Bizcuits | Circular is the new black

Leanda Lee

This was the year Sands launched its first fashion week showcasing international fashion brands and local designers across luxury and lifestyle wear. Red carpet glitz, an exclusive gala dinner for the who’s who of the surrounding regions’ fashionista elite lent the proper pizzazz. There were plenty of opportunities too for Macau’s mass visitors to share in the glittering spectacle – good news for fashion sales.

Designer fashion is no longer limited to a knowledgeable and well-healed class thanks to mass production and distribution of textiles globally.  Clothing is not just about comfort and protection but is inextricably part of the persona we project; we all now have access to fashionable ready-to-wear pieces at prices so low they are considered disposable.

This week, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation released a solemn reminder of the excesses of fashion in its 150-page report redesigning this epitome of design, the fashion industry. Fast Fashion is problematic for the tremendous negative externalities. The report presents a systemic industry approach to phasing out inputs of concern, increase clothing utilisation, design recyclability as well as functionality into the product, and to move away from non-renewable resources.

Fashion and clothing are not synonymous. I wear clothing, my daughter prefers to wear fashion. I have managed to maintain some beautiful and iconic pieces through two or three cycles of fashion popularity: the original 1970s Ugg boot, baby-doll shortie pyjamas, a flared jumpsuit and a traditional kilt imported in the 80s. I value vintage: a patch-work quilt, each patch reminiscent of dresses, aprons, smocks, uniforms, PJs, dressing-gowns and tunics made and worn from the 60s onwards; pieces embroidered by ladies of the family from the early 1920s; and even a 1978 pair of high-school socks which are still being worn to school by a younger family member this very day – no holes, no darning. Classic men’s 1980s jeans, with the worn-through (not manufactured) hole at the knee have been handed down to the next fashionable male body in line in the house. Now, that’s decidedly s.l.o.w. fashion for you: Quality must have been different then, but so was the price and our mindset.

A few decades back, it was common for clothes to be made at home, these skills being passed on and taught in schools before it became an outmoded applied study.  We would maintain garments – darning, patching and mending. Clothes were used differently – new would be worn for going out, older clothes worn casually, worn-out gear was for grubby work, and then cut down into rags or destined for the scrap bag, rag-rugs, tomato ties, or onto the compost heap (all-natural fibres).

Now, at worst we bin clothes we no longer like or that become unfashionable. At best, we donate them to second-hand shops or hand them on for others to use. Where the industry was once localized and cyclical, it is now linear. “A New Textiles’ Economy” report outlines the waste we perpetuate: non-renewable resources extracted for clothes used for a short time then mostly sent to landfill or incinerated. The Foundation states that more than USD500 billion is lost due to underutilisation and lack of recycling. They report a litany of negative externalities of Fast Fashion: total greenhouse gas emissions from textiles production are more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined – 1.2 billion tonnes per year; oil-based synthetic fibres release plastic microfibres through washing – 500 thousand tonnes a year leach into oceans, worse than microbeads from cosmetics.

The Foundation’s vision is to make production cleaner, products more valuable and to close the loop so that resources no longer end up as a waste management problem. We have done it before. It is now time for fashionistas and the clothing textile industry to do it on a global and industry-wide scale.

Leanda Lee