As the earth faces an inexorable climate emergency, with the resource-guzzling fashion system simply adding fuel to the fire, the industry urgently needs a radical overhaul to transition to a new operating system, first by agreeing on the scale of the changes required to achieve a just fashion system within planetary boundaries, exhorts a new report.
THE REPORT: One-Earth Fashion: 33 Transformation Targets for a Just Fashion System within Planetary Boundaries by Swiss nonprofit Public Eye, charts out the key steps for this critical transition. It calls for prioritising longevity, resource efficiency, and equity across the value chain, envisioning a fairer and more sustainable future.
Some key circular actions for 2025 and beyond:
MATERIAL SHIFT: A bold target: Reduce virgin material usage by 40% by 2030, including a 60% cut in fossil-fuel-based inputs and a 10% reduction in virgin natural resources. Fibre-to-fibre recycling will play a pivotal role, with ambitions to reach 15% of material inputs, complemented by a broader increase to 25% recycled materials overall.
- Assuming an ambitious and steep volume rise of fibre-to-fibre, to reach 15% of total material input by 2030, the total volume of feedstock would still shrink by 28% in the material shift scenario. Only changing the fibres and fabrics and otherwise keeping the fast fashion “business as usual" won’t be enough.
Slow Down Fashion: The main reason for disposal of clothes today is not quality or sizing issues, but emotional: marketing messages. Doubling the actual wear days and lifetimes of clothes is technically feasible. It would enable us to achieve the same use value with half of the material resources.
- The industry must double the lifespan of garments and halve non-recovered clothing waste. Achieving this demands policies that emphasise better product design, repairability, and local reuse systems, ensuring textiles remain in circulation for longer.
Tackling Wasteful Trends: The fast-fashion model, driven by overproduction and fleeting trends, must give way to slow fashion. This shift involves embracing timeless design, prioritising durability, and implementing marketing strategies that promote repair, maintenance, and sustainable consumption. Key legislation will be essential to curb misleading marketing and restrict fast-fashion advertising.
LABOUR AND KNOWLEDGE SHIFT: There are countless codes of conduct, certifications and voluntary standards oriented at minimising harm, preventing what are deemed “inhumane conditions”:
- a workplace should not kill workers or harm their health;
- a standard working week should not exceed 48 or 60 hours with overtime;
- wages should be sufficient to survive;
- and discrimination and violence should be absent.
But decent (or humane, good, fair) work is much more than the absence of harm and human rights violations. On the other side of the coin, there is a positive perspective to work, asking how labour could be such that it also contributes to personal and societal wellbeing, dignity and satisfaction.
- A just fashion industry within planetary boundaries depends on holistic solutions. For this to happen, it’s crucial to extend perspectives and responsibilities and foster exchange and collaboration between roles that today are often kept apart from each other, and to actively engage the existing workforce, explicitly including those working in precarious settings and from more vulnerable groups, making them subjects rather than objects of change. This means giving them social and job security, as well as the power to co-determine transformation strategies.
SHIFTING VALUE DISTRIBUTION: Reducing the excessive economic inequalities within the industry is a transformation goal in itself, and is an enabling factor for goals addressing social shortfall as well as excessive resource stress at the rich end of the societal divide. At the same time, it’s also a practical necessity for financing the investments in transformation needed at company, personal and state level.
Redistribution of value needs to target at least three connected layers of economic inequality: The value distribution
- along the value chain;
- within companies and economies;
- within the labour force
For a more equitable fashion system, the main patterns of value redistribution should be:
- more value kept in manufacturing and other labour-intensive parts of the value chain;
- a shrinking value share of big brands and retailers; and
- more value kept in raw material production, especially in sustainable agriculture.
A just transformation of the fashion system will reduce the level of wage injustice across its value chains to a certain extent, but it can’t overcome the underlying patterns of inequality that are enshrined across all economic sectors. However, it should at least alter the perception of normality and immutability of extreme income inequalities, help develop a vision for global wage justice, and pursue this objective through collective bargaining, political campaigning and regulation.
POWER SHIFT: REGULATE, DEMOCRATISE AND RESET OWNERSHIP IN THE FASHION SYSTEM: Instead of relying solely on the spirit of consumer resistance for a better fashion system, we should change the direction of these winds. First, by strengthening the regulatory framework around the industry. The current shortcomings in the industry’s operating system are systemic and will not be fixed by voluntary initiatives or business self-regulation.
- Lawmakers and governments have the responsibility and the tools to set industry on a path of transformation. This includes not only setting and enforcing labour laws and other rules and standards to prevent harm, but also incentivizing transformation and better practices.
But political regulation is not the only lever. A power shift in fashion can be advanced on at least in three other levels:
- by fostering more participatory and democratic decision-making within the industry, for example through trade union organising and collective bargaining;
- by rebalancing unequal ownership structures and business purpose;
- and by empowering ourselves and others to act more consciously, to change behavioural patterns, and to become actors in transformation.
Workers, citizens and consumers can act individually, but when they organise in unions and other associations, their transformative power is amplified
THE TEAM: Authors David Hachfeld, Elisabeth Schenk; Editor John Durham; Publisher Romeo Regenass; Illustrations and graphics Roland Ryser; Layout Karin Hutter
ABOUT: Public Eye (formerly the Berne Declaration), a non-profit, independent Swiss organisation with around 28 000 members, has been campaigning for more equitable relations between Switzerland and underprivileged countries for more than fifty years. Among its most important concerns are the global safeguarding of human rights, the socially and ecologically responsible conduct of business enterprises and the promotion of fair economic relations.
