The year 2023 was one of super fast fashion, extreme price tags (both high and low) and toxic leaks from polyester clothing. It was the year when the zombie in the room – the enormous amount of clothing we produce and buy – took on a life of its own.
The connection between fossil fuels and the synthetics in our clothing really hit home. “Fossil fashion is at the heart of many of fast fashion’s worst problems: cheap materials, an over-reliance on synthetics, a growing waste crisis and rising emissions,” said Fossil Fuel Fashion, a new organization that presented at New York in September Climate Week was launched. , which brings together a coalition of organizations focused on phasing out fossil fuels from the industry.
Fossil fuel-based polyester is cheap and the fiber of choice for high-speed fashion, which continues to dominate the market despite a barrage of criticism in June after leading manufacturer, Shein, paid six fashion influencers to travel to their own countries . factories in China. The influencers then posted rave reviews from behind the scenes, and the $66 billion fashion brand continues to trick us into buying clothes we didn’t know we wanted and definitely don’t need. However, the race to the bottom has only just begun. Chinese shopping app Temu, which gives Shein value for money with its ‘lightning discount’ of 99% off, has been downloaded more than 7 million times since its launch in Britain in April.
But it wasn’t all bad news. There has never been so much talk about the link between agriculture and fashion; “Regenerative” is one of the biggest buzzwords this year. As Safia Minney, founder of Fashion Declares, which calls for radical change in the industry, explains, fashion isn’t just about making sure farmers keep carbon in the soil, but about the whole process – from the way cotton, hemp, flax, wool and leather are processed until the end of the garment’s lifespan.
One win for regenerative fashion came in October, when Justine Aldersey-Williams presented Britain’s first home-grown, home-spun jeans, made from flax and woad grown on wasteland in Blackburn, Lancashire.
With a few distractions—thank you, Louis Vuitton, for the million-dollar handbag, whose price tag still isn’t enough to justify the Crayola-colored crocodile it’s made of—it was also the year that brought a new focus on the horrific pollution of waste colonialism. In February, The Or Foundation – based in the Kantamanto Market in Accra, Ghana, which is committed to tackling the injustice of fashion’s waste problem – published its Stop Waste Colonialism report. It explained how “the fashion industry uses the global trade in second-hand clothing as a de facto waste management strategy”. In May, a group of clothing traders went to Brussels to debate with policyholders about Europe’s Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) legislation – ensuring the Kantamanto market is part of the conversation, as the world’s fashion waste ends up on their doorstep.
Artist Jeremy Hutchinson took the idea of waste on your doorstep one step further when he became a “monster of post-consumer imperialism” in the form of a suffocating 8-foot-tall textile zombie called Dead White Man. It was a collaboration with The Or Foundation and referred to the Ghanaian expression obroni wawu, that means the clothes of dead white men, and that is how the traders in the Kantamanto market refer to their stock of discarded people from the global north. Dead White Man performed at the British Textile Biennial in Blackburn in October and then made impromptu visits to all his favorite clothing suppliers, including Marks & Spencer, where it was filmed by bemused shoppers as it made its way down the escalator to the lingerie department. M&S is one of the brands whose labels frequently wash up on the beaches of Accra.
In September, Clare Press, the Sydney-based founder of the Wardrobe Crisis podcast, essential for anyone interested in sustainable fashion, published her latest book, Wear Next: Fashioning the Future, which explores some solutions to many of these problems. “Overproduction and hyper-speed are two of the biggest problems facing the fashion industry,” she says. In its annual Fashion Transparency Index, Fashion Revolution reports that 88% of major fashion brands still do not disclose their annual production volumes. According to the Index, there is enough clothing in the system worldwide to clothe the next six generations of people (if the planet doesn’t collapse before then).
But this was also the year when European legislation began to dig in to regulate fast fashion. In December, the European Parliament agreed to ban the destruction of unsold clothing, accessories and shoes as part of its new ‘eco-design’ framework, which will also see clothing given a digital product passport. A QR code, expected to go into effect in 2026, will give shoppers more transparency about materials, manufacturing and even tips on how to repair their item. Without regulation, brands still fail to take responsibility for their products, the materials they use and their supply chains. Legislation will push them to take collective action.
This year also saw continued exploitation of garment workers around the world. 2023 marks the tenth anniversary of the Rana Plaza factory disaster that killed 1,134 people and injured another 2,000 when the factory collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh. In December, more than 50 brands signed the newly expanded International Agreement, which has helped provide safer working conditions for more than 2 million garment factory workers in Bangladesh, including 48 signatories to the Bangladesh Safety Agreement and 88 to the more recent Pakistan. Agreement.
But there remains a lack of transparency. In November, a woman in Derbyshire found a Chinese prisoner’s ID card in the sleeve lining of her Regatta jacket, raising warnings about modern slavery hidden in supply chains. And poverty payments are still the norm in the sector. As the Clean Clothes Campaign reported, on June 25 this year, union leader Shahidul Islam was beaten to death for labor rights activism in Tongi, Bangladesh. Ongoing protests against Bangladesh’s new minimum wage resulted in the deaths of four workers and the jailing of at least 115 workers and union members in November. According to Maeve Galvin, director of global policy and campaigns at Fashion Revolution, “We are so far away from achieving social justice through workers that it is shameful.”
What is more hopeful is that young people still buy their clothes second hand, online or at car boot sales. Fast fashion brands see that Depop, Vinted and eBay are their biggest competitors and have started converting valuable retail space into second-hand clothing. As Press notes in Wear Next, as fashion consumption accelerates, we are also seeing the parallel rise of the slow fashion movement, as the repair revolution (including repair and customization apps like Sojo and The Seam) and DIY fashion continue to flourish . That’s progress.