Forever 21 recently announced bankruptcy and the closure of its roughly 350 stores, leading to an outpouring of heartfelt nostalgia on social media. Millennials fondly remembered impulse-buying “But First Coffee” sweatshirts, ignoring the controversies — knockoffs, allegations of sweatshop labor — that defined the brand as much as its $7 going-out tops.
Forever 21 brought fast fashion and its shoddy manufacturing practices into the mainstream. Their methods were only perfected by competitors like Zara and H&M, which were in turn turbo-charged by ultra-fast fashion brands Shein and Temu. In a court filing, Forever 21 blamed Shein and Temu for its demise.
When Forever 21 was newly a Thing in the aughts, sustainable fashion wasn’t nearly as big of a concern for consumers and brands as it is today, when 72 percent of Gen Z say sustainability is an important factor in purchasing decisions. Of course, the environmental damage fashion is doing to the planet has only gotten worse over the last 20 years, with mountains of fast fashion waste piling up on the shores of Ghana.
So how to explain the unstoppable rise of Shein and Temu? I wrote about this in a recent guest essay for the New York Times (emphasis mine):
It’s not that people don’t want to be ethical consumers. It’s just that sustainability in fashion is not something most people can afford if they still want to dress in the latest style.
“Unfortunately, I think it’s pretty compelling to buy a $7 pair of jeans if you’re not rich,” Ken Pucker, professor of practice at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and the former chief operating officer of Timberland, told me last year. “To a consumer, there’s no real functional benefit of sustainable fashion. Just perhaps a psychic benefit that they’re helping the planet.”
In the absence of regulation, the onus is on consumers to shop sustainably. And many shoppers have been trained to get their dopamine hit of a new ’fit for far less than anything that, say, the upmarket upcycled brand Bode can offer.
When this newsletter was a tadpole, the lie of sustainable fashion was one of the first topics I covered. High-end designers were talking up the eco-friendly bona fides of their collections, which would be regurgitated by reviewers in friendly outlets like Vogue (regarding one Balenciaga collection: “the leather bomber in look 44 was made of a vegan alternative derived from cactus leaves”). Brands could do this because there were not then — as there still aren’t today — rigid rules in place to stop them. If a brand wants to call their shoes “sustainable” or their bikinis “eco-friendly,” they can do so for the sake of marketing pretty much using their own understanding of those terms — a practice known as green-washing.
The Fashion Act is one such bill that would define “sustainable” fashion and rein in some of these claims in addition to requiring many apparel companies to keep carbon emissions to a certain level and to make certain disclosures about their supply chains. This would likely lead to many companies cleaning up their acts instead of making potentially embarrassing, brand-damaging revelations. However, it unfortunately hasn’t passed in New York.
Sorting through these green-washed claims is, for shoppers, a nightmare. Brands seem to decide what they think sounds appealingly sustainable, and then produce accordingly. For instance, how many times, have you been shopping and noticed that a clothing item is made from recycled plastic bottles? Everlane’s $95 “ReNew” backpack is made “using 100% recycled polyester from recycled plastic bottles.” Nike’s $180 Space Hippie sneakers were made from “Space Waste Yarn” including “about 85% recycled polyester – made from recycled plastic bottles, t-shirts and yarn scraps.” And Stella McCartney says “[s]ince 2012, all of our handbags [easily $1,200 if not more] have been lined using fabric made from recycled water bottles.” Sounds good, right?
Well, maybe not.
The most common type of plastic bottle is made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which can be recycled up to 10 times in a closed-loop system. When they exit that system to become clothing, their path to the landfill tends to accelerate, particularly since so much of our clothing is of the fast or ultra-fast sort that people wear a few times and then throw away. But it’s unreasonable to expect the average shopper to know that.
Edited, which tracks retail sales data, reported in 2021 that the word “sustainability” had increased in retailers’ customer emails by 84 percent since 2019. In its more recent sustainability analysis, Edited indicates that this green-washing is only getting worse:
Products described using sustainable keywords equal 34% of ranges, up from 28% in 2023. 82% of these materials are related to fabric choices, with the majority containing recycled polyester.
Shein, which has been trying to go public in London after efforts to do so in the U.S. were thwarted, is spending some of its $38 billion annual revenue on an apparent greenwashing campaign that includes buying sponsored content in mainstream publications like Elle that unsurprisingly tout products creating using “recycled fibers — made from fabrics scraps or discarded plastics.”
However, as I wrote in the Times, luxury brands have a much easier time convincing consumers that their stuff is sustainable since they produce less and market their items as long-lasting investments. And sure, if you buy something from The Row you may be less likely to throw it away than to try and sell it, which would keep that item in circulation instead going to a landfill.
However, waxing poetic about recycled fabric tells consumers nothing about other things they might want to know if they had the time to really research in effort to ascertain which clothes were less bad for the environment than others. For instance, brands tend not to talk about their carbon emissions, which actually cause global warming. Maybe because it’s harder to tell a seductive story backstage at a runway show around an intangible gaseous byproduct than a fabric people can see and touch. Brands also don’t tend to market around what they do with their unsold merchandise. The tendency has been to destroy it rather than flood the market with goods they’d have to discount. However, excess inventory is still a huge problem, according to the Edited report:
Fast fashion stock is +43% vs. 2022, but overproduction isn’t just a fast fashion issue. Luxury products are +12%, with conglomerates reporting unsold billions, emphasizing the need for retail intelligence for all businesses to optimize assortments and minimize environmental and financial risks.
You may recall Coach going viral in 2022 for apparently slashing unsold merchandise and trashing it, or Burberry generating outrage for incinerating its unsold stuff (the brand then said it would stop doing this).
Plus, generally speaking, fashion isn’t truly sustainable given the industry takes resources from the planet to create clothing and doesn’t replenish them — it’s not planting trees.
All that helps explain the disconnect between a desire to shop “sustainably” and the reality that so many consumers are not doing that. Brands have been allowed to confuse the issue for shoppers, many of whom understandably have no choice but to reach for the most affordable thing over whatever seems to be the most “sustainable” one.
If you want to be a sustainable fashion consumer, what I’ve learned from experts over many years of writing about this issue as a journalist is that the best way to do this is simply to buy clothes you’ll wear a lot before you part with them.
Loose Threads
Everyone’s been talking about Meghan Markle’s Jenni Kayne sweater — but apparently her stealth wealth chairs (“Montecito dining arm chairs,” to be precise) were Jenni Kayne, too.
H&M announced last week that it would use AI “twins” of 30 models in marketing imagery and social media posts with the models’ consent. Labor advocates, however, aren’t so sure about this. Model Alliance founder Sara Ziff told the Guardian, “There are a lot of open questions, and one of them is about compensation. What does fair compensation for a digital twin look like?”
I loved reading in Allure on the discourse surrounding Aimee Lou Wood and Charlotte Le Bon’s teeth in White Lotus (they play Chelsea and Chloe, respectively): “I think fawning over a rejection of perfection is misplaced. Complimenting Wood and Le Bon solely for an imperfection many people can’t afford to fix is like telling a cash-strapped friend without the money for a car how well-toned she looks because she has to walk 10 miles to work.”
For all your denim trench dress needs? Gap is launching a “Studio” collection under creative director Zac Posen on April 3 that promises “atelier craftsmanship at an under-$300 price point.” Per InStyle: “Posen says he was hired as a sort of ‘Willy Wonka’ for the company—someone to push creativity from within, spearheading innovation and experimenting with what it means to wear Gap.”
Earlier in Back Row
