To forecast the fashion of the future is a perilous business. Many years ago I road-tested compostable clothes for this newspaper. The corn-starch separates promised much: they potentially allowed us a guilt-free way of consuming fashion at a frenetic pace without the nagging thought of them festering in landfill for eternity. Unfortunately the garments I dutifully wore all day – praying that they would not begin composting while I was on the tube – never caught on. Surprising, that.
But this time, I’m back with bigger, bolder predictions, and for once I have some firepower. On Friday, the parliamentary environmental audit committee, led by Mary Creagh, announced it would investigate the social and environmental impact of disposable “fast fashion”. The aim is to remodel the industry and make it sustainable.
This sort of spotlight makes a difference. Despite a rise in awareness of the social and ecological injustices contained in the consume-and-chuck-it cycle that governs the way we dress, substantive change has been slow. We currently produce 100 billion new pieces of clothing each year, mainly from virgin resources. And, according to a recent report from environmental NGO Stand.Earth the fashion industry is responsible for 8% of global climate pollution.
If the garment business were a nation, it would be the fourth largest climate polluter on Earth. So the committee has quite a task ahead of it. Here are my hopeful suggestions for what your wardrobe might look like in a decade’s time if fashion’s sustainable revolution succeeds.
Our wardrobes are dominated by cotton, a thirsty crop saturated in pesticides, and polyester, which is derived from petroleum. These will be displaced by so-called “wealth from waste” fibres, including “banana sylk” (from the stems of banana plants) and fruit “leathers”, especially from pineapple. The Spanish brand Piñatex has already brought the latter to market; a square metre of pineapple leather uses 480 waste pineapple leaves and is half the cost of traditional cow leather (and, its proponents claim, comes at a fraction of the environmental cost of raising livestock).
