sustainable fashion is an oxymoron
a collection of thoughts on liberal ideas of ‘sustainable fashion’ of late, its contradictions & on becoming disillusioned by liberal solutions to the problem.
I.
If the current fashion landscape was a ball, ‘Sustainable Fashion’ is its most adored attendee.
She has wandered her way into all our conversations. She is the woman of the night, whispers of her aura circulating every corner of the room. Initially innocent, a beacon of hope maybe — she lets off a gorgeous fragrance that drifts through the air dissipating the promise of a better tomorrow, a better industry for all. But things have taken a turn for the worse. Because like many things under capitalism, Sustainable Fashion is not what it seemed. Instead of an invitation to reimagine the industry, she has introduced new ways of masking its wicked realities, of distorting its crimes and silently burying its victims. Nowadays, you don’t find Sustainable Fashion drifting through the room, asking you to dream of something better. You find her coating corporate marketing campaigns in a thin veil of feigned morality — like cheap lipstick smothered onto a rotting corpse.
II.
With time, I have come to the conclusion that ‘sustainable fashion’ is, at least in relation to fashion as we know it today, a nonsensical statement. A cluster of contradictions. It is an oxymoron.
Why, you might ask? In my head, I think about it like this: sustainability is defined as ‘the ability to be maintained at a certain level’ — that is, to keep at a constant, to sustain. Meanwhile, fashion is just about the antithesis of that — when we talk about ‘fashion’, we are not just merely referring to clothes. As Elizabeth Wilson said, “fashion is dress in which the key feature is the rapid and continual changing of styles… fashion, in a sense, is change.” And she’s right, is she not? Because fashion is not any single garment. The very logic of fashion necessitates a moving machine — it is obsessed with novelty and change. And therein lies the oxymoron. Staying constant (sustainability) versus rapidly changing (fashion). Is that not self-contradictory? To say something can be both sustainable and ‘fashion’ all at once?
After years of drifting about fashion circles, I’ve come to feel as though this initial contradiction is a poignant metaphor for and surface-level symptom of a deeper problem that permeates a lot of the discourse about socio-political change in the fashion industry. About so-called ‘sustainable fashion.’ (I should note here when I say ‘sustainable fashion’ I am referring to not only the discourse around what fashion is good for the earth, but also for garment workers and broader ethical concerns). So yes, the abstract contradiction between the ideas of ‘sustainability’ and ‘fashion’ is just a symptom. A symptom of the problem, with the problem being the underlying refusal to acknowledge that fashion’s problems don’t exist in a vacuum; they are a product of the society and political system in which we live. So really, if we care about changing these things, we need to think bigger. We need to go to the root of the thing. (That is, by definition, to be radical: Angela Davis reminds us the etymology of the word ‘radical’ is simply ‘grasping things at the root’.) So when we interrogate these matters, our question can’t be just ‘why isn’t fashion sustainable?’ It needs to be, ‘why isn’t our world system sustainable?’
III.
The contradiction between ‘fashion’ and ‘sustainability’ transcends their abstract meanings. It’s not just about the idea of the thing. When we look at fashion, not just as a socio-cultural phenomena, but as a physical industry, we see the practical operations of the fashion industry are rooted deeply in the toxic mesh of capitalism, imperialism and supremacy — the co-conspirators of colonialism. Colonialism is so often mischaracterized as a thing of the past; but that is far from the truth. She is here, still breathing, in her many forms, with her many faces, that work to seduce and manipulate us.
Though it has been said often, I feel the need to reiterate the crucial fact that fashion’s wreath of exploitation is in no way limited to the sphere of ‘fast fashion;’ it is one that plagues all members of the fashion industry. That is because no industry — or part of an industry, such as the luxury sector of fashion — can exist and operate, ideologically or practically, in isolation. Each is a single cog in the wider workings of our economic system; our economic system whose rules are pre-determined, whose machinery is set in stone, whose network is built rigidly by those with power. Though we are sold pre-packaged dreams of self-determined entrepreneurship and American-branded freedom, no creator can really choose to operate outside of this system. And that system is one of capitalism. Imperialism. Profit over lives. CEOs over the masses. A handful of western nations over everyone else. Across industries, the wealth of the Global South — in terms of not only its natural resources, its land, its air, its animals, but also its labour and its spirit, including that of garment workers — is extracted and exploited in order to satiate the never-ending obsession with profits and excess. I know this is talked about, especially more so these days, but the way in which people speak of it all makes me feel as though they don’t truly grasp the extent of it. The magnitude of it all. How insidious it all is. The number of players involved, the evil rules of the evil game. How the worst of it is buried. Even the things that seem good — like foreign aid, diverse representation in politics, and, I would say, new-age ‘sustainable fashion’ discourse — are unbelievably sinister. They cover up the tracks. They distort the truth.
“Imperialism is a system of exploitation that occurs not only in the brutal form of those who come with guns to conquer territory. Imperialism often occurs in more subtle forms, a loan, food aid, blackmail. We are fighting this system that allows a handful of men on Earth to rule all of humanity.”
