Can we ever dress sustainably?
Or some “loose thoughts” on why we’re failing at sustainability in fashion.
Good morning and Happy Earth Day!
(Or is it “happy” considering the state of sustainability these days?)
This is Laura Beltrán-Rubio and I’m thrilled to write my first Substack for The Fashion and Race Database®. You might know me as Senior Researcher and Editorial Manager at the FRD or you may have at some point stumbled upon my independent newsletter and podcast, Redressing Fashion. In both instances, my mission is to become your go-to source for diverse histories of global fashion.
More recently, though, I’ve started to embrace a second—and not too distant—mission of convincing the world that fashion is life-changing and can change our world too.
Enter sustainability.
But also enter our daily choices around how we dress.
Regardless of how much attention we pay to Fashion (capitalized here to indicate an industry centered on multi-millionaire, global brands and conglomerates often based in major cities of Europe and North America), we all engage with fashion every single day of our lives by simply getting dressed.
And every time we get dressed we also partake in the politics of fashion as a mediator between our selves and the society around us.
Yet, we often overlook this aspect of fashion and instead focus on the big industry players. The more I think about it, the more I conclude this is why we still haven’t managed to make fashion truly more sustainable.
So on this Earth Day I’m reflecting on five reasons why I think we’re failing at sustainable fashion, sparked by years of conversations with friends, colleagues, students, style coaching clients, and fashion industry members.
There is no way of being 100% sustainable.
Our societies and economic systems are not built on the principles of sustainability, which makes it nearly impossible to achieve. Embracing sustainability therefore requires rejecting the status quo but it also implies compromises, meaning that we will always be trapped between dilemmas of how to be more sustainable. The way to face those dilemmas, if you ask me, is to tune in to our values and make the decisions that make most sense to us and how we want to contribute to a better world.
Sustainability is about how we consume just as much as it is about how things are produced.
Shopping second-hand fashion every week is just as unsustainable as it is buying frequently from fast fashion brands. Throwing away your entire wardrobe to fill it with “sustainable” products isn’t any better than trying a slower approach where we preserve what we have and add or replace items mindfully. If we truly want fashion to be sustainable, we must change our consumption habits in addition to ask brands to produce less (and governments to regulate more).
We’ve been too wired to think that we can’t afford it to even give it a try.
One of the things that blows my mind when I talk with my friends about sustainable fashion is that they always reply something along the lines of “I don’t have as much money as you do to spend on clothes.” In some cases I know this is not true because I can see that they already spend more than I do. The difference is in how I organize my purchases: I don’t shop as a principle—unless I really feel like I must. And there are certain strategies that we can all take to reorganize our spending habits to consume more sustainably regardless of our income, which I’d be happy to discuss further in a different space.
Ease and immediate gratification have ruined everything.
We keep buying from the same brands, even when we know they’re not great for people, society, or the environment, because it’s too comfortable for us to do things differently. And having everything delivered at our door, sometimes within hours and with no extra payment doesn’t help. Recognizing that there is always an extra cost even if we don’t see how we’re paying it, and perhaps even trying to quantify it, might remove the friction of actually going to a store, paying for ground shipping, or finding a different provider—all of which might contribute to more sustainable fashion practices.
We’re too focused on the environment at the expense of social justice and racial equality.
Most discourses of sustainability focus on its environmental aspect—which is really only a portion of the whole issue. In fashion, many initiatives that encourage sustainability also do it at the expense of racialized and marginalized people around the world, whether it is by extracting their knowledge, appropriating their practices, or misrepresenting their experiences and identities through the lens of white saviorism. For fashion to be truly sustainable we need to move past these narratives and, instead, develop strategies for real inclusion and social justice.
I perhaps should note here that all of this is about fashion and it is also not about fashion. So take it as you choose and feel free to apply it to other aspects of your life as well.
Now, to return to my question above…
It is not a “happy” Earth Day considering the state of the world.
Not when we look at the divestment of major industry players on initiatives that have to do with both environmental sustainability and social justice (including DEI programs). Not when we see the wave of deregulation against measures aimed at protecting the environment, labor and human rights, and inclusion, especially in the United States.
But I choose to remain hopeful.
I am convinced that we can all contribute to making fashion more sustainable—and in turn change our world—by making small, conscious choices every day through what I call “pocket microactivism.”
And this leads me to my starting question: Can we ever dress sustainably?
I would say yes.
Yes—only if we choose to do the (very hard) work of acknowledging that fashion is politics even in its most mundane expressions and embrace the power of every single one of our choices, especially when they require us to modify our habits even by a tiny little bit.
As always, I’d love to continue the conversation so please share your thoughts in the comment section or reach out via DMs and social media.
Thank you, thank you for reading, and until next time!
—L 🩷