September’s London Fashion Week leaned into circularity this year, featuring its first scheduled show exclusively for pre-owned clothing.
This budding interest among designers in circularity shows how some in the industry are pushing back against the drift towards greater waste, plastic use, and disposability, practices that have pushed the apparel industry into the ranks of the biggest global carbon emitters.
Circular fashion shows off no-waste looks
London Fashion Week’s first-ever circular fashion event was a catwalk tie-up with eBay and the British Fashion Council. Named the Endless Runway, it aimed to challenge the linear mode of clothing production that encourages light wear and quick disposal.
By showcasing how coherent looks can be conjured up from disparate styles and decades, the point of the show was that circular dressing needn’t be drab or utilitarian. The outfits drew on archival pieces from major UK designers from the last four decades including Christopher Kane, J.W. Anderson, and Simone Rocha.
The same show also ran at New York Fashion Week earlier in September, where curator-stylist Wisdom Kay based runway looks loosely on classic American style, drawing on items from Ralph Lauren and Tom Ford.
Oxfam was behind the other circular fashion runway show at London Fashion Week this year, called Style for Change. The charity organised the event in partnership with secondhand resale app Vinted, with the looks styled by Bay Garnett. Oxfam is selling every outfit shown on the catwalk via its shop on Vinted through the entire month of September.
Biobased fashion
As well as circular catwalk pieces, London Fashion Week also shared biobased creations from Patrick McDowell, the biggest name in sustainable fashion to show at the event.
McDowell’s runway collection, shown at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, was inspired by the life of queer British artist Glyn Philpott and contained faux mycelium leather, petrochemical-free dyes, and mostly deadstock fabric.
McDowell graduated from Central St Martins just 5 years ago but is already gaining a global reputation as marking the cutting edge of biobased and sustainable fashion design. His brand is already so big that it has spilled over into the world of industrial biomaterials: he was named the first global design ambassador for mycelium company Ecovative last year.
Change needed across the industry
The inclusion of circular clothing in this year’s London Fashion Week reflects how growing numbers of designers grappling with the gnawing question at the heart of fashion today. How can the pursuit of style be reconciled with ecological concerns?
Apparel is a multi-billion dollar globalised industry with hefty material demands – from thirsty cotton crops to petroleum polyester – making it a massive contributor to climate change and environmental degradation.
Clothing consumption has also crept up dramatically: the world uses 400 percent more pieces of clothing from two decades ago. Part of the rise is down to the rise of fast fashion – the end point of an industry obsessed with cost-cutting.The phenomenon refers to cheaply produced garments churned out from the global south mainly for consumers in advanced economies, hooked up to the micro-cycles of to-the-minute social media style trends.
High fashion may appear worlds away from the throwaway culture of cheap major online retailers. Indeed, many luxury houses pride themselves on crafting their wares in-house and in the countries where the brand was established.
However, high fashion has its own culture of inflicting environmental damage. A report by the Changing Markets Foundation released at the end of London Fashion Week revealed that while low to mid-end retailers Shein and Zara are the biggest users of synthetic material, luxury retailers like Kering and LVMH score poorly on this measure, as well as their lack of microplastics policies.
Despite rising interest in rental couture and biobased collections among the higher-end luxury houses, it is still an embedded part of its culture to refresh wardrobes each season with new garments and styles.
The influence of the catwalk extends beyond high fashion and can also have an impact on the broader industry. The styles on show at London Fashion Week and other international catwalk events are designed to showcase how reusing materials and clothing items does not mean abandoning individuality in style. Designers can use the spotlight to inspire alternative patterns of consumption, as the Oxfam and eBay runways aimed to.
In theory, circular fashion that maintains a focus on aesthetics should not be too difficult. As much as 40% of the clothes made each year are not sold. Whether it is by rescuing items whole or repurposing used fabric in new designs, using materials that already exist in the supply chain should not limit the possibilities of creative expression and consumer choice in fashion.
Gen Z aesthetics support circularity
Even away from the fashion catwalks, secondhand finds are essential in building the emerging looks favoured by style-conscious citizens in the fashion centres of the world.
Fashion critics have been slow to put a name to the trend but creatives and Gen Z buyers are favouring mismatched textures, aesthetics, patterns, colours and shapes, creating self-consciously clashing combinations.
The ‘ugly’ clothing trend of 2024 appears to be a rebellion against the sleek aesthetics that dominate high fashion. It also flows naturally from the popularity of circular shopping among younger buyers – wardrobes are built up through intermittent raids on secondhand outlets like eBay or Depop. However, this street style aesthetic is also supporting the upswell in circular practices among the upper echelons of the fashion industry.
Ecosystems of circularity
The global stock of fabrics may be growing and some consumers at least want more sustainability in their apparel. But what needs to happen for the global pool of fashion feedstock to get turned into desirable pieces that consumers want and can afford?
One way is to drive up demand for circular fashion and make second-hand dressing more accessible to the ordinary consumer.
First, people are more likely to opt for used clothing if they have the know-how to adjust and customise outfits, whether they need some TLC or have to be brought down a size. Before the early 20th century, most clothing was repaired, mended, tailored or recycled within the home as rags or quilts. The spread of repair cafes could help re-seed the practical knowledge needed to make secondhand outfits ready-to-wear.
Second, there should be large-scale, easily accessible collection services that pick up people’s used clothing and get it to where demand is highest, including to designers looking for material. Rental models are also a way to match buyers with sellers: subscription clothing services, clothing rentals, or peer-to-peer sharing, some of the ways that the Ellen Macarthur Foundation recommends fixing today’s disposable clothing cultures.
A standardised measure of clothing durability would also help consumers decide what price they are willing to pay for a product guaranteed to last.
Fairness and sustainability are inextricable
Catwalk organisers and designers can put a spotlight on material innovations with lower environmental impacts. They model alternative cultures of consumption where buyers and makers attend to the social and environmental impacts of the supply chains they use while still leaving room for sartorial creativity.
Yet to be most effective in reducing the environmental impact of clothing, this trend-setting work has to happen simultaneously with reforms to the global governance of fashion supply chains.
Most fashion worn in the economic and cultural capitals of New York, London, and Milan were made in developing countries like China, India, Cambodia, and Vietnam. This geographical and social divide in the value chain makes fashion a striking example of how environmental degradation and social inequity go hand-in-hand.
Intense market pressures on global apparel companies to minimise production costs is what draws them to regions offering cheap labour. This market pressure is also what drives companies to regions with looser environmental regulations as well as to use scaled and cheap petrochemical fibres and chemicals in their products.
Cheap labour and cheap nature is the fundamental formula for success in the apparel industry today, resulting in a sector notorious for its neglect of social and environmental responsibilities.
Self-regulation and voluntary commitments on this front have not worked. To fix the sustainability problem in fashion, global governance structures would somehow have to short circuit the inherent drive towards cheap labour and material by forcing industry to devise new business models oriented around durability, environmental sustainability, and social equity – metrics that are alien to current supply chains.
Multi-regional governance over intricate apparel supply chains would be complex and politically onerous. Yet without a shift in governance, innovative materials and circularity practices being explored by designers and consumers will remain confined to a tiny corner of the global market while the industry’s environmental footprint grows ever larger.
