Some fashion, finally

A few weeks ago I got to have drinks with two of the most luminous fashion sustainability experts in my life - women responsible for leading brands and organizations towards net zero impact, environmental advocacy, and engaged customer education. I won’t name them here but I’m using this intro to solicit their eventual interviews for this newsletter, and they know who they are, so…. call me, ladies.

Anyway, at some point I was decrying the lack of responsibility most brands take toward creating a traceable, accountable supply chain of materials and labor, of really making an effort to hold their production partners accountable for their labor practices and material decisions - a noble intention but ultimately a horrendously difficult ongoing practice, like water eroding a rock, largely because the infrastructure our industry is reliant upon is archaic, opaque, and virtually designed to extract. So making alternative, progressive decisions is not just a matter of flipping a switch, but also then being able to turn the crank by hand for a long while, and to do that for every facet of your business requires a lot of hands, and hands are expensive, and there’s only so much margin, etc etc.

This is a valid difficulty faced by everyone in our industry, which both of my friends were quick to point out in the course of our conversation, because, well, how do you pull information out of a black box? If an entire infrastructure is designed around obscuring information in order to protect common practices, how does your one brand rock the boat?

And that can be enough to discourage anyone, especially anyone with and already complicated or extremely intricate supply chain, because, where do you even start? Do most industry professionals even understand the extent of the damage, or what they are trying to change? Can any of us fully understand?

This week a study was released by Stand.earth in collaboration with Slow Factory that includes a detailed, interactive map of how the Brazilian leather industry contributes to the deforestation of the Amazon rain forest in addition to a very consumable report explaining the link. For any of you who have never had the task of trying to uncover material supplier information from within the fashion industry before, I can assure you this research is an absolutely Herculean undertaking, and the result, which you can explore interactively on Slow Factory’s site, details the path from 6 tanneries to 103 brands buying from those tanneries’ subsidiaries or wholesalers.

And yes, Zara and The Gap are definitely on that list, but disturbingly (and perhaps demonstrative of how black-box much of the fashion supply chain is), so are luxury powerhouses like Louis Vuitton, Chloe, or Bally, all of whom have each announced major sustainability agendas to accomplish in the next 3 years and beyond.

I cannot overstate how amazing and rare this research is. We have so little insight into our real impact on the world, all we know is that we are discovering more every day that it’s bad - really bad - and that it needs to change urgently.

So my point is, if you frequently find yourself wanting to tackle sustainability at your brand, or if you want to know what you can do on a personal consumer level to make a small impact…. here you go! Somebody did the research for you, so get started!

If you have influence over sourcing at your brand, look at this map and examine it for links to your supply chain. This is not about playing the blame game and pinning the fault on a few enormous brands, this is about everyone everywhere doing something urgently. Band together with other like-minded brands and organizations to advocate for legislation that supports your sustainable business decision.

If you have no supply chain influence over a brand and are simply a consumer, you can sign the declaration on this page and share in the movement on your social platforms and in your IRL social circles. Call in the brands that have been traced and ask them what their plan of action is to divest from deforestation. And remember that legislators are as beholden to you as they are to corporations and industries. Speak directly to them about supporting reform.

That’s all. So often people ask where to start or how to make a plan. And that is really understandable, because evolving a system that is so incredibly damaged (and damaging) feels daunting, and discouraging, and heavy.

But for god’s sake, if somebody hands you a fire hose, point it at the fire.

This is Present Tense, a bi-weekly, free newsletter discussing sustainability, culture and impact. To read more, click here. If you’re new here, you can subscribe anytime below:

I really appreciate you being here. :)