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The average person in the developed world buys 60 per cent more items of clothing than they did at the turn of the century – and keeps clothing for only half as long as they used to.
A survey conducted by the UK sustainability group WRAPfound that one in three women consider a garment “old” after one or two wears, and that more than half of “fast fashion” items are disposed of in under a year.
The equivalent of one rubbish truck of textiles is landfilled or burned every second, and this behaviour is contributing more to climate change than air and sea travel combined. According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which promotes sustainability, fashion will be responsible for more than a quarter of the world’s carbon budget by 2050.
The rise of fast fashion has distorted our relationship with clothing and design. In 2020 we will discover better ways to dress ourselves through recycling, repurposing and renting garments, buying vintage clothing and trading items with each other.
This shift away from traditional ownership will be driven by the desire of consumers for newness, variety, sustainability and affordability. We will realise that new doesn’t have to mean new to the world, but can simply mean new to you. Rental and resale will offer us a new way to navigate the fashion system, and, if done taking sustainability into account from the beginning, it will also help to lengthen the lifespan of clothing and drastically reduce the immense stress that textile and garment production is putting on the planet and our available resources. And this will shift the perception of clothing from being a disposable item to what it really ought to be: a durable product.
One route is to rent clothes. In August 2019, Mintel found that over half of UK millennials had either rented fashion or had considered doing so. The US rental market has already developed further. It is now worth over $1 billion a year and, according to GlobalData, a market-intelligence company, is estimated to reach $4.4 billion (£3.5 billion) by 2028.
The fashion-resale market is already more developed. In 2018, the global secondhand-garment economy was worth $24 billion, according to a report by ThredUp and is projected to grow to $51 billion by 2023.
In 2007, Stella McCartney was first major luxury brand to promote resale, through our partnership with The RealReal. We are not perfect but we are embracing the necessary change our industry needs to undergo.
When you start to think about the end of the life of a product in its very early stages, the steps taken to create that product shift. At Stella McCartney we are focused on making desirable products that make the women who wear them feel comfortable, confident and empowered; but we are also interested in how to ensure that the products have a long life (one that can be extended through resale) and that, when they are truly done with, they are recycled or can biodegrade. A statement like that may sound simple, but in reality is a drastic change. As of today, only one per cent of textiles is recycled back into textiles each year and almost none of the products created can safely biodegrade into healthy soil – something we should all be ashamed of in the industry.
Today the small percentage of textiles that are collected for recycling are most often shredded and downcycled into things such as car door stuffing or insulation. This is of course better than these materials ending up in landfill, but what we aim for is that polyester will be recycled back into polyester, that cotton waste can liquified and that natural materials such as wool will be able to safely biodegrade. There are already encouraging developments starting to happen in this area and we are working with innovators such as Evrnu and ECONYL that are enabling true textile-to-textile recycling.
In the near future we can imagine a closet that is filled only with the pieces of clothing that we really want to own. Our one-off pieces will be rented and anything we no longer have use for will have been re-entered into the economy through resale. When a garment has reached the end of its life, it will either be recycled or composted. Then we will have regained a healthy relationship with fashion.
Claire Bergkamp is worldwide sustainability and innovation director at Stella McCartney
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