Thomas Sankara
And so the reality is that these ‘formerly colonized’ countries we think to have now ‘gained independence’ are still under the coercive control of and are being economically exploited by ‘former’ colonizers. And the system is so deeply rooted that now these countries cannot survive without us. Us, their tormentors. Ex-colonies are dependent on foreign companies, as well as foreign aid and loans from institutions run by imperialist countries like the IMF and World Bank. The thought of it all, the enormity of it all, the sinisterness of it all, is nauseating. How do we contend with the guilt of what has been done to those who have already suffered so much? Knowing that we have re-stitched the seams of their societies so that now they can no longer hold themselves together? That now they need our threads and our ziplines to keep them from falling apart? And with this, with our so-called generous lending hand, we leave them bloody?
The thought of it all is heavy and inescapable and weighs on me daily.
To make matters worse, the fruit of all this production — the profit — falls into the hands of the very, very few, arriving at the board meeting drenched in the blood of all those exploited to reap it. Those countries that are exploited are not ‘underdeveloped’ or poor due to some inherent failing — they are constantly being impoverished, being stolen from, being exploited by the West, every day. It is ongoing, and it is merciless. Though the so-called ‘colonial era’ is thought to be long gone, these nations are being further destabilised by what is, at its root, colonial, imperialist violence. And fashion is a part of that. 8 years ago, the Rana Plaza garment factory in Dhaka collapsed in 90 seconds, killing 1,134 people. The building buckled under the pressure of severe structural failures — by the engineers of the building and the engineers of the system. The cracks were there and were worrying much before the collapse (in the building, and in the system). And yet it happened. A 2015 documentary released following the disaster painted a picture of how very expansive the problem is, beyond even the walls of garment factories; from pressured cotton farmers committing company-sanctioned suicide, to the way leather tanneries leak fatal toxins into villages’ drinking water supplies.
What does a mushroom leather bag have to say in the face of that?
IV.
And so, when you look up ‘sustainable fashion’, a whole range of things come up. Media talking about ‘new sustainable brands’ that utilize all the right fabrics, tweet all the right words and allege to pay their employees a living wage. There is talk about fast fashion and its impact, who is to blame for it all. Some discourse seems to suggest that fast fashion is the only problem in the industry. There are activists begging for legal regulation of factories from the very State and Lawmakers that are the orchestrators of imperialism, policing, poverty, prisons, homelessness, death and so forth.
Online, it’s a battleground for the best idea. The most ‘progressive’ idea, the hottest take. And yet barely anyone is willing to use the word capitalism. To use the word imperialism. And where any of these words are used, they are entirely co-opted into a distorted liberal fantasy where they are drained of any real meaning. But how will you defeat the enemy if you are not even willing to name them? When you are constantly distorting the enemy’s face, how will you recognise them when they come knocking at your door, gun loaded?
We are sitting in the belly of the beast and people are fighting amongst each about which one of us is to blame.
On this, I want to say 2 things.
1.
Liberal solutions to the ethical dilemma of sustainable fashion — put forth by brands, fashion media, so-called ‘activists’ and more — are rife with inconsistencies. As goes the title of this piece: sustainable fashion is an oxymoron. They tell us to stop buying real fur, recommending faux fur instead — but faux fur is made of plastic that ends up in landfills and microfibres that leak into our water system with every wash. They tell us to buy less fast fashion, but with no solution to who will pay the already abysmal wages of the garment workers who have now been systemically manipulated into relying on us. They say to invest in ‘sustainable labels’, but now that has become a market of its own, creating a whole range of new CEOs and businesses when we are trying to reduce production. And the problem with all of these propositions is much simpler than you would think; despite their name, they are all invested in saving capitalism, rather than saving the planet & its people. Making capitalism ‘work’, despite all the failures it continues to fester.
2.
I don’t think it is our fault. Us, being the everyday person. It, being the fact that we buy into gorgeously-marketed idea of ‘sustainable fashion’ that requires zero systemic change. Most of the people discussing and endorsing these ideas have good intentions. They want a better world, too. However, as Assata Shakur said, no one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Certainly not the brands, or the mainstream fashion media. In fact, there is so much money going into ensuring that we never understand what the problem is. Pro-capitalist, anti-communist propaganda is rampant in everything. From the tweets of the Democrat president of America to the punchlines in Netflix’s Emily in Paris. The dance of political correctness that brands put on are reminiscent of the theatre put on by politicians, to lull us into a state of complacency. To distract us from what they are really doing, and simultaneously make us feel powerless. Politicians tell us all we have is our ‘vote’ and sustainable brands tell us all we can do is ‘vote with our dollar.’ They tell us we can’t take direct action. We can’t do a thing about it all, except hope that they start doing better. They tell us our dreams of a world where no one needs to die for a profit margin are unbelievably unreasonable, utopic and unintelligent. That we just don’t understand ‘how things work.’
But what if we started dreaming, anyway?
What if we chose to believe?
