The key pieces of fashion at the moment? Clothes you'll still want to wear (or sell) in five years | Jess CartnerMorley

I guess in theory, sustainable fashion shouldn't have just one look. After all, the point of prioritizing ethics over aesthetics is surely that designing clothes shouldn't just be about how they look, but about how they're made: the raw materials used , the industrial processes undergone, the people employed, the carbon footprint. transport. But in reality, it has a look. You can't take aesthetics out of fashion. Sustainable fashion also has style rules. Just different.

Part of it is just practicality. Sequins, being mainly made from non-biodegradable fabrics, are prohibited for environmental reasons. If you liven up a T-shirt with decorative zippers or decorate it with beads or glued trims, you make it much more difficult to recycle or reuse the fabric in a useful way. Therefore, a simplified design is preferred. Textile dyeing is one of the most water-intensive parts of the garment production cycle, so bright colors can be a red flag.

A lot of luggage was superimposed on our idea of ​​what sustainable fashion looks like: rough, coarse fabrics that seem more shabby, less industrial, than shiny, whether they are or not; bamboo, birds, waves and other prints and patterns that celebrate nature; loose silhouettes, to avoid semaphorizing personal vanity; raw edges and textures to forgo problematic levels of bling.

But that's changing. With circularity now a cornerstone of consumer sustainability strategies, consumers and brands are looking at clothing in a new light. Circularity draws attention to the longevity of a garment's appeal and its value in the future resale market. This is a sea change for the value system of an industry that has always loved new clothes, preferably with labels and wrapped in fabric, and which has tended to dismiss as irrelevant to the conversation on fashion all clothes that have already been worn. .

A 10-year program for industrial change, to which the government has pledged £80m funding, focuses on "creating a circular fashion ecosystem leading brand in the UK", according to the British Fashion Council (BFC). When the scheme was announced by Downing Street, Stephanie Phair, Chair of the BFC, presented a vision of "a city like Leeds, which has a rich history in manufacturing and textiles, retaining its role as a key part of fashion and the textile industry, and an example of a circular city with reprocessing plants and main streets energized with take-back schemes.”

Meanwhile, Love Island set the tone for a resale-fueled summer with sponsored eBay as outfit supplier for the series, and Dr Martens teamed up with fashion app Depop to provide a sales platform refurbished shoes. With the resale market growing 11 times faster than traditional retail, according to a global report by Thredup, brands such as Valentino and Gucci are looking to partner with customers who have pieces from the previous season. into their wardrobe through validated buy-back programs.< /p>

Circularity is far from a silver bullet to the fashion industry's environmental problems; rental companies have been criticized for the impact of transport and cleaning involved when a dress is transported from one wearer to another every few days. But the most fundamental problem with circularity, from a sustainability perspective, is both its greatest flaw and its greatest asset: that circularity does not attempt to prevent fashion consumers from making their purchases. Faced with the scale of the climate emergency, many activists believe that any policy that panders to our desire to shop is fueling the problem. But others argue that by offering a scratch at the itch to buy, circularity offers a roadmap that consumers and brands...