Review | From Gucci to Gap to Stella McCartney, how fashion is trying to be green and what more it needs to do
- Clothes and textile manufacturing is the world’s second most polluting industry and US$3 billion of clothing ends up in landfills each year. So what to do?
- Circular Design for Fashion gathers ideas and reflections on fashion’s path to sustainability, while throwing up some big red flags
Circular Design for Fashion by Ellen MacArthur Foundation
Creative designers give me hope. The imaginative people whose job it is to dream up striking images, fantastic furniture or beautiful clothing solve problems differently from the rest of us.
While most, including businesspeople, politicians and even engineers, typically look to practical, economical solutions, designers consider something else as well, something more human: they think about how things look and how we feel about them.
What’s important about this distinction is its potential to offer a new way of tackling our planet’s greatest threats. Climate breakdown remains stubbornly resistant to purely pragmatic solutions. Pricing carbon or costing the worth of nature’s “ecosystem services”, for example, have yet to turn the crisis around. We can’t buy or sell our relationship with nature; we have to feel it first.
This idea emerges as an encouraging theme in Circular Design for Fashion, a book of reflections from leaders of the fashion industry who want – or say they want – their US$807 billion business to go green.
