London Fashion Week (LFW) returns to the city this week, bringing five days of catwalk shows, creative showcases, and celebrity sightings. Yet the conversation around fashion is evolving, and beyond the glitz and glamour, a new topic is taking centre stage: sustainability.
For the first time in LFW’s history, the British Fashion Council have introduced eco-conscious requirements which take aim at the mounting environmental cost of the fashion industry. Applicants to the ‘NewGen’ scheme, aimed at elevating the industry’s emerging talent, must have an approved sustainability strategy in place, agree to avoid the destruction of unsold clothes and samples, and abide by a strict criteria in their garments.
This criteria entails that at least 60% of a collection must comprise of certified, preferred, or deadstock materials, include no virgin fur, wild animals skins or feathers, and eliminate the use of single-use props and plastic packaging in showcases.
It’s a promising move – but is it enough?
The reality is sobering. The global fashion industry churns out more than 92 million tonnes of textile waste every year, with many garments worn less than ten times before ending up in landfill. This short shelf-life is highly incompatible with the cost of creation; producing textiles such as cotton requires thousands of litres of water per kilogram as well as pesticides that pollute the soil, air, and waterways to cheaply match demand.
Meanwhile, synthetic materials derived from petrochemicals are largely non-biodegradable and instead end up in the ocean as microplastics, joining the runoff from toxic chemicals and pigments relied on in the dyeing and colour-fixing processes.
Rising awareness around this environmental destruction has helped empower the push for sustainable fashion, in particular boosting the second-hand apparel market which is expected to reach almost $600bn by 2031. And while platforms like Vinted and eBay are popular avenues to reuse and recycle, many big brands are also looking to embrace circularity through recycling schemes or commitments to organic materials.
Yet promises do not equal progress, and despite these measures, the problem is continuing to worsen. Overproduction remains rampant, with as much as 40% of all fashion goods produced going unsold; an issue massively accelerated by the meteoric rise of the fast fashion industry, forecast to reach $150.82 billion in 2025 – an 11% increase from 2024, despite sustainability’s growing awareness. While the ‘NewGen’ scheme may instil the value of sustainability in the ‘global, high-end brands of the future,’ it’s clear that brands of the present may still be struggling.
So where can change come from? Recycling and repurposing have long been the cornerstones of sustainable fashion, yet consumer habits and production practises can be notoriously slow to improve.
Instead, as the industry grapples with a colossal environmental impact, more radical solutions are needed. Innovations enabling greener processes for cotton production, biodegradable monomers and polymers for textiles, advanced methods for recycling petrochemical-derived monomers from used textiles, and environmentally-friendly dyes and finishers are all in the works; and by tackling the rampant issues within clothing production lines, innovation can begin to reduce the impact of fashion without waiting for consumer behaviours to shift.
Yet while the possibilities are huge, so is the challenge. Research and development (R&D) into sustainable fashion practises requires ongoing financial investment, and while intellectual property can help businesses secure financing, competition for investment has never been more fierce. It can also take many years for R&D to reach commercialisation, and without investment accelerating these processes into operability, smaller businesses are financially barred from implementing the changes needed to their supply chains – while large brands hide behind facades of sustainability.
London Fashion Week’s new requirements are hardly groundbreaking – instead, they’re a symptom of a growing consumer base looking to do better, and beginning to demand it. Yet until sustainability becomes more than a buzzword for corporations– and becomes a requirement for all brands and designers – the changes to LFW may prove little more than window-dressing. The industry must decide whether incremental changes and half-measures will suffice or if it’s finally time to commit to embrace sustainability as a core principle of modern fashion.
Kirsteen Gordon is a Partner at Marks & Clerk
