The word sustainable has become a familiar echo in today’s fashion industry — stitched into labels, marketing campaigns, and corporate pledges. At first glance, it seems like a step in the right direction. After all, who wouldn’t want fashion that sustains rather than destroys?
But over time, the word has started to lose its weight. It’s been stretched, softened, and smoothed into something that can be worn by almost anyone — from fast fashion giants offering “conscious” collections to luxury brands releasing capsule lines made with slightly less harmful materials. In its overuse, sustainable has become comfortable. And comfort, while soothing, can also keep us from asking harder questions.
The Comfort of the Minimum
At its core, sustainability suggests maintenance — the ability to keep something going. But if what we’re sustaining is an industry built on overproduction, exploitation, and environmental degradation, then maintaining that system, even a slightly better version of it, is not nearly enough.
Reducing harm is important. But reduction isn’t transformation. And many of the changes we see today — organic fabrics, recyclable packaging, carbon offsets — often sit at the surface of deeper systemic issues. They may ease guilt, but they rarely shift power.
Beyond the Buzzword
When sustainability is used as a branding tool, it risks centring the product rather than the people — or the systems behind the seams. It overlooks the labour conditions of garment workers, the colonial histories of textile trade, and the structural inequalities that shape who gets to participate in fashion (and who doesn’t).
In this diluted version of sustainability, ethical sourcing can co-exist with poverty wages. “Green” fashion can still rely on extractive economies. And progress is measured not by justice, but by optics.
A Call for Systemic Change
True sustainability — the kind that nourishes life and community — requires more than better materials or smaller footprints. It requires rethinking our relationship with consumption, ownership, and growth. It asks us to slow down, to repair, to pay fairly, to value craft and care over novelty and scale.
It also demands listening — especially to those who have long been excluded from fashion’s dominant narratives: informal workers, indigenous makers, migrants, home-based artisans. The ones whose labour sustains the system, yet whose voices are rarely heard.
Their knowledge, resilience, and quiet innovation are not side notes. They are the foundations of a fashion system that could truly regenerate — not just materials, but livelihoods and dignity.
Holding the Tension
This doesn’t mean throwing out the word entirely. It means holding it with more depth, more clarity, and more accountability. It means recognising that real change is slow, imperfect, and often uncomfortable. And that’s okay.
Because in that discomfort lies potential — the space to imagine something more honest, more human, and more whole.