36 DEPARTURES STYLE
36 DEPARTURES STYLE CONSCIOUS CLOTHING TWENTY-NINE YEARS AGO, the clothing company Esprit shocked a good portion of the fashion world with an advertisement that was, the Los Angeles Times warned its readers, “astonishing”. Entitled “A Plea for Responsible Consumption”, it was an appeal to consumers to consume less. “By changing the things that make us happy and buying less stuff, we can reduce the horrendous impact we have been having on the environment,” the letter said. Since then, despite a A textile instillation for Eileen Fisher’s “Waste No More” campaign at the company’s Brooklyn store seemingly generational shift towards eco-awareness, not enough has changed: glaciers have melted, seas have risen, and plastics have been found on the Himalayas’ highest peaks and floating above the ocean’s deepest folds. In 2015, according to a recent report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the textile industry was responsible for 1.2 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions – more than is generated by all international flights and maritime shipping combined. Textile treatments have polluted 20 per cent of the planet’s shrinking freshwater supply. Last May, Global Fashion Agenda, an association working in alliance with business consultants and sustainability experts, released a report entitled Pulse of the Fashion Industry in which they declared that fashion’s efforts not only still had a long way to go but had recently slowed down. If things continue to go as they have been, we’ll be looking at landfilling 136 million tonnes of clothing by 2050, which, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation also noted, is ten times the weight of everyone living on the planet right now. Why the disconnect, especially when everywhere you look brands are hashtagging their sustainability? How can those of us who are neither ecologists nor supply-chain experts understand what’s going on? The way to think about it is like turning a ship, in which a dramatic result is gained by what feels like the tiniest of degrees. Sixty per cent of fashion companies have made serious efforts – measures that run the gamut from changing how their suppliers farm cotton and rethinking traditional materials entirely to vigorously promoting reusing clothes. The astronomical success of clothing-rental companies like Rent the Runway and Girl Meets Dress are seemingly in answer to Esprit’s limit-your-consumption call. Sustainability-focused measures from luxury conglomerates like Kering, LVMH and Yoox Net-a-Porter are announced almost weekly. What’s especially hopeful is the work of the individuals who are setting the course, sometimes by revolutionising how we make elemental ingredients like fibres, sometimes by reconsidering how we deal with what we’ve made, but most of all by a crucial rethinking of what kind of a business fashion is anyway. TAKING STOCK As a .3 trillion global industry that employs 300 million people, fashion has an enormous reach. The missing step for most companies is an in-depth accounting of where their impact is greatest: watersheds destroyed by cotton farming; toxic chemicals inhaled by workers in pollutant-spewing factories; carbon emitted by trucks that bring clothing to consumers or to landfills in communities whose water is then polluted by the toxic disintegration of synthetic and cotton fabrics. In 2011, Kering, the luxury goods consortium whose roster includes Gucci, Saint Laurent, Balenciaga, Alexander McQueen and Bottega Veneta, introduced its Environmental Profit & Loss account, or EP&L. Its goal was to measure but also put a dollar value on the environmental impact of the company, or as employees put it: “If Kering were to write a cheque to nature to make up for its impact, how much would that check be?” For 2018, it came to 0 million. Michael Beutler, Kering’s sustainability operations director in charge of the EP&L, first heard about the company’s environmental © EILEEN FISHER
FROM LEFT: © STELLA MCCARTNEY; © EVERLANE A focus on sustainability is expanding beyond just the larger brands, one industry observer says. “The smaller companies are starting to understand” accounting in 2011 while working on sustainability for the business software corporation SAP. He remembers wondering where it got its data. By 2012, data-getting had become his job. Today, his team produces spreadsheets of impact caused by Gucci sweaters and Balenciaga belts: colour-coded, mapped, graphed to show, for instance, how much more the mining of metal required for that belt buckle pollutes streams in Peru than in the US. (In general, the impact is greatest in China, followed distantly by Canada, Japan and the US.) “We mapped all the processes of the group, over 600 processes, with 110 raw materials, and all the environmental processes related to it,” Beutler says. That means tracing “how the business process is run, where all the materials come from, and how things are made”. If 20 years ago CEOs looked to environmental accounting to keep them from having to pay penalties for polluting, today they are beginning to look to environmental accountants to point them towards potential longterm gains from the use of fewer resources. Last June, Kering released all its EP&L data, arguing that transparency leads to reduced impact across the board. “There’s a real tendency to want to show positivity,” says Beutler, who in the late 1990s was a pollution-prevention specialist for the Environmental Protection Agency. “But I think it’s important to make an honest measurement. We don’t make environmental problems go away by saying they don’t exist.” WORKING TOGETHER Via various think tanks and foundations, fashion brands find themselves inevitably trending towards cooperation, coming to corporate grips with the idea that sustainability has to be more than a marketing plan. In May 2019, LVMH, the luxury group behind fashion houses like Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior and Fendi, announced a partnership with Unesco’s intergovernmental scientific programme, Man and Biosphere, “which aims to safeguard biodiversity across the planet” in line with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. LVMH says that by 2020 it will have applied the UN’s highest standards to 70 per cent of its supply chains and will have reduced its carbon dioxide emissions by 25 per cent. The efforts of multinational conglomerates are beginning to have a ripple effect. In 2018, HSBC sent Susanna Wilson, its global head of sustainable networks and entrepreneurship, to the Copenhagen Fashion Summit for the first time, where she talked about ways big companies could encourage conversations between finance and sustainability people. “What we’re noticing is that a focus around sustainability is broadening out beyond just the large brands,” Wilson told a panel. “So it’s the smaller companies that are starting to understand that this is really important.” Herno, the Italian outerwear brand, was founded in 1948, when Giuseppe Marenzi and Alessandra Diana started a factory where the Erno River meets Lake Maggiore. Back then, to make raincoats waterproof, they used castor From left: Stella McCartney closed her autumn 2019 runway show with a coat made from fabric scraps from her previous collections; Everlane’s Kick Crop jeans are made in what the company calls the “world’s cleanest denim factory” oil, the production of which releases the poisonous substance ricin. “It’s not easy to make material waterproof today,” says Claudio Marenzi, their son, who runs the company today. “In the past we used many things that we now avoid.” To develop new ways of manufacturing, “you have to invest”, he says, and Herno’s new Laminar collection uses Gore-Tex fabrics that are durable, waterproof and increasingly free of environmentally concerning perfluorocarbons. Marenzi is not the only small manufacturer hoping to perpetuate Made in Italy without destroying Italy. Italy wants to reengineer as well: Marenzi says the fashion business produces seven per cent of the nation’s GDP. In 2017, he was appointed chairman of Confindustria Moda, a confederation of 67,000 textile, fashion and accessory companies. “The goal is to make the same materials with the same performance,” but without harming, for instance, Lake Maggiore, where the Herno factory still stands. “The reason,” Marenzi says, “is to have a better life.” CHECKS AND BALANCES On 1 November 1986, a chemical storage facility sprang a leak and a DEPARTURES 37
