular Leap Asia, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing upstream actors in fashion to the table, collaborated with leading sustainability consultancy, Forum for the Future, to publish a research report that explored one critical question—if everyone recognizes the need to transition towards a circular production model, why is there so much resistance along the way?
The research pointed to the unequal distribution of risks and rewards between brands and producers. Producers are pushed to operate on very tight margins, while shouldering all the risk if production is unexpectedly canceled, as in the case of Covid-19, where in Cambodia alone, 400 factories shut down and 150k workers were unemployed.
However, these aren’t just unfair business practices, these dynamics have their roots in histories of colonialism and attitudes of extraction and dehumanization. Celine Semaan, fashion designer and founder of Slow Factory, points out:
“Since we live in a global economy that is still very much the product of European colonialism and imperial exploitation, sustainability must be discussed in relation to colonialism, and I have previously written about the relationship between the two. If we look at where the resources to make our clothes come from by mapping trade routes — for resources such as cotton, wool, and silk — we can observe how these map directly to historical colonial routes proving that colonialism is a continuing economic reality. ” (Celine Semaan, Teen Vogue)
The Making the Leap to Circular Fashion report connects the dots between equitable partnerships and the need for circular innovation. Without more agency, trust, and empowerment across the supply chain, the fashion industry won’t be able to develop the solutions, synergies and new systems that are so desperately needed to curb waste, ensure efficiency, and promote creativity.
This means brands must take a historically-informed lens towards reforming production practices, and show up as partners and allies, rather than top down and demanding managers, or harsh enforcers of supply chain environmental policing. As traceability and innovation become more urgent, we’ll also see more vertically integrated supply chains, ethical storytelling and direct access to end-consumers via digital channels.
What Would an Alternative Model Look Like?
In the same report where the challenges the fashion industry faces are laid out with such honesty and nuance, there’s also a case study for what a supply chain for a fashion brand/purchase may look like in 2030. In addition to a highly organized secondhand market (where the majority of purchases take place), the case study also proposes a digitally enabled tailor service, TailorMe, that links the ability to commission bespoke made-to-order pieces with a global fabric library, talented designers and local maker resources. The case study looks to the future and imagines that, “responding to consumer preferences for customized products and fully transparent supply chains, garment manufacturers have moved away from pursuing fully automated mass production lines, working instead to build networks of tailors and seamstresses, who receive localized orders on demand, via platforms like TailorMe.” (Making the Leap to Circular Fashion, 2020, p.15)
While still in the early stages of ideation, case studies such as these are imperative in questioning assumptions, and beginning to design new ecosystems of makers, designers, consumers and conglomerates that are anchored in radically new principles of distribution and production.
What About the Present Damage?
Finally, as we reckon with the past and project into the future, we must also embrace agile, experimental and iterative means of rehabilitating and restoring the urban landscapes, like Accra in Ghana that have been inundated and warped by the well meaning but pernicious charity market of second hand clothes.
The OR Foundation reported that 40% of the clothing that arrives in Accra’s resale hub—The Kantamanto Market, leaves as waste, creating massive landfills with nearly 70 tonnes of new trash being dumped every day.
Going from fast fashion to fair fashion means looking seriously at such collateral damage, and factoring it into the overall intervention strategy. In other words, it isn’t enough to innovate new materials or donate used clothing. We have to clean up both our supply chains, and our waste lines.
Whether through bold enterprises like “The OR” foundation that document on the ground conditions and educate consumers, new taxes and policies that create greater accountability and support, or technological interventions that create new options for recycling garments, there’s a global mandate to address the fallout of the current fashion paradigm, and those it most negatively impacts.
If we can reckon with the past, envision a new future, and do right by the present, we stand a chance of transitioning fast fashion into fair fashion, and preserving both the cultural and social capital that allow fashion to be an engine for expression, and connection.
About the Author :
Sofiya Deva
Founder and fair fashion activist, Sofiya Deva, grew up in a combination of India, New York, and Dallas, and has felt like a global citizen for as long as she can remember. She’s been a yoga teacher, a magazine editor, a creative director, and a marketing exec, but at her heart, has always dreamed of creating a smaller, stranger world. Inspired by travel, the strength of women in shaping the community, and the artistic process of cross-pollinating cultural currents, she founded The Postcard Edit (www.thepostcardedit.com) as a way for fashion lovers to discover, shop and support designers off the beaten path.
