On Monday, the Federal Trade Commission announced an extension on the public comment period for updates to the green guides used for environment marketing. This gives people in the United States an opening to crack down on greenwashing in the fashion industry. In particular, it has the potential to change the way fast fashion uses certain buzzwords to make claims around marginal improvements on a small number of products.
It had me thinking about a question I get asked a lot: Can fast fashion ever be sustainable and ethical?
The short answer is no. Prices are low because wages for workers are low and volume is high — two fundamental things that must change for a brand to be considered ethical. But I think it’s important to understand WHY they keep trying to make themselves part of the sustainable fashion conversation, while maintaining those practices mentioned above.
It’s because we want it.
Boohoo recently announced a self-hosted ethical fashion talk in which they called sustainability a fashion “must have,”in the same way you would refer to a trend. Boohoo also launched a “sustainable” line with Kourtney Kardashian last year. The brand has not slowed production and has been in the middle of several labor scandals, including documented wage theft at factories in Leicester.
The brand is not alone. In many ways, it followed other fast fashion brands that created sustainability capsules to satisfy a market without making the changes necessary to support workers. H&M, for example, started their conscious collection over a decade ago (though it’s since been dropped). Meanwhile, overproduction has led them to destroy overstock,factory workers continue to raise awareness of discrimination and wage theft, and the textiles for the general collections remain as they always were.
For fast fashion to be sustainable, it would have to stop being fast, and it would have to be more expensive. It seems the brands are willing to make marginal changes that look pretty good but in reality only serve as marketing. Does that mean we should stop pushing them to be more sustainable? I don’t think so. Legislative methods like greenwashing language crackdowns could at least force them to stop trying to gloss over the problems.
I recorded some thoughts! I didn’t use anything professional, so if you have a difficult time listening to unedited audio, please feel free to skip! (I GET IT).