Journey from Sustainable to Unsustainable to Sustainable clothing
When I see our lifestyle today, a sense of nostalgia just peeps in to remember my grandparents, especially my grandfather who used to have 2 sets of shirt and pants and another 2 sets of Kurta Pyjama (Indian Night suit). I remember me asking him “Why he just had so less clothing in his wardrobe?” His answer was very clear “It’s a Need and cannot be a desire”. Whatever he had in his closet was there for a purpose or need and of course had a longer life. He was proud of all his clothing which served a purpose whether for office or an occasion or for home. I still ask this question “What is the purpose of clothing?”.
Being from a fashion design background now I believe that the most obvious function of clothing is to protect the wearer from the elements. In hot weather, clothing provides protection from sunburn or wind damage. In the cold, it offers thermal insulation. It is not certain when people first started wearing clothes, however, anthropologists estimate that it was somewhere between 100,000 and 500,000 years ago. It is believed that the first clothes were made from natural elements: animal skin, fur, grass, leaves, bone, and shells. Which to me seems very sustainable and in alliance with nature. While Hindu religious texts state that clothing has always been an integral part of all civilisations, I wonder what happened during the journey of clothing which led to massive damage to the mother earth.
Fashion or clothing or textile industry with its allied industries are the second largest contributors of pollution on this planet. In all the processes involved in creating a piece of cloth today, the role of manmade inventions is to be blamed in bringing the damage to our planet. The apparatus, chemicals and processes involve heavy usage of earth’s resources and also discharge pollutants and waste in back into the earth’s atmosphere in one or the other form. The clothing industry’s functioning is majorly affected by consumer behaviour and also the retailer’s / brand’s desire to offer more and more without realising the effects of their desires on the nature. The largest Industrial Revolution change on the clothing industry was that people became more fashion conscious and began purchasing clothing for style, rather than necessity. Before the revolution, people crafted their own clothes and had just enough to get by. Since the Industrial Revolution and today, even people of average means have a number of outfits for different occasions, and continue to buy clothes simply because of their tastes. The biggest problem now arising due to this is also the landfills of clothes and fabrics.
The question is can we really go back to old habits and ways to be able to return to the “Natural environment”? I feel that we can try and repair but cannot bring back the configuration of earth’s atmosphere which probably existed even 100 years ago. COVID-19 times have been really an eyeopener for human race as we saw nature healing itself while 90% of the humans were in lockdown. It was amazing to see how nature heals itself when humans behave in controlled environment with industries, markets and everything was closed and shut for 4–6 months. What happens now is interesting to see. Post-pandemic fashion and clothing world is now talking about apparatus, industry, processes, technology to move faster in direction of sustainability. Brands, fashion houses, retailers, new start-ups, apparel manufacturers are realising the importance of the sustainability. Everyone is talking about Re-think, Re-purpose, Re-design, Re-cycle, Re-Use, Rent, Repair, Reduce. New technologies being built to act as apparatus to create sustainable future. But are these technologies themselves being created with sustainable materials? Well that’s what true circular approach would be. Well now we have a new term called “Circular fashion” considering all 9 Rs listed above.
While we have been creating new terminologies, have we really done anything on the ground to ensure to contribute to nature as an organisations, industries, brands, retailers, individual consumers? Well the answer is yes and no both. Yes because with increasing awareness of the issue, individuals/ consumers have now started to question the Brand’s purpose and how they are procuring the products, but at the same time as a consumer we are really not looking at other elements which contribute to pollution. We are still buying as per our tastes and accumulating clothes for the fashion and not for the Need which will eventually end in the landfills. We are driven by desires and not needs.
I firmly believe that we need to leave desires to be able to understand true meaning of all things we do on this planet. While I say this, I also believe that if we move few steps in the right direction, the nature will also support our efforts. We just need to believe in the superpower of this God’s beautiful creation “EARTH”.
