
Lewis Perkins is the interim president of the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute. Photo: Emily Hagopian
Take a poll of sustainable fashion gurus, and you’re likely to hear the same thing in multiple ways: They’re currently a small group, but they’re poised to set a trend. Lewis Perkins, interim president of the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute, a nonprofit that certifies sustainable materials in several industries including fashion, says there was “not much movement at all” around sustainable fashion as recently as a couple of years ago. To the extent that fashion designers did focus on environmental and human rights issues, they largely did so on an individual basis, he says. Now, finally, Perkins is starting to see collaborative efforts across the industry. “It’s never going to move fast enough for those of us that are advocates in the space,” he says, “but the reality is, it’s moving faster than it ever has.”
“Consumers certainly haven’t taken up [sustainable fashion] in the way they’ve taken up organic food,” says Kate Black, author of Magnifeco: Your Head-to-Toe Guide to Ethical Fashion and Non-toxic Beauty. But, she says, a number of companies are making positive changes anyway, both for business reasons and because they anticipate that shoppers will soon begin paying as much attention to how their clothes are made as to how their food is grown. “Everybody is scrambling to change their ways before consumers realize what they’re paying for.”
“I would say [the fashion industry] is a lagger, if I’m completely honest,” says Shannon Whitehead, founder of Factory 45, an online business accelerator for sustainable fashion designers. She bemoans the “fast fashion” culture that promotes cheap and trendy items that might just as likely find their way into a landfill as into a closet after their first wear. But she’s also excited about independent designers like the ones she works with, who take a storytelling approach to their companies, with an emphasis on products that will last. “It’s going to take a very small group of early adopters to really create a movement,” she says. “We have that small group, but we just haven’t gotten to the mainstream yet.”
There are a number of possible explanations for why “sustainable” and “fashion” are only recently being put together in the same sentence. For one, it’s not immediately intuitive to many consumers how large an environmental impact the clothing they wear can have. While the production of clothes requires resource-intensive processes—such as agriculture, manufacturing and shipping—the average person doesn’t think much about how the shirt on his back got there. While it’s readily apparent to most people how gas-guzzling SUVs and inefficient buildings can cause environmental harm, they rarely apply the same level of eco-scrutiny to their socks and underwear. And in some ways, the very notion of fashion—with its focus on trends, newness, variety and constant reinvention—may seem inherently incompatible with the ideals of sustainability.