Luxury Fashion Must Change Their Sustainability Tactics
By: Patrice Louvet
The conversation around sustainability in luxury fashion is nothing new; fashion houses and major brands have all subscribed to promoting ethical practices in their clothing, providing sustainability reports online, and overly promoting what they do each season to market carbon neutrality through fashion. However, greenwashing continues to be an ever-present issue, making customers wonder who is telling the truth.
Sustainable fashion focuses on environmentally and socially responsible practices throughout the clothing industry, including materials, production, distribution, and consumption. Although significant fashion brands promote their sustainability by using deadstock materials or creating sustainable fabrics from recycled plastic bottles and additional waste, they are not looking at the big picture (Esponnette, 2023). Brands fail to identify why those fabrics were mass-produced and cast aside or why creating new materials out of recycled products could cause manufacturing issues if the brand is unfamiliar with this process. This can create more waste with lower-quality products that consumers are unsatisfied with.
Luxury fashion houses are the pinnacle of the fashion industry, setting the standard for trends, customer expectations, and loyalty to the industry overall. What a significant house chooses to implement in its production practices impacts the entire fashion community since non-luxury brands pull inspiration from these fashion gods. It’s time for luxury brands to instigate change in what sustainability means for the fashion community moving forward.
Fashion revolved around creativity and thinking outside the box. Now, fashion houses have to be creative with sustainability practices. There is no need to continue mass-producing fabrics that are not used or creating recycled fabrics that fail in the long run. 84% of donated clothes are in landfills or burned in polluting incinerators (Frerichs, 2021). The seven million tons of textile waste in American landfills should be a wake-up call for fashion designers to think differently and prevent this copious waste.
After seeing the numbers, I knew Ralph Lauren needed to be the instigator of change to meet the negatively spiraling climate change. As an iconic American brand, we knew we needed to take action by showing how we would be different in our sustainable actions.
Our new initiative to use materials and fabrics that would have ended up in a landfill and give them a new life is seen through our Birds of a Feather capsule collection, which was created in collaboration with American singer-songwriter Billie Eilish. Billie’s advocacy for sustainability in her professional career and personal life made her the perfect person to work with for our new approach to sustainability. The collection will include cargo shorts, thermal long-sleeve shirts, a corduroy flat cap, three t-shirts designed by Eilish, and accessories. All items are meant to last a lifetime and showcase our new approach to sustainability.
Using American materials that would have caused more environmental damage in the capsule collection allows us to do our part to better the planet and fashion industry. We may be the first “Birds of a Feather” for this type of sustainability, but I hope we will not be the last.