Are Fashion Brands Truly Taking Environmental Responsibility?

Fashion brands know they have to take environmental responsibility seriously. Yet, consumers and reports are noticing that brands tend to opt for eco-consciousness campaigns, instead of employing action in production.
BOF’s The State of Fashion 2020 reports, “Despite some modest progress, fashion hasn’t yet taken its environmental responsibilities seriously enough.” Next year, fashion players need to swap platitudes and promotional noise for meaningful action and regulatory compliance while facing up to consumer demand for transformational change.” The reputable fashion news source of BOF is not alone in recognizing and calling out fashion brands’ inability to create a wave in sustainability.  A recent article from Glossy points out, “Sustainability has become a trend to sell clothes, and that is not what it should be about.”

Instead of exploiting sustainability as a buzz word to attract customers, brands need to make real strides in creating a positive impact on the environment. Taking real, quantifiable action will, in the end, allow brands to win over high priority key accounts. Although, securing consumer trust through successfully creating sustainable measures is not easy. DespiSurvey respondents stated sustainability will be one of fashion’s largest challenges in 2020.

The article “Is Your Fashion Brand Ethical” offers three ostensibly easy steps to achieving sustainability: “explore new business models”, “respect your business partners”, “pay fair”. A new business model inevitably calls for transformation and upheaval of a tried and true model of the past. There is a forewarning in the article that “Brands that want to have a positive social impact may have to sacrifice some sales and profit.”

Although, sacrifices, changes, and risk will not outweigh the reward of gaining consumers’ trust and having a true environmental impact.