A Short Piece on Sustainable Fashion

I hope to expand upon this piece one day, but for now this is it. :)

The fashion industry is torn between two extremes: the demand for masses of trend-based clothing which is fuelling the ‘fast fashion’ side of the industry, and the customer base only interested in wearing something if it’s deemed sustainable and ethical. ‘Fast fashion’ is the term coined to describe clothing that is made extremely quickly, with cheap materials and cheap labour. Its contribution to global warming is so massive, due to the factory use, importing and exporting, and even further back in the process to the chemicals used on the fabrics while they are produced. Here in New Zealand, brands are combatting the need for sustainability as best they can, both in order to keep up with their consumers and their own evolving personal ethics and morals. 

Maggie Marilyn is the first New Zealand based brand that comes to mind. She started her company in 2016 and was immediately an advocate for transparency in the fashion industry. In 2018 she released a Sustainability Strategy which lined up with the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. Kate Sylvester, one of New Zealand’s oldest and most established brands, co-founded ‘Mindful Fashion’ also in 2018, as an attempt to bring together New Zealand’s fashion and textile industry to collectively improve the fate of sustainability in fashion. Rachel Mills has created ‘The Pattern Table’; essentially a small factory team, to enable designers to make their collections wholly in New Zealand. With the lack of factories and specialist clothing makers in New Zealand (due to fast fashion), brands are forced to travel all over Auckland, to various different outworkers, just to complete the production of one garment. New Zealand brands are forcing consumers to ask themselves: Is that $25, fast fashion, made in a sweatshop top really worth it?