lifestyle sustainability ‘Slow Fashion?’
With sustainability becoming a more pressing issue, it’s easy to overlook the contribution the fashion industry makes towards our planet’s degradation. Does the answer lie in the ‘slow’ movement? Hannah Collins and Sarah Bowdidge examine the benefits and challenges, and what we can do in Wales to help.
You may have noticed recently that major clothing brands and retailers are suddenly developing an environmental conscience in Wales and the rest of the UK. The term ‘fast fashion’ is one you’re also likely familiar with already, referring to quickly and cheaply produced clothing that is just as quickly discarded by fashion-conscious consumers. Fueled by low labour, material costs and the fibre-optic speed of social media trendsetting, the pace at which we’re consuming and binning clothing are estimated by Global Fashion Agenda to be a 92 million-tonne landfill per year. This is expected to reach 134 million tonnes in just under a decade. Barely 15% of all that waste will be recycled.
But it’s not just about textile waste. According to the UNEP, 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions come from the fashion industry, as does 20% of the world’s waste water. A big part of this is changing consumer habits. Around the world, most of us are simply buying far more clothes than past generations, with fashion spending up by 60% compared to 15 years ago, as reported by the UN Alliance. Research from Oxfam reveals that the UK is at the epicentre of this: we buy more clothes per minute than any other European country. According to My Recycle Wales, almost half of Brits aren’t aware that they even can recycle textiles. If they were, researchers reckon the industry’s carbon footprint would be reduced by 10-20 percent.
What’s the solution to this continuing crisis, then? Do we log out of Instagram, Marie Kondo our wardrobes, and rediscover sock darning? Questions like these are what ‘slow fashion,’ the antithesis to fast fashion, aims to solve. Coined by Britain’s own Kate Fletcher of the Centre For Sustainable Fashion in 2007, slow fashion is one of many branches of the ‘slow culture’ movement, itself rooted in the viral spread of McDonald’s restaurants in the 80s. Slow culture stands against the capitalist, pro- consumerist notion that human progress means getting faster and faster, but not necessarily in favour of making the pace of modern life unilaterally slow. “The Slow philosophy is not about doing everything at a snail’s pace. It’s about seeking to do everything at the right speed,” Carl Honore writes in his 2004 book In Praise Of Slow.
Crucially, Slowness isn’t controlled by one entity – be that a person or business. Instead, it’s an ideology that said entities can be incorporated into their lives and practices. This naturally – or unnaturally, perhaps – feeds into environmental issues, such as the damage the fashion industry is inflicting on our global ecology. Fashion is all about creating the next big thing and is perfectly poised, at the intersection of art and commerce, to push consumers to buy that next big thing every waking second of every day. That isn’t to say that fashion isn’t a legitimate art form or doesn’t have an important role to play in human identity and expression. But it’s also an industry that’s infamously less concerned with practicality or longevity than it is in love with the new.
Advocates for slow fashion believe that changing the industry to be more sustainable is a process that relies on both producers and consumers. Producers have a responsibility to manufacture clothes that will last longer and try and use materials that already exist rather than make more of them. Keep Wales Tidy describes this process as a “circular economy,” advocating that the nation adopting it means “all this ‘stuff’ will have a much longer lifespan and we move away from a ‘single-use’ or ‘disposable’ culture and
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