The key word for Vogue’s January 2020 issue is values. Interpret that as you may: monetary, ethical, sentimental… Every definition relates to the big picture: that fashion needs to reassess its value system, and quickly. We have to change the way money is invested and spent; we have to shop with brands whose values reflect our own; and we have to change the way we assign value to what we buy and wear.
Let’s start by working backwards, because I think that last part is actually the most important. In fashion, the inverse of value might be disposability: If your T-shirt costs less than your Starbucks latte, you probably won’t think twice about throwing it out when it rips. Value isn’t just about price, of course; you might cherish a $50 vintage dress more than a designer bag. But therein lies the difference: You value the dress because it’s rare, or because it’s by a certain designer, or simply because it has a story; it may even be more valuable now than it was 30 years ago. Your old T-shirt, on the other hand, is hardly a treasure—and who would want it, anyways? It’s stained, it’s got holes, it’s no longer bright white.
T-shirts are among several “high-frequency basics” that tend to have a single, very short life; underwear, athletic clothes, and shoes fall into the category, too. They’re items you wear through quickly, can’t be resold, and are too dingy to be donated, so they inevitably end up in the trash. An estimated 50 million tons of clothing is discarded every year, and most of it will not biodegrade in a landfill. (Synthetic materials like polyester or nylon can also leach chemicals into the earth, and if they’re incinerated, they may become carcinogenic.) The amount of time, energy, and resources that go into those trashed items is usually disproportionate to their quick turnaround; a single cotton T-shirt may require up to 700 gallons of water and may travel across several countries during production. But even if it’s stained or damaged at the “end of its life,” it could likely be recycled into something else, like housing insulation or even another T-shirt.
Making that clear to consumers will be key to making fashion more sustainable in the future; we’re phasing out single-use plastic and paper bags from our lives, and we should think about our clothes the same way. What will happen to this T-shirt, handbag, or sneaker when I’m done with it? In the long-term, it should ultimately change the way we shop, because we’ll only buy things with legitimate value and a feasible end use.
“We need to get used to looking at things and understanding that nothing actually goes ‘away’ [when we throw it out]—there is no ‘away,’” explains Stacy Flynn, the CEO of Evrnu. She came to that realization nearly a decade ago on a sourcing trip in China, where she found herself in a factory town so polluted, she couldn’t see her colleague standing next to her through the smog. “I realized how impactful and damaging our industry is to the environment, and began adding up all the millions of yards of fabric I’d made over the course of my career… I was contributing to the problem,” she says. She launched Evrnu in 2015 and recently unveiled a groundbreaking technology that breaks cotton waste down into a liquid, then remakes it into stronger, higher-performing fibers. A recent Adidas x Stella McCartney collaboration included a hoodie made from Evrnu’s regenerated cotton. “Cotton and polyester make up 90 percent of all clothing, and both fibers require tremendous amounts of resources,” Flynn says. “Consumers throw away about 80 percent of their textiles directly in the garbage. We knew if there was a way to take that waste, break it down into a polymer, and build it back up to a new fiber, that would be the lynchpin of reducing our industry’s impact.”
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