a stitch in time
I’ve never watched the Great British Sewing Bee. Furthermore, I’ll never watch the Great British Sewing Bee. To anyone who knows me, or has seen me out and about, this will come as no great surprise. However, as it transpires I do have something in common with one of its presenters, Patrick Grant, whom I listened to being interviewed over the weekend: both our wardrobes are chock-full of used, second-hand, hand-me-down togs, most of them decades old.
In his recently-published fashion expose, Less is More, Mr Grant, highlights that today the average person has nearly five times as many clothes as they did just fifty years ago. That last year, 100 billion garments were produced worldwide, most of them made from oil, 30% of which were not even sold. That the equivalent of one bin lorry full of clothing is dumped in landfill or burned every single second. That our wardrobes are full to bursting with clothes we never wear but still we keep buying more and more. That we are disposing them ever more quickly.
Last year, the luxury fashion house, Burberry, burnt unsold clothes and other goods to the tune of #28.6m. Apparently, there is nothing particularly unusual about this and they’ve disposed of #90m’s worth in the past five years. The company’s spurious defence is that if they hadn’t been burnt they would have been sold cheaply on the ‘grey market’ (not quite a ‘black’ one), thereby undermining its prestigious cachet. Unsurprisingly, Burberry are not alone and almost every fashion brand, from Nike to H&M, stands accused in the dock.
Back in the day even I used to care about clothes. Me and my pals didn’t have many but those we had were important to us and we’d invariably cherish them, repair them (ok, get them repaired) and pass them on. I still darn my socks. No, really. British clothes today are largely made in Asia and China and the focus is upon low cost and speed-to-market, the so-called fast fashion spiral. Clothing is the eighth largest sector in terms of household spending, but the fourth largest in terms of environmental impact and the UK has a footprint equivalent to 26 million tonnes of CO2. Some eight billion cubic metres of water were used to make our clothes. A single pair of 501s can take up to 20,000 litres of water to produce and 20% of industrial water pollution is attributable to the dyeing and treatment of textiles. Not good.
The current ‘take-make-ditch’ system is clearly unsustainable but precious little appears to being done: less than 1% of clothing material is recycled into new clothing; 13% is recycled into insulation; 73% is landfilled or incinerated. Since the 1980s, our cast-offs have flooded into African nations, where huge bales of clothes are exported via wholesalers and sold in massive quantities. Known locally as ‘obroni wawu’ this translates as dead white men’s clothes.
With only 12.5% of the global fashion market signing-up (the most stylish virtue-signalling you’ll ever witness?) to a more circular fashion system it would appear the only way to help alleviate the waste is let the powers of supply and demand have sway. If, as a consumer, you want to help, there’s a simple solution: don’t be such a dedicated follower of fashion, keep your clothing in use for longer and buy less new stuff.
