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Can Fashion Truly Be Sustainable? Let’s Not Get Ahead of Ourselves

Hand holding a stack of sustainable cloths in tracksuit

The global fashion industry is a mess. As one of the oldest industrialized sectors and one of the largest global industries today, touching nearly every person on the planet in some way and intersecting with numerous other industries including oil and gas, agriculture, and global transport, fashion’s impact is big. Its problems are also big.

Greenhouse gas emissions for the global fashion industry contribute somewhere between 4 and 8.6 percent of the world’s global greenhouse gas footprint, more than France, Germany, and the United Kingdom combined. Left unchecked, the industry will be responsible for more than a quarter of the world’s global carbon budget by 2050. The fashion industry is a significant user and abuser of chemicals within its supply chain and poor chemical management results in toxic waste in waterways and health issues for workers and communities. The fashion industry is one of the most labor-dependent industries in the world, employing an enormous portion of the global population. Most of those employed within the fashion supply chain, a majority of women in the Global South, are consistently exploited, underpaid, and subject to sexual abuse and forced labor.

The fashion industry is the leading global industry of exploited and child labor. It is also an industry that significantly contributes to the plastics crisis; the fashion industry reportedly uses 342 million barrels of petroleum annually in its production of synthetic fibers such as polyester, nylon, or acrylic, roughly 1.35 percent of annual global oil consumption. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but merely a taste of the range and scale of issues plaguing this nearly $2.5T global industry.

Evolution of the Global Fashion Industry

Unfortunately, most of these issues are not new. The fashion industry looks remarkably similar to how it did following the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. The behaviors are bafflingly unchanged. The biggest change for fashion has been the continued growth of the industry. While the fashion industry has experienced steady growth through much of its 300-year history, it has really moved into hyperdrive in the last 30 years. The total annual volume of garments produced has doubled since 2000 and surpassed 100 billion for the first time in 2014. Similarly, the volume of garments purchased per capita in that same time frame increased by 60 percent. This continued growth means all of the caustic environmental and inhumane behaviors of this already huge industry are getting bigger and harder to manage.

Sustainability is a hot topic within fashion and beyond. Over the last 5 or so years, fashion companies have begun creating sustainability departments and hiring for sustainability roles to begin to address the wholly unsustainable operations inherent to the typical fashion business model. Sustainability also represents big business. McKinsey and Business of Fashion put sustainability as the biggest opportunity for the global fashion industry in 2023. While this sounds great, ultimately, opportunity is not yet leading to action. Fashion companies are great at marketing sustainability, but unfortunately have made almost no progress relative to the scale or urgency of the issues of the industry, resulting in major greenwashing challenges. Earnest progress in addressing the range of issues of the fashion sector is largely voided by continued fashion industry growth. The unfortunate truth is that talk about fashion sustainability far outpaces action.

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Limits to Progress in the Fashion Industry

One of the major reasons for the lack of progress is that people in the fashion industry are skilled for 1950, not for 2023, and certainly not for an unknown and volatile future. Worse yet, the typical education of someone in the fashion industry is actively contributing to a range of problems. Fashion education overemphasizes the creative genius and hero narrative of the eponymous designer, resulting in a glut of individuals trained in producing goods as a designer, inadvertently contributing to market expansion, overproduction, and leaving other desperately needed industry skills unfulfilled.

Unfortunately, this, too, continues to expand and exacerbate the issues of the sector; between 2007-2017, fashion design undergraduate matriculation tripled at many institutions in the US. This educational model has been exported to other countries developing their own fashion education systems, aggravating the issue. Further, the fashion industry is an exceptionally insular and gatekept space, keeping out participants from other sectors with valuable skills which could Support innovative solutions for the urgent issues at hand. Fashion businesses, mostly based in Europe and the US, are full of people who look the same, think the same, are trained similarly, and are interested in maintaining the status quo. This is not a recipe for dynamic innovation or novel problem-solving.

Given how big, complex, and entrenched the challenges are for the global fashion industry and how limited progress has been to date, it is clear to see that we must be reinventing fashion industry education to Support the skills needed to address the industry of today, creating dynamic and fulfilling careers for individuals and help to manage the worst behaviors present in the industry.

A Complex and Opaque Industry

The global fashion supply and value chain are deeply complex and often opaque. The fashion value chain is operational in every country in the world and engages in a wide range of activities, from raw material extraction on farms to synthetic fiber development at chemical factories, to sewing factories, to warehousing, to many layers of air, land and sea transport, and countless other activities. This complex web of practice required to bring a product to life and get it in the hands of customers is a big reason for the large impact of the fashion industry. Each step within that complex web has its own environmental and human impacts, under the direction of different businesses, located in different geographies, and subject to different governance and oversight. Discovering and unpacking the range of issues in the fashion industry, let alone mitigating the issues, is no small task within that complex web of practice.

Fashion companies and fashion business models are built for old ways of doing business, has remained largely unchanged over the last century, and are unprepared for the present, let alone the future. Margins are plummeting and have been for the last 20+ years, resulting in an industry that has become ‘winner take all’ with almost zero emphases on innovation. The fashion industry is in a catastrophic race to the bottom, chasing low prices without investing in margin-boosting innovations such as sustainability. The fashion industry’s deep commitment to the status quo isn’t just hurting people and the planet; it’s hurting the viability of the fashion industry itself. A focus on sustainability is a win-win-win for a fashion industry seemingly hell-bent on destroying the planet, people, and business value.

The History of Higher Education and Fashion

The fashion industry may like to think of itself as glamorous, but at its core, it has always been essentially a trade. Before fashion education was formalized in the university systems we see today, people learned skills as tailors or seamstresses within apprenticeships. From the early couture houses of Paris to the prototypical garment district of Manhattan’s Lower East Side at the turn of the 20th century, those that sought skills to work in the growing fashion industry did so by working under a skilled needleworker. Few if any entering this system thought of themselves as designers and most expected simply to practice their craft within the Apparel trade which had a growing need for skilled workers.

While Paris began as fashion’s creative center, the US, particularly the East coast, became the primary source for global garment production in the first few decades of the 20th century. At that time, training and education opportunities for fashion-related work in the US were almost exclusively vocational; New York City’s Central Needle Trades High School (now the High School for Fashion Studies) opened in 1926 with the original purpose to provide a trained workforce for the domestic fashion industry followed by the incorporation of the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in the 1940s. FIT was created to ensure the ongoing success of the local fashion trade; following years of dwindling interest in skilled Apparel work and the resulting decline in qualified tradespeople to fill open roles in the industry, industry participants and educators banned together to create the advocacy organization Educational Foundation for the Apparel Industries, ultimately founding FIT in 1944 with the express purpose of supporting the ongoing need for a skilled workforce for the domestic Apparel trade. By 1957, FIT became part of the State University of New York as a community college with the ability to grant Associate’s Degrees, paving the way for the formalization of fashion in higher education.

Some fashion programs with particular emphasis on design also sprung up at the turn of the 20th century, built from art schools aimed at developing the mostly male creative side of the fashion workforce, helping to build the foundation for a uniquely American fashion industry, one not just capable of production but also of creative design. Parsons The New School of Design, known in 1904 as the Chase School, opened the first-ever study program focused exclusively on fashion design, at that time called ‘costume design.’ This, too, became a model of fashion education, centered on the designer’s artistic expression and embodied in programs today like those at Central Saint Martin and London College of Fashion in Europe.

The majority of higher education institutions with fashion or textile programs came from these models, with the former far more common in the US. These models continued to be leveraged through the 1970s and 80s, with many programs iterating on the trade school model to grow from existing home economics programs targeted to women. The range of fashion higher education models built through the 20th century in the US all share a tight relationship with industry and business, often built in direct partnership with local trade advocacy groups or large manufacturing firms. In contrast to other types of higher education, these prototypical fashion programs were not aiming to help students develop tools for free thought, research, or even business management; they were built to Support the industry’s need for a deferential workforce, indoctrinated to the needs of volume domestic production, supportive of industry status quo, and targeted largely at women who frequently had few sanctioned options for both higher education and work.

These programs continue today with trade-centric foundations living on proverbial vestigial tails. Over time and as the US domestic workforce shifted and, in turn, the domestic fashion industry changed, most fashion education programs aligned under the umbrella of ‘fashion design’, producing designers much in the same model as needleworkers were once minted. Fashion design higher education programs sell students the idea of themselves as singular creative visionaries and educate on skills relevant to that pursuit (illustration, draping, styling, for example) while in function funneling them into high volume-oriented production management, left to learn tangible skills (technical sketching, pricing, supply chain management, for example) on the job. This model of fashion education is unaligned to the needs of the current caustic fashion industry operations and fails entirely to consider more progressive, sustainability-focused, future-looking skills for an industry in desperate need of them.

The scale of fashion education grew exponentially in the late 1990s and early 2000s, in some cases tripling matriculation within existing program over that time, as design became accessible to everyday people through stores like Target with their ‘Design for All’ mission and fast fashion companies like H&M growing their US footprint. Shows like Project Runway and America’s Next Top Model added fuel to the fire, introducing what was positioned as a glamorous profession to people who maybe would have never considered fashion or fashion design as a career. These cultural changes resulted in immense growth in matriculation into fashion design programs of all locations and qualities and the development of fashion programs in schools that did not previously offer that degree. This growth simply exacerbated the issues of fashion education, as most programs did not iterate on the curriculum but simply expanded existing ineffective programming and curriculum.

This growth in higher education fashion programming did not Support the skills development necessary for the jobs available nor adjust the curriculum to account for the limited volume of available fashion design jobs in the market. As of 2021, students were spending on average upwards of $35,500 a year for a total of $142,000 over four years, for a fashion design undergraduate degree which under-equips them for roles not readily available which pay at entry on average between $36,000-45,000 a year. At the same time, extremely important and increasingly lucrative skills focused on business management, sustainability, circularity, environmental science, political science or policy, human rights, chemistry, or data science were left wholly unexplored within fashion education and ultimately wholly unsupported in the fashion industry.

As you might imagine, outside of the negative impacts to the industry already mentioned, this monolithic fashion industry education model and workforce pipeline have had other negative impacts on the industry. Almost all of the individuals who work in fashion companies or brands within the US and Europe are educated similarly, have similar skill sets, similar personal backgrounds, leverage similar frameworks, utilize similar approaches to solve problems, and have similar knowledge gaps resulting in a homogenous landscape with real barriers to entry for those outside of the status quo and a complete absence of innovation on any level.

Rethinking Fashion Higher Education

If a sustainable fashion industry is to be possible, we must rethink fashion higher education to better prepare industry participants for the industry of today while imparting dynamic skills to transform it for an inclusive and sustainable future. We need participants less interested in centering themselves and their vision for creating a new product, ignoring the destruction which inevitably occurs in pursuit of that goal, and more interested in looking directly and unflinchingly at the issues perpetuated by the status quo and seeking to creatively innovate processes, management, and models of creating fashion. How do we address chemical impacts without people with expertise in chemistry who are also interested and knowledgeable in the fashion industry? How do we address water stewardship and waste dumping without environmental scientists and geologists also savvy to unique fashion industry issues? How do we develop legislative policy rooted in actual practice if we don’t have lawyers and political scientists who also think their expertise is worth leveraging in the fashion space? How do we develop new and innovative business models rooted in sustainability without participants who understand both sustainability and management?

The unfortunate reality is that sustainability is essentially at step one of what is likely a 1000-step journey for the global fashion industry. No matter what a fashion company may tell you, there is no sustainable brand. There is no sustainable product. We need new skills for this sector. We need environmental scientists. We need researchers. We need policy experts. We need good data stewards. We need sustainability managers and strategists. We need to leverage innovations from other sectors more advanced in their sustainability journey and apply them to the fashion industry.

We don’t need to shop better; we need to hold the industry accountable for the lack of progress, its commitment to the status quo, and its use of greenwashing to keep from being held accountable and hide the lack of actual progress. ‘Voting with our dollar’ is not the path to positive impact for the fashion industry; this, in fact, has the opposite effect, providing resources and attention to fashion companies committed to ‘business-as-usual’ and brands that are unwilling to innovate beyond unsustainable behaviors. Legislation and policy focused on sustainability for the global fashion industry is one of the only ways to disrupt the status quo and meaningful drive change for an industry desperately in need of it.

If we want a more sustainable, just, and positively impactful fashion industry, we should all collectively be shifting our attention to citizen activities including participating in legislative processes and supporting education. Legislative policy, like New York’s Fashion Act, is one of the only ways in which we can drive change effectively, meaningfully, and at the level necessary to meet the scope, scale, and complexity of the issues. Given how few levers are available for change in the complex and caustic global fashion industry, legislative policy and education should be the primary focus of efforts to improve the fashion industry.

Sustainability-focused policy and education for the global fashion industry are both in their infancy, though we see great examples today. New York’s Fashion Act aims to end the race to the bottom for the fashion industry. Legislation needs citizens to be successful, and I encourage anyone looking to learn about policy development or the legislative process to get involved. I am proud to lead Glasgow Caledonian New York College’s master’s degree in Sustainable Fashion, a novel program globally and the only such education model in the Americas. We built our program from the ground up, refusing to simply layer sustainability onto existing design or management education. Our curriculum looks directly at the range of issues of this hugely impactful sector and offers dynamic critical understanding based on both theory and practice. Our aim is to empower a new class of industry changemakers to address the issues of the global fashion industry from the unique vantage point of their interest and expertise. We want our graduates to be dynamically prepared not just for today, but for tomorrow and beyond, in order to apply the principles of sustainability and positive impact to any new and evolving industry issue that may present itself. And we know the industry needs what our students offer; 95 percent of our students work in sustainability or impact within 6 months of graduation, many leading the strategies of the fashion industry’s biggest companies.

Despite the daunting scale of issues for the fashion industry, I know real impact and change are possible and available. It is only for us to pull the right levers. Education and legislative policy are two of the most impactful levers we can engage in driving meaningful change at the scale and urgency needed if we are to stave off the worst of human and environmental destruction. Without those, however, a sustainable fashion industry will remain distantly out of reach.

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