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Dilys Williams and Kate Fletcher, both professors at the London College of Fashion and sustainability experts at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, coincided on April 25th to celebrate the public launch of a collaborative project, The Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion. We sat down with them at the event to discuss their ideas and knowledge around the topic, as well as positive practices that could help make the fashion industry more sustainable.

 

The handbook, co-edited by Fletcher with Mathilda Tham, includes a total of 28 chapters by 33 authors and covers the hottest topics surrounding sustainability at the moment, from brands and working rights to future studies. Williams’s chapter is devoted to the notion of fashion designers as agents within sustainability, whereas Fletcher wrote about conceiving an alternative fashion system.

 

At the event, and in individual conversations, the experts discussed the roles of brands and consumers, good and bad practices in the treatment of clothing, and the pace of fashion. All with the purpose to question, rethink and ultimately improve the current fashion system.

 

Dilys Williams recalls that standing up for sustainability and the planet once used to be considered a political, even punk move, yet nowadays it’s perceived as “cheesy.” At the event, the director of the Centre for Sustainable Fashion and co-secretariat to the House of Lords All Party Parliamentary Group on Fashion, Sustainability and Ethics, spent time with colleagues and students to share her expertise on the matter. “In our society, more and more people are lacking a sense of identity and belonging,” she says. “This is really problematic because it has been found that countries with high consumption rates are also the ones with higher mental health issues.”

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"Countries with high consumption rates are also the ones with higher mental health issues”

 

This is something that Kate Fletcher, professor of sustainability, design and fashion at LCF, agrees with: “Defining what is considered a need, what is the minimum we need and what is enough is not easy, however it has been proven that there is no correlation between consuming more and feeling happier.” Fletcher argues that clothing consumption has increased by 50% since the year 2000. She also notes that, when Greenpeace carried out a survey in South Asia and Europe on whether participants considered they had more than they needed, 70% of them answered “yes.”

 

This shows that there might be an appreciation towards how materialistic we have become, though this doesn’t stop us from consuming. Williams and Fletcher point out how consumers and brands should all take blame in promoting or engaging in over consumption, and they urge more heartfelt efforts to correct this issue. “In the case of brands,” Fletcher says, “there are massive sustainability issues to address, yet some spend most of their resources teaching consumers about their product without really taking responsibility for it.”

 

For Williams, those sustainability issues have a lot to do with how the fast fashion strategy has distorted our perception of speed and what gets lost in the way. She argues that this speed demands “more materials and resources, but leaves little time for designing, making and even wearing the garment”. On discussing this subject with a group of students at the event, the former designer was confronted by a fashion business student who found a conflict between the need to make a profit while acting as agent of positive change.

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"Speed in fashion means using more materials and resources, leaving little time for designing, making and even wearing the garment”

 

Williams explains this is a question of turning creativity into a positive force. “It’s really vulnerable to run a business on price and speed because there will always be someone cheaper and faster,” she observes. “If, on the contrary, you have a distinction that has to do with integrity, then no one can knock that.” Where the professor does find incongruences is in some brands’ discourse on sustainability, which sometimes runs alongside exponential growth strategies that go against what they preach.

 

In a 2015 essay entitled ‘Slow Fashion: An invitation for Systems Change’, Kate Fletcher said that, “in the fashion sector, the logic of growth is well-established as the basis of power and prosperity”. Two years on, the professor maintains that, “when fashion is discussed seriously, it is usually around de idea of money and the market”.

As she had previously observed in her paper, she finds that economic growth based on wanting more is potentially harmful to society.

 

To tackle the urge to consume more, Fletcher brought to attention several alternatives to traditional shopping. “Practices such as clothes-swapping, mending and community production all avoid directly buying more, which is what we ultimately do when we purchase products marketed as sustainable,” she says. For her, the idea of sustainability has been coined in recent years by several brands and individuals who promote products and a public lifestyle to harvest admiration, not necessarily environmental welfare.

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"Practices such as clothes-swapping, mending and community production all avoid directly buying more"

 

Fletcher is also an advocate for the appreciation and preservation of our existing garments. Arguing that durability can be a function of nurture and not nature, she has found that sometimes pieces of clothing last because we look after them through wearing, washing and storing techniques, and not simply because they are made of a robust material. She sees wool as a revolutionary material in this sense, as her surveys of consumers have shown that this is a material that is considered more delicate and therefore demands more care. Despite this, her experience has shown that “neither treasuring existing garments nor buying sustainably stop people from buying”.

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Although both women recognise there are serious issues within the industry that need to be addressed, they also considered that changing the conversation and moving towards different approaches could bring positive results. In Williams case, her involvement with student projects fills her with hope. One of her projects within LCF was ‘I stood up’, a workshop where students were given the opportunity to visit the House of Lords and voice their concerns around the industry. Today, she maintains that we are all agents of change.

 

“Try to exercise acceptance towards the things that you have to decrease your desire for consumption,” Fletcher advises. She suggests one should “find pleasure in having less, so the sacrifice of not buying more will feel liberating”. Sustainability is a collective initiative with a domino effect, where identifying bad practices, taking individual action and spreading the word will increase the chances of a better future. The option to consume will always be there, the question is how we want to act moving forward.