Ethical & Sustainable Clothing Brands

Unfortunately, fashion isn’t the cleanest industry in the world. The rapid production of clothing is affecting human health, our precious resources, and our shared ecosystems. But, there are ethical and sustainable clothing brands that are raising the standard for how our clothes should be made. These brands regard people and planet as top priorities within their supply chains, so we can purchase their clothing in good conscience.

That’s why we’ve created this page here, on some of the most ethical clothing brands in the industry. We wanted to make it easier for you, for whatever you’re looking for, to ensure that the clothes you wear (and the clothing brands you support) represent your belief that people and the planet should be put above profits.

Our Buy Ensemble Picks: Sustainable & Ethical Fashion Brands

The Issues in the Fashion Industry

Fast Fashion & Overproduction

What Is Fast Fashion?

Just as its name implies, fast fashion refers to the rapid process of designing, manufacturing, and stocking new clothing items. The model is dependent on creating a high volume of pieces and selling them at a low price, yielding high profits. Unfortunately, garment workers and the planet pay that cost. 

Clothing items made via fast fashion come from some of the biggest brands, like H&M, Forever 21 and Zara. These brands, among others, produce a staggering amount of clothing each year. In 2018, H&M had $4.3 million worth of unsellable inventory. Considering how cheap each item is, that’s tons and tons of clothing, each made with raw materials and a high carbon footprint. 

Embedded within the fast fashion industry is a crucial marketing and advertising angle that provokes mindless consumption among consumers. Fast fashion companies might be overproducing, but consumers are also overconsuming. 

One response to the crisis fast fashion has laid before us is simple: slowing down. The slow fashion industry is moving to more mindful, ethical, and sustainable methods of production. 

What is Slow Fashion?

Slow fashion seeks to deliver high-quality, durable clothing when consumers need something new. These brands oversee their supply chains and thoughtfully select (or build their own) factories to ensure fair working conditions. Some brands pursue certifications like climate neutral to help offset the negative impact of the clothing industry. 

Companies like Patagonia are experts in the slow fashion industry. Not only do they offer repair and resale programs for gear, they also explicitly tell shoppers not to buy an item unless they really need it. 

For more, read our posts on conscious consumerism, mindless consumption, and voting with your dollar.

Working & Labor Conditions

Unsafe & Dangerous Working Conditions

The Rana Plaza collapse, an incident in Bangladesh where more than 1,000 people died, showed the devastating reality of apparel manufacturing and the harsh conditions that workers tolerate around the world, particularly in Asia. Garment workers are forced into low-paying jobs in cramped, unventilated factories, suffer physical and verbal abuse, and breathe in toxic fibers and fumes that can cause disease. 

A number of disasters have occurred in these factories besides the Rana Plaza disaster, including multiple deadly fires at factories in Bangladesh and New York City in 1911. These disasters illustrate how little regard is given to the safety of these workers.

Low Wages

Most workers in the fashion industry don’t make a living or fair wage. Instead, they can be paid per piece, a rate as low as 2-6 cents each. In Los Angeles, the United States capital of clothing production, after a 60-70 hour workweek, employees can take home roughly $300.

Child Labor

Once you see the “soul” of a shoe, you can start to recognize which are better for the world. We’ve done the work for you in our list of Sustainable Shoes! Certifications will also help you do the trick—keep an eye out for Carbon Neutral, B-Corporation, Leather Working Group, Fair Labor Association, Canopy, PETA, OCS, & GOTS certifications.

The fast fashion industry needs costs to be low at each step in the supply chain in order to survive. One way to maintain cheap labor costs is a form of modern slavery: child labor. In the cotton industry, one of fashion’s most ubiquitous raw materials, children are often forced to work in the fields during harvest season and live in unsanitary, hot barracks. In factory scenarios, children are seen as “obedient workers who slip under the radar”. 

These exploitative practices are typically unknown by the companies outsourcing their labor to these factories because the work can easily be subcontracted to other facilities. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t responsible. The entire premise of making cheap clothing is dependent on impoverished families who have no other option but to send their children off in hopes of a better life.

Solutions

A number of solutions exist to bring transparency into supply chains. Fair trade movements and certifications (by Fair Trade USA or Fairtrade) seek to remedy some of the destructive social inequities in the fashion industry. By meeting certain criteria, producers can earn a fair trade label, which means the workers make a living wage, have access to crucial workers’ rights like unions and health benefits. Fair trade also prohibits the use of child labor. 

Founded by competitors Nisolo and ABLE, the Lowest Wage Challenge is a movement directly calling out the “business as usual” practices in the fashion industry. The organization estimates that only 2% of the people who make clothing earn a living wage. The challenge encourages consumers to ask their favorite fashion brands to publish their lowest wage, in an effort to achieve transparency and encourage accountability.

Environmental Harm 

The production of textiles contributes more to climate change than international aviation and shipping combined and the fashion industry is responsible for 10% of global carbon emissions and by 2050, it’s expected to reach 50%. Not only is the industry contributing directly to climate change, it also pollutes the planet at nearly every step in the supply chain. 

Here are a few of the fast fashion industry’s most dangerous crimes against the planet. 

Textile Waste

Textile waste comes in a few forms in the fashion industry. First, in the manufacturing of clothing, there are scraps. Just imagine cutting the shape of a t-shirt into a piece of paper. All the unused paper is thrown away, right? The same goes for fabric. These irregularly shaped scraps are seen as unusable in the fashion industry. 

Deadstock fabrics are another often thrown away item in clothing production. Deadstock is the fabric that’s overordered by one producer and either dumped or rescued. 

The other side of textile waste falls on the consumer. In 2018, the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that landfills received 11 million tonnes worth of textiles from Americans. It can take hundreds of years for these materials to decompose in a landfill and they release greenhouse gas emissions like methane as they do, which perpetuates climate change. 

Water Use

Freshwater is a very precious resource on our planet and cotton production accounts for 3% of it. 

Pollution 

Pollution exists in nearly every step of the supply chain. In the growing process of materials like inorganic cotton, pesticides and herbicides runoff into local waterways, harming marine life. 

On the production side, dyeing clothing is a huge contributor to pollution. The fashion industry accounts for 20% of industrial water pollution. Especially in places like Bangladesh with few restrictions on what can be dumped, wastewater from factories (which is essentially a mixture of heavy metals, dyes, and carcinogenic chemicals) is poured directly into rivers and streams, which are a source of drinking water. Not to mention, fish have largely died out in these areas, which impacts the health of the entire ecosystem, humans included. 

Distressed denim is one of the biggest contributors to these chemical cocktails and chemical exposure. Cotton is dyed with indigo to get the classic blue color, but chemicals like bleach and formaldehyde are used to give a more worn look to the final product. 

Perhaps even more disturbing, that same wastewater is used to water crops and textile dyes have been found in vegetable and fruit samples collected in Bangladesh, the second-largest exporter of garments. 

Pesticides & Agriculture 

We can almost guarantee that every person has an item in their closet made from cotton. It’s not just t-shirts either. Athletic wear and denim are made from cotton yarn too! In fact, nearly 30% of the yarn we use for making clothing is from cotton. 27 million tons of cotton are produced per year and conventional crops are incredibly dependent on pesticides and herbicides. Cotton is one of the most chemically treated crops in the world. 

Pesticides, even when used in accordance with their legal application methods, are dangerous for the health of farmworkers, local waterways, and the soil. It’s been proven by multiple studies that farmworkers exposed to pesticides at work are at a higher risk for deadly cancers. Once that cotton is processed into clothing, pesticides can still linger and make contact with our skin. 

Solutions 

As consumer awareness grows, an increasing number of sustainable fashion companies are emerging with new ways to save deadstock fabrics, recycle used clothing, and use low impact dyes, seek certifications like Climate Neutral, and source organic materials. 

Perhaps our best tool in reimagining the fashion industry is circular fashion. 

As explained by fashion innovator Shamini Dhana, circular fashion is defined by four strategies: 

“The first one is you designed a piece of clothing with cyclability in mind. The ability to disassemble, the ability to use materials that have already been in the system. So these are what we call designing for cyclability. 

The second strategy is you take back. So the brands take back clothing, empowering the customer. When the life of the clothing is done, then your brand will have a real take-back program. And we’re doing that as well. 

The third one is using the current garment. So your secondhand clothing, and having a resale to that. So you may have noticed the spike in the Gen Z and the millennials, all wanting to wear vintage clothes and they’re shopping in thrift stores. It’s a $51 billion market, believe it or not, and really pushing, that’s the third one, you know, you’re using garments and you reselling it. 

And then of course, the fourth one is what we call recycling, you take the deadstock or you’re taking the fabric as feedstock, putting it into a machine, using new breakthrough technology and a new fiber comes out.” 

Creating a fully circular fashion industry is possible! We believe that a combination of efforts from consumers to producers to policymakers can incentivize and push more brands to embrace circularity.