How Do Fashion, Luxury, And Sustainability Interlink?

Luxury, fashion, and sustainability have a somewhat interesting relationship. Luxury and fashion are not the same, but they overlap. The most expensive segments of the fashion industry could be included within the notion of luxury. Sustainability’s relationship with luxury depends mainly on how luxury is defined. Is it a quality standard or just an idea?

Suppose luxury was defined as having the best quality, the best craftsmanship, and things that last, both with their technical duration and design-wise. In that case, luxury could be argued to be the very definition of sustainable fashion. Things that have been chosen with thoughtful intent and built to last and be tasteful no matter the change in fashion.

But how do you define luxury if many of the items sold under luxury labels in fashion are produced from poor-quality materials and in terrible working conditions? Since business conglomerates began purchasing old, renowned, family-owned luxury fashion brands, this has happened to many of those brands. They seized from being the highest quality artisan work they used to be, started saving in costs, and licensing the brands in every direction.

In the Book Deluxe, Dana Thomas demonstrates this demise of luxury clothes by comparing a Prada dress she bought in 1992 to Prada trousers she bought after the turn of the millennium. The dress had a timeless design and was so well made that it would last easily for decades. Ten years later, she bought a pair of Prada trousers. Trousers ripped from multiple different seams almost immediately. A former Prada design assistant explains to her that the cheaper thread is the difference between her Prada items. The cost-cutting has led the brand to cut corners on quality. As production costs were driven down, the advertising budget went up. It was no longer about the product but the image.

I can easily tell from being a person who bought and wore clothes around the turn of the millennium and who buys and wears clothes now that the quality has continued declining since then. Regular high-street clothes didn’t immediately fall apart or ruin in the first wash twenty years ago as they do now.

In addition to using cheaper materials, brands would resort to leaving out linings, using raw edges, and cutting sleeves shorter. Outsourcing to China was a trend where luxury brands were more hesitant to follow the lead of the rest of the fashion industry since labels that say, ‘made in France’ or ‘made in Italy’ were seen as an integral part of a luxury item. Many still moved their production to China, but most kept it hushed. Also, ‘made in Italy’ written on the label is by no means a guarantee that the product was not made in a sweatshop anymore.

This trend is not isolated from the rest of the fashion industry. It aligns with the general trend of pulling production costs down, production volumes up, and exhilarating the culture of consumerism in full gear, where clothes have become disposable goods. Clothes, in general, used to be more expensive and better made. And since they were expensive and well made, they would be passed down for as long as they were useful.

When Thomas’s book was published in 2007, she could still point out some luxury brands that still put quality and craftsmanship first: Hermes, Louis Vuitton, and Louboutin were not compromising on their quality. But I cannot tell if that is still the case.

I have repeatedly heard the claim that ‘sustainability has become the new luxury.’ Does that mean that expensive high fashion brands that source their products from low-quality materials and in sweatshop conditions are now just overpriced fast fashion products, and sustainable brands are the actual luxury items? Kind of like an SVU would have been a status symbol 20 years ago, but now driving one in the city and suburbs would be seen as tasteless, at least among the educated urban crowd.

This may be one of those cases where counterculture or anti-fashion becomes the mainstream. However, it has been a while since sustainable fashion looked like hippie clothes. There was a time when sustainable clothes struggled to push through because many still believed that sustainable fashion was the same as a hippie-chic or boho-chic look. But we have come to the point where it is generally acknowledged that coarse fabrics and earth tones are not the definitions of sustainability. You can produce clothes that look ‘bohemian’ or ‘ethnic’ in unsustainable production chains, and you can make sleek office clothes in sustainable supply chains. These are just aesthetics; they do not express where the item came from.