CIRCULAR FASHION

I bet you have heard about the word sustainability when it comes to fashion– am I right?
Nowadays we seem to hear and read the word sustainability in political debates, in advertisements, in articles and posts on social media. I first consciously noticed the word when the United Nations published “17 Sustainable Development Goals – also called the SDG goals in 2016. Regarding the fashion industry, the word sustainability has also made its mark, but this is not new. What is (relatively) new, is how some fashion brands use circular economy, also called circular fashion, as a more sustainable approach towards consuming- and producing fashion in the industry. However, it is interesting to examine the pros and cons of this circular approach, since one could question the sustainable effects of such recycling system. 

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The worlds need for sustainability in the fashion industry
According to fashion and textile professor, Debbie Moorhouse, the fashion industry is one of the most damaging industries when it comes to the environment: “Fashion is widely considered the second most destructive industry after oil, to the environment”. (Moorhouse, 2017, s. 1948). Seen in a historical context, sustainable fashion already emerged in the 1960s due to consumers’ awareness of how the production of clothing had an impact on the environment and demanded that the industry changed the way clothing was produced. This led to a sustainable fashion/slow fashion movement that “developed over the past decades” (Henninger, Alevizou, & Oates, 2016, s. 400) and focused on ideals such as sustainable values, reducing environmental damage et al. 

In opposite to the sustainable fashion/slow fashion, “fast fashion” is described by author Tansy E. Hoskins in her book “Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion” from 2014, as: “(…) a retail style that consists of the expedited production and distribution of short runs of trend-based fashion” (Hoskins, 2014, s. 70). This retail-style is used by many fashion brands such as ZARA, Nike, H&M, Primark et al. and the brands often produce their clothing in manufacturing fabrics located in both Bangladesh and China.The fast-fashion products “improve life quality, but meanwhile, they produce waste and pollution” (Zhi-Hua, Li, Chen, & Wang, 2014, s. 7063).

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In April 2013 the Rana Plaza manufacturing fabric in Dhaka, Bangladesh collapsed during a workday. The collapse of the building caused the death of 1,133 workers and left 2,500 people with injuries. Many of the workers had, just a while before the collapse, argued with their managers about the building’s condition and their concerns about their safety while working in the fabric. As a result, the managers threatened the workers with a cut of their salary, for the entire month, which forced the workers to return to their work. The incident of Rana Plaza raised ethical and sustainable questions regarding fast fashion, production of clothing in the industry, as well as consumption of fashion, and “(…) fast fashion quickly becoming an undesirable model for consumers to support”  (Hill, 2020).

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Circular economy and fashion = circular fashion – what is that?
So what is my point in telling you about such a tragic incident? – let me explain…
The Rana Plaza incident increased, as mentioned above, ethical, and sustainable questions regarding production and consumption of fast fashion, and in 2014, the year after the incident, a new sustainable approach to consuming and producing fashion came to be. The new sustainable approach was introduced at a seminar held in Sweden, where: “a more circular approach to the fashion industry was the core focus” (Hill, 2020). Here fashion got combined with a circular economy business model which gave it its name – circular fashion. The circular economy is, in opposite to linear economy, a system that changes the way we use, dispose, and recycle objects and commodities. In the linear system, objects are made, used, and later disposed of which means, that raw materials used in the production of a product get disposed of instead of being recycled, which results in pollution. The circular system focuses on how objects/products get designed, produced, used, and reused to reduce pollution, minimize waste, and use less materials. This way, the materials get circulated in a larger recycling system and gets to be used in the production of a new product. You can see an example of the linear and the circular economy in the picture below.