Welcome to the Blog
“That’s the great thing the fashion industry can do-it’s one of the most polluting industries in the world, but it’s also one of the most influential.”
According to prominent luxury fashion designer and environmental activist Stella McCartney, “an estimated 100 billion pieces of clothing are made every year, with a truckload being burned or landfilled each second” (Farra, 2019, para. 1). The fashion industry has a larger overall carbon footprint than international flights and shipping combined (BOF Team, 2020). It accounts for 20 to 35 percent of microplastic water pollution in oceans. The “catastrophic” impact of the fashion industry is, quite honestly, indisputable (para. 1). Environmentalists, such as radical group Extinction Rebellion, are calling on the fashion industry to talk less and do more. More and more environmental protests, such as the one led by Extinction Rebellion at 2019 London Fashion Week, pictured below, are breaking down the wall that once hid consumers from the reality of the fashion industry’s environmental impact.
Extinction Rebellion protestors at 2019 London Fashion Week.
Early in 2019, ten UN organizations launched the UN Alliance for Sustainable Fashion. France, a global leader in the luxury fashion industry, introduced an initiative to be implemented by 2023, which will ban the destruction of unsold goods – encouraging brands to donate, reuse, or recycle. At the G7 summit in 2019, where global leaders from seven different countries come together, luxury group Kering introduced the Fashion Pact, aimed at reducing the fashion industry’s environmental impact. Nearly 200 brands joined the Fashion Pact just that weekend. All this being said, sustainability and the protection of our environment is, supposedly, taking center-stage in the fashion industry’s agenda for the next decade. Despite the flurry of activity surrounding the relationship between the fashion industry and sustainability in 2019, “the industry has a long way to go before achieving transformative change” (para. 18).
My name is McGee Bosworth and through Is Green the New Black? I will be discussing the tumultuous relationship between fashion, the fashion industry, its consumers, and the new, hot-button topic – sustainability. Every Tuesday, we will dive into a different aspect of sustainability in fashion – whether it’s a new development within the industry itself, a look into a new, so-called “sustainable” collection, or attempting to understand the role of consumers in this complicated relationship – there will always be much to discuss.
Bye for now,
McGee