Why We Need to Start Threading Change
Written by: Sophia Yang, Founder & Director of Threading Change
[10 minutes read]
I never thought that I would be putting everything on the line to start my own organization, just as our world came to a halt in 2020 due to COVID-19, an unprecedented moment that will go down in history as a catalyst for the ‘new normal’. But Threading Change was born at such a time, because I truly believe in intersectionality, and that no two issues exist without being deeply intertwined with other systemic injustices.
Today I want to let you in on #WhyWeNeedToStartThreadingChange, a play-on-words with ‘spreading change’.
Threading Change is a new ethical fashion organization that works towards accessible education in the fashion and apparel industry, whilst raising the profiles of those who have been undermined and exploited by the industry, through research, storytelling, policy implementation, and collaboration.
Our vision is a future where fashion is ethical and circular, rooted in justice with climate, gender, and racial equity at the forefront.
Our motto is simple: Ethical fashion for people, and for the planet.
I chose to start Threading Change focusing on ethical fashion because fashion is one of the most polluting industries in the world today. Currently, the fashion industry releases more carbon emissions per year than the aviation and maritime industry combined. In addition, the fashion and apparel industry produces 20% of global wastewater, and currently generates 1.26 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions every year. If we keep on this trajectory, the fashion industry will use up a quarter of the world’s carbon budget by 2050.
I chose to start Threading Change focusing on ethical fashion not only because of the environmental implications of the industry, but also the gender and humanitarian aspects. Currently, over 10 million people in Bangladesh, Turkey, Vietnam and Cambodia work in the fashion industry, with 85% of the workers being women who make less than 25 Euros a month.
Our current fashion trajectory operates in a linear system where trends are mass-marketed in the Global North, while extracting cheap labour overseas from the Global South. Our wasteful consumption habits in the Global North are polluting the intricate waterways in beautiful nations such as Bangladesh, where pink waters are a normal sight to behold. Our consumption habits cause garment workers in China and Bangladesh to work around the clock, sometimes up to 16 hours a day, and 364 days a year, without a break or many opportunities for career advancement. This is the very definition of sweatshop labour, further proving the extreme disparity prevalent in the apparel industry.
Thousands of garment workers and their unions hold a protest rally on the first anniversary of the Rana Plaza collapse that killed more than 1,000 workers.
Image: Solidarity Center, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Yet, most of us as consumers are either vaguely aware of these issues, or are willing to sacrifice the voices in the back of our heads that we don’t need more clothing just for aesthetics. Or the voice in our head that tells us we shouldn’t support fast fashion companies, even if they have the latest trend in stock.
In December 2019, I got to attend COP25, the 25th conference of parties and annual United Nations climate negotiations hosted in Madrid, Spain. I remember very clearly attending the UN Sustainable Fashion Charter event, which was a celebration of the one year launch anniversary of the Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action. This is where our story starts.
According to the communique linked above, it reads:
“We, the fashion company signatories of the Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action, share a fundamental commitment to drive the fashion industry to net-zero emissions in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement no later than 2050.
The Fashion Industry recognizes that current solutions and business models will be insufficient to deliver on the climate agenda and that the Fashion Industry needs to embrace a deeper, more systemic change and bring to scale low-carbon solutions.”
If one took a good hard look at the companies that have signed onto the charter, one can’t help but raise an eyebrow. The majority are large fashion conglomerates and luxury brands who have contributed the most to fashion’s dirty problem with excessive pollution, extremely poor working conditions, and abysmal pay. The companies I’m talking about are Inditex (who owns Zara), H&M, Levi Strauss & Co (who only shifted to using non-fossil fuels in their supply chains very recently), Target, and Gap Inc.
Now, the fact that the brands that have signed onto the charter are the same ones who’ve done the most damage, isn’t exactly a big surprise. In the new Netflix documentary, ‘The Social Dilemma’, those being interviewed cautioning social media users about the dangerous aspects of social media addiction, are those who built the apps and helped launch them to notoriety in the first place. Similarly, this is happening in the fashion space as well. Brands are obviously still run by people, despite some of those people being greedy, they still have values. These people recognize what they’ve done something wrong in the system, contributing to immense amounts of pollution and corruption in the Global South, and now they wish to enact change.
I can’t be the only one that felt my gut drop when at the end of the fashion event, when the company representatives and signatories of the UN Sustainable Fashion Industry Charter got up on the stage to take a picture. Take a close look at the picture below, what do you notice?
Representatives from brands, financial corporations, and retailers take the stage at COP25 at the one year anniversary signing of the UN Sustainable Fashion Charter.
In the picture, there are only two people of colour represented. A gentleman from China who’s the Co-Chair of Charter Policy Engagement working group, and a fashion label designer and owner from Turkey. Everyone else up on the stage, was Caucasian and from a Global North country. As a woman of colour myself, I definitely notice these types of demographics when attending events, but it wasn’t until we got to the question and answer period, that I felt the visceral need to take action. A gentleman raised his hand and was chosen to speak. The man introduced himself and said he was from Nigeria, where his wife works 50 hours a week making fabric that gets shipped off to different factories. His question was:
“How do we better support small to medium fashion businesses and enterprises in countries such as Nigeria, to be a part of this conversation? Right now there’s no way for us to do so, because the only communication we have is with the middleman in the supply chain, who take most of the profit, with the factories themselves doing most of the polluting. The solutions you are presenting mainly relate to the larger players in the industry, but the seamstresses and cloth makers in the Global South are part of the industry, too.”
The response that some of the folks up on stage had to offer this gentleman, was shocking. Shockingly bad, that is. The response was along the lines of: “No matter how small your business is, you can buy renewable energy for your house to offset some of the emissions released. I would encourage you to pick up the phone, and contact the supplier directly to do better.”
The problem with this response, is that it doesn’t address the underlying root cause: inequity. People work hard to make the fabric and ship it away, in which garment workers get pennies compared to dollars the middle man (such as retailers) make. There is no transparent knowledge on where the clothing is going, and little to no reward for their work. Meanwhile, suppliers and manufacturers can still get away with exploiting cheap labour in Global South countries and paying people low wages, because of this system. Even if the UN Fashion Industry Charter is working to advance sustainable fashion through innovation and eventual emissions reduction, the people and ethics part of this equation is still missing.
But the fashion industry wasn’t always like this. The explosive popularity of globalization and capitalist greed in the late 2000s made it possible for Global North countries such as the United States (the start of Forever 21) and Spain (the start of Zara) to buy merchandise from manufacturers at a discount, who then sold the clothing at a much cheaper price. Oftentimes, the styles were directly ripped from the runway, featuring low-priced nearly identical products of popular, high end fashion brands. Sure the concept was glamorous at first, helping the average consumer gain access to trendy styles, but this gave immense rise for fast fashion.
In addition, the current rhetoric around conscious fashion is problematic as well because it places all the emphasis on the consumer to make better fashion decisions. “12 ways you can save the planet, and your wallet this holiday season!” or “Make sure you try to only thrift/swap/or vintage shop instead of buying new!” These are both statements that I’ve seen populate fashion magazines, blogs, and even tips from sustainable brands/NGOs themselves in the last 3 years.
A H&M billboard in New York urging consumers to buy ‘conscious’, but why do we have to buy?
While the messaging has its heart in the right place, this is dangerous because it places all the onus on consumers to make the conscious or right decision. When in reality, it has to be brands, the industry, and especially the supply chain to offer more transparent, ethical, and sustainably sourced materials for purchasing. Brands and the industry have to not only work on greening the supply chain, but also making it more ethical with proper working conditions, living wages, access to worker’s benefits, and products that are centring designing for circularity and reuse of materials, instead of what’s popular.
You may be asking yourself, why must we design for clothes that are ethical and circular? There are a lot of reasons.
Globally, only 0.1% of collected textile waste is made into new garments. The current take-make-waste model does not allow fashion brands to maximize the value of resources (e.g. water, oil, energy, cotton) that go into the creation of garments. The global fashion industry emits 1.7 billion tons of CO2 per year, being the fastest growing contributor to landfills in North America.
With the way we’re currently making our clothing, the fashion industry (clothing, footwear, footwear) is extremely labour intensive. More than 60 million people are employed in the apparel industry worldwide. With jobs spanning throughout the supply chain, the chain is the link which connects the sourcing of raw materials, the factories where such materials are made into garments, and the distribution network that delivers this clothing to consumers.
One of the most terrifying things about the fashion supply chain is its obsession with speed. Reports have shown for some brands, such as Zara, they can get a sketch of a garment from the concept of the idea, to the sourcing of materials, making of the garment, distribution and marketing, in as little as 6-7 days, a week to do all of that! In order for this processing speed to be possible, the global clothing supply chain involves millions of people as well as tons of water, chemicals, crops, and oil. The resource-intensiveness of the industry is what makes it possible for your clothing to reach your wardrobe.
Another huge problem is the seasonality and obsession with reinvention in the industry. Styles that were popular 6 months ago, are quick to be replaced with new styles every season. Although the seasonality of fashion did mostly start with luxury brands and runways churning out at least 4 collections annually (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter), this trajectory has largely transferred to the fast fashion space as well, resulting in an increased demand for high speed, high volume and cheap consumption. Terrible things can happen when blind consumerism is valued over a transparent and ethical supply chain.
With the overconsumption of clothing, you’d think that at least some of this clothing waste can be recycled or reused right? Sadly, this is not the reality we are in. Research conducted by Reverse Resources has shown that textile recovery rates for recycling is relatively low, despite textiles being considered almost 100% reusable or recyclable.
Consumer waste may be the larger problem, but the pre-consumer supply chain has its own wasteful practices built in to the way garments are designed and produced. A quarter of fashion manufacturers’ purchased materials are wasted every year, this type of waste is “systematically underreported”, which further contributes to the large data gap in the fashion industry. Interviews conducted at all levels of the supply chain and in 7 factories in China and Bangladesh showcase that at least 25% of purchased materials went to waste, with some factories wasting nearly half of the materials brought in.
Having dived in regarding the problem space of our wasteful make and trash model, you may be wondering: “What’s the solution?”
In recent years, an emphasis on the circular economy has sprung up. According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a circular economy aims to redefine growth, focusing on positive society-wide benefits. It entails gradually decoupling economic activity from the consumption of finite resources, and designing waste out of the system. Underpinned by a transition to renewable energy sources, the circular model builds economic, natural, and social capital. It is based on three principles:
Design out waste and pollution
Keep products and materials in use
Regenerate natural systems
For the second episode of the Textile Talks international webinar, we will be diving in deeply regarding how circular fashion and innovative textiles presents a viable, scalable, and measurable model to help reconfigure the fashion industry.
For us at Threading Change, our primary focus is on ethical fashion—which goes hand in hand with circular fashion as an ethical fashion future. To us, ethical is defined as:
“Ethical fashion is not only a concept, it’s the future. Ethical Fashion should and will be at the epicentre of how we go forward in our fashion trajectory. Our fashion future must centre ethical and transparent fashion design, production, retail, and purchasing. It places people before profits, and covers a range of issues such as working conditions, exploitation, fair trade, sustainable production, the environment, and animal welfare.”
Our clothes are capable of telling so many stories, serving as one of the greatest means of self-expression. Everyone wears clothes, everyone has stories tied to their clothing, cultures tied to their clothing, trauma and experiences tied to their clothing, hardships, victories, and memories tied to their clothing, the list goes on. Our clothing is a key fabric of who we are. So why not make it ethical? Make it circular? Make it do good?
Like many other changes that need to happen in our deeply corrupt world, change will not happen by ranting to the masses that something needs to change. We NEED to take action. Changes will happen and start happening at understanding the root of the cause and why our system is deeply corrupt, and in terms of the fashion industry, there are so many things broken in this system, such as how:
It’s rooted in consumption and an exuberant celebration of capitalism and wealth
It can be incredibly inaccessible and only benefit those fitting within Eurocentric beauty standards, often times contributing to larger stereotypes and highlighting deeper systemically-rooted issues of racism, colourism, able-body-ism, gender, and age
It’s deeply damaging to our planet's resources, our lands, our water, and other living beings through the destruction of ecosystem, killing of animal and animal by-products for clothing
It operates on the belief that profit and trends are what should drive us, not compassion and connection amongst human and animal beings
It values profit over peoples’ livelihoods, and undermines many smaller business and indie brands unique work through plagiarism to sell, or profiting off an original idea
The fashion industry and supply chain currently operates on a linear trajectory instead of a circular one.
Here at Threading Change, we have three main avenues of work we are engaging in.
1. Education:
Through our "Textile Talks" webinar series, we help raise awareness by bringing together experts and community members in the fashion supply chain, policy, design, entrepreneurial space and more to talk and ideate on ways in which we can transition to more ethical fashion choices. We do this at the consumer and industry level, both locally in British Columbia, and internationally. Our first webinar of our series, which also happens to be our global launch, will be at 9 AM PST/4PM UTC on Wednesday, September 30th. You can register and get your ticket here.
2. Global Innovation Map:
One of the main issues I had when getting into the fashion space, and I’m sure many others in their journey as well, was the overwhelming amount of information on some aspects, but little to no information on others. A fact that’s been thrown around by many brands and NGOs is that: “The fashion industry is the second most polluting in the industry, after oil and gas.” But the truth is, this is a myth, and has been debunked. There is a big