Threads of Tomorrow: Crafting the Narrative of Fashion's Future in Sustainability

We are all certainly aware of the environmental crisis we are facing in the past few years. We are now feeling the impact of global warming and climate change that has impacted our lives. And this had just made us realize the severity of the environmental issue, something we had not really taken into account for, for all these years. The risk of coming to an end of abundance in natural resources has made us people from various expertise come together to stop the harm we’re doing and certainly think of solutions to protect and conserve Earth. People are now more environmentally conscious and this has become a big game changer in the decision making process not only in the present time, but also in the future. 

Talking about the future of fashion is definitely sustainability. Why so? As consumers are more aware of environmental issues, environmental implications are surely going to impact considerations in buying behavior. Obviously fashion brands also need to adhere to it, by being responsible not only to the people but also to the planet. 

The fashion industry is one of the top industries in the world to take into account the harm we did to the planet. From greenhouse gas emissions, fossil fuels, chemical dyes, wastes and so many other factors. 

Our industry itself is responsible for 10% of greenhouse gas emission in the whole world (Adeogun, J.). If you don’t know, greenhouse gas emissions are the gasses in the Earth’s atmosphere to trap heat which leads to temperature rising (global warming). This happens because of the rise in overproduction of garments by ‘fast fashions’ companies to satisfy consumer’s demand. 

Other than that, production processes in the industry also used up a tremendous amount of water. The statistics show a shocking result of 215 trillion liters of water used up mostly for cotton production in China, India, Turkey and many other countries, which leads to these countries suffering under high water stress. An example of an unknown fact for most of us is that a cotton T-shirt needs 3,000 liters of water to produce. 

The question next is how are we gonna tackle this issue?

The future of fashion will see a lot of these sustainable innovation practices. In this new era, designers need to prioritize the environmental aspect and considerations of creating a sustainable garment that will not harm the earth and also bring good to the people.  The future of fashion is going to see sustainable solutions for example waste regenerations to tackle present waste issues in the industry.  Besides that, we will see a lot of collaboration across interdisciplinaries for example fashion with biology or fashion with technology and more. Through this, fashion can innovate beyond fashion. With the help of science or technology, we may find more solutions to the problems and perhaps see new innovations of new materials for sustainable textile development. Other ways are through production making, perhaps from design techniques we can implement techniques like “zero-waste cutting” or “upcycling”. 

We will discuss this issue in the next blog post and I will explain more about it. Meanwhile, give it a thinker, about what other sustainable practices the industry can implement to help on the environmental issue? How can we as consumers help to support this new change? See you next time!