Hello stranger, I’m back! Seven months have flown by and in that time I’ve graduated from university, moved to a new city with my partner, rediscovered my love of reading (if anybody wants to start a sustainable fashion reading club, hit me up) and generally found my feet in this new chapter of life. Speaking of chapters, NWIS is embarking on a slightly redirected journey which you can read all about below.
FYI Not What It Seams is a free, monthly newsletter that unpicks the latest in fashion and sustainability. If you enjoy this post, please feel free to share it. Or you could very kindly gift me a virtual cuppa - it really makes my day and helps keep this newsletter running! 💌
Sustainability is one of those words that slips off the tongue with ease but lacks in substance. Every mention somehow adds to its vagueness, each misappropriation cheapens its meaning.
Sustainability is a word parroted by governments, abused by fashion brands and scrutinised by the likes of you and me. Without a universal industry definition, sustainability is in the mouth of the beholder - which is a serious issue when that mouth belongs to a notoriously unethical brand trying to entice you with its latest “eco-friendly” offerings.
According to these fashion brands, sustainability could mean any number of things: too little too late goals to use only recycled materials within the next 5 years; organic cotton t-shirts that contain only a fraction of organic fibres; vegan leather which is really just plastic; or suspiciously cheap “responsible” collections that were likely produced in sweatshop conditions. These small-scale initiatives flirt with the idea of sustainability but hardly make a dent in the industry’s environmental and socio-economic footprint. Really, they’re tokenistic moves that are marketed as brands “doing their bit”, moves that rarely - if ever - put garment workers first.
When I think of sustainability, it encompasses a wide range of processes and actors across the fashion supply chain and accounts for the entire lifespan of a garment. A sustainable fashion industry isn’t achieved by novelty capsule collections and take back schemes. It’s achieved when the production, packaging, marketing, consumption and disposal of garments are no longer exploitative, polluting and wasteful practices. Sustainability interweaves environmental rights, workers rights and animal rights in one combined goal to create a fairer future for us all.
See, it’s not just about conserving planetary resources. When we speak of sustainability, we have to ask ourselves who and what are we really sustaining?
In the last six months or so, sustainability has taken on a whole new meaning in my personal life. I’ve learnt that sustainability can - and should - begin at an individual level, one where we safeguard our mental health, pause for moments of reflection and know when to preserve our energy to fight the good fight. Even in my lowest times, I reasoned I cannot stop writing about fashion justice because the issue is so much bigger than myself. In reality, I’m not doing the movement any good if I constantly wear myself out to the point where I can’t continue. To keep momentum, I needed to take an extended break, even from my beloved newsletter. Because, as Susanne Moser puts it, “burned out people aren’t equipped to serve a burning planet.”
Battling similar exhaustion, climate reporter Emily Atkin finds parallels between burnout culture and climate change: “The rationale I’ve used to burn myself out is the same rationale the fossil fuel industry uses to burn up the planet … ‘Look at all the good things extraction has given you,’ it says. ‘If you stop, you’ll never have good things again'”. This justification kept me churning out content in a job market that tells me to constantly work on my “brand” or be left behind in a rapidly evolving digital world. To my surprise, my work didn’t suffer nor did my subscribers plummet after I announced my hiatus (an announcement I had been putting off for months).
I started Not What It Seams to fight against the tide of greenwashing. After a much needed rest, I’ve never felt more committed to holding brands accountable and demanding better for all garment workers. Which is why I will be turning this fortnightly newsletter into a monthly one. This change helps me keep pace with the ever-changing industry and provides you, my lovely readers, with well-researched and timely updates.
At the start of each month, I’ll be sliding into your inboxes and unravelling the latest in fashion and sustainability. Don’t worry, you can still expect the same unfiltered hot takes - just with a slightly refined structure and a conscious balancing of good and bad news. Instead of recommending a billion articles to read, I’ll be delving into a curated selection of 4-5 news items on the topics of greenwashing, industry regulation, myths and trends. And rather than provide an abstract definition of greenwashing tactics, I’ll show how they operate in practice by unpicking misleading fashion ads.
Thank you for sticking with me, reading between the lines and refusing to buy into any greenwashed bullshit. I really, really appreciate your support and can’t wait to see where this next phase of NWIS takes me.
Mel x
P.S. let me know what you think of the cosmetic changes!
In other news…
Greenwashing has shown no signs of stopping, and Captain Greenwash has something to say about it. A lot can happen in six months and a lot has. Laura Whitmore was criticised for her role as Primark Cares ambassador; Shein - a brand known for plagiarism - launched a “philanthropic” design contest; and Missguided is now available in select ASDA stores because clubbing dresses are obvs as essential as bread. Not one to miss out on questionable marketing moves, H&M plastered their shop windows with XR-style posters to advertise their “conscious” kids range. H&M clearly didn’t see the irony in platforming child activists when it participates in an industry that jeopardises their future. In protest, with Tolmeia Gregory stationed in the window and Fi Quekett dressed as Captain Greenwash, the climate activists spilt H&M’s dirty secrets surrounded by confronting cardboard signs. It caused quite the scene and prompted the window display to be changed overnight. Now, that’s greentrolling at its finest.
New greenwashing guidelines are set to crack down on deceptive fashion marketing. A recent report found that up to 60% of fashion giants’ sustainability claims were misleading which is no surprise when, thus far, the UK has lacked any enforceable anti-greenwashing regulations. Enter the Green Claims Code which the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has devised to help brands “stay on the right side of the law”. Its guidelines advise against using dishonest, inaccurate or ambiguous messaging, omitting information that could skew a buyer’s choice, pretending to be better than unnamed comparisons and making misrepresentative claims that do not reflect the overall impact of a product or service. If a business fails to comply with the Green Claims Code, its risks legal action and being fined by the CMA or Advertising Standards Agency. While the bare minimum, clear guidelines have been a long time coming and serve to change the way companies operate as well as communicate. You now have to be who you say you are or else stfu. H&M, are you taking notes?!
The Garment Worker Protection Act has passed in the State of California, proving that collective action can transform the fashion industry. It was a huge blow when SB 1399 - a landmark legislative bill that sought to prevent wage theft in the Los Angeles’ apparel industry - died in Assembly last September. A year later and celebrations are in order after governor Gavin Newsom signed the Garment Worker Protection Act into California law. What this means is that 45,000 garment workers sewing in California will now receive at least the minimum wage and the bill’s joint liability clause makes brands directly responsible for the fair and legal payment of garment workers in their supply chain. Hailed as blueprint legislation, the implications for the industry are huge, not least because brands can now be held accountable for wage disputes. Remake add that “if this campaign has proven one thing, it is the strength of citizen power”. Indeed, anything now seems possible.
After fears it would be abandoned, the Bangladesh Accord has been renewed. Boasting over 200 signatories, the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh was first set up to prevent another Rana Plaza collapse from happening. It was designed to radically improve health and safety conditions by incentivising Bangladeshi factories to invest in fire safety measures, structural evaluations and electric upgrades, or risk being dropped by their western buyers. This has reportedly eliminated over 97,000 safety hazards in factories covered by the Accord alone which proves that it works. So, when the 2021 expiry date loomed with no certainty of being postponed, many feared the worst. At the last minute, amid intense public pressure, the Accord was renewed and renamed the International Accord for Health and Safety in the Textile and Garment Industry. What’s more the legally binding agreement will be expanded to other garment-producing nations. When the Green Claims Code, Accord and Garment Worker Protection Act are viewed as part of the same global picture, brands are being increasingly held accountable for the mess they made. Let’s hope this trajectory continues.
Unpicking performative honesty in fashion marketing
My phone buzzes and the notification takes me by surprise. “We’re not sustainable…” reads the subject line of Birdsong’s latest newsletter. Wondering whether the face of ethical fashion has suddenly gone rouge, I quickly open up the email. “…until the big brands are, too” the sentence continues. In the ultimate gotcha moment, I soon realise the point Birdsong is making. It’s a sad truth that while the small independent brands are doing everything right, their efforts are soon overshadowed by the actions of greedy, carbon guzzling giants.
What is, here, a harmless, April fools-esque form of clickbait is quickly being turned into something quite sinister elsewhere. “We’re not sustainable” has been hijacked by fast fashion brands and warped into some sort of self-aware brownie points system. A step further than greenwashing, Erin from the Fair Fashion Project identifies this trend as performative honesty: the act of “display[ing] a false sense of accountability and transparency to convince consumers of sustainability goals”.
Performative honesty is essentially when brands pretend to hold themselves accountable by acknowledging their shortcomings without having to act on them. Like your bothersome ex, they’ll tell you what you want to hear but fail to ever change. They’ll plead and plead with you that “we know we’ve done wrong, but please give us a chance” until you eventually give in. It’s nothing more than a strategy to buy some extra time and convince you to support them monetarily in the process.
Let’s take this Nasty Gal Instagram post for example - a carousel of aesthetic, beachy shots with a load of neon excuses superimposed on them. “When it comes to the conversation about sustainability, we’re pretty behind” it begins. Well where have you been for the last 5 years Nasty Gal? You’ve been mass selling clothing, not exactly living under a rock. Plus, admitting that you’re “fully aware” you’re part of the problem isn’t noble. It’s incriminating.
Next in their arsenal of deceit is the deployment of emotional language in an otherwise vague af post: “Friend to friend, babe to babe, we’ll be transparent with you”. This attempt at relatability gives the brand a human quality, as if it’s prone to silly mistakes and exempt from scrutiny. Fucking up is forgetting to send your nana a birthday card, not decimating the planet.
Nasty Gal continue that “it’s just gonna take a minute to get there”, the end goal being becoming a more sustainable brand. Beyond the obvious fact that fast fashion can never be sustainable, the timeline for this aim falls short of the deadline of our ever-present climate emergency. The first step of the journey is listed as bare minimum “honesty”, which is a hundred miles away from where Nasty Gal needs to be.
By 2030, Nasty Gal pledge that all of the materials in its clothes will be “more sustainably sourced”. Of course, the post doesn’t actually elaborate on what the hell that means. Even by improving the number of organically certified garments in its collection by 1% would technically mean Nasty Gal is “more sustainable”. It doesn’t mean anything.
When transparency is misused as a tool of greenwashing, the only way to trust a brand is if they actually show, rather than just say, what they mean. Small but mighty brands like Birdsong put Nasty Gal to shame because they don’t need a minute to get things right. They don’t need to use the word sustainable because their actions prove that they are. They employ ethically, they design seasonally and they market thoughtfully. Their honesty is sincere, not performative.
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