Welcome To Reform Your Fashion

WELCOME TO REFORM YOUR FASHION

Firstly, it's clear that everyone has heard about the demand for more sustainability in the fashion industry. This is to help us understand the several rising issues and encourage us all to make small changes in helping the industry. With this, I think that in order for change to happen, people need to understand the realm of the issues and why changes need to be made. This will give people an opportunity to adapt their own shopping habits and employ more sustainable choices.

Significant changes in the fashion industry aren’t going to happen overnight, but we can’t afford these issues to progress further. I decided to create this blog, Reform Your Fashion to offer insight for people in understanding the current situations in fashion, in relation to sustainability. In regard to myself, I am also starting this blog to allow myself to continuously learn more about sustainability in the fashion industry and use this research to help others.

I do believe we all want to help in some way and know that not everyone can afford to buy from sustainable brands only, relying highly on cheap clothing which sits within their budget. But there are multiple changes people can make to help and this blog will explore how.

Let’s start off by addressing the issues apparent in the fashion industry. In recent years, there has been a large advertisement of how major brands are structuring their supply chains. Many of these brands are labelled as fast fashion, involving the manufacture of high quantities of cheaply made clothing in an attempt to keep up with the latest trends in fashion. Many brands have 100’s of new styles each week, is this really necessary?

With this high quantity of clothing being made, plus the everchanging trends in the industry, this leaves masses of unsold clothing, which ultimately ends up in landfill. This can be described as over-consumption.

SUSTAINABILITY SHOULDN'T BE A TREND

With the rise of talk around sustainability, brands are using this as means of Greenwashing their customers. This allows brands to appear more sustainable than they really are. Designer, Leyla Acaroglu describes how brands avoid any possible progress within business practices and are instead:

“Spending more time and money claiming to be “green” through advertising and marketing rather than actually implementing business practices that minimise environmental impact”

Acaroglu, Leyla

Many of these brands will introduce ‘conscious collections’ to their ranges but offer little or no factual evidence to support this. If a brand releases a small range classed as ‘sustainable’, but don’t address the rest of their collections, this isclassed as greenwashing. A brand cannot label themselves as sustainable if they’re still largely benefiting from selling garments within their other collections. A sustainable brand needs to take time and create new strategies to be imbedded throughout their supply chains and all areas of the business.

The subject of greenwashing and other attributes in the fashion industry will be explored in future posts, offering a deeper insight into the definitions and what you can do to help spread awareness. These include talk of transparency, ethical fashion, environmental impacts, slow fashion and tips on shopping sustainably.

Thank you for reading my first post and hope you visit again on this journey. I will leave you with a question below which I hope you will consider.

Will you join in the fight for a more sustainable fashion future and #reformyourfashion?

Sabrina Cowper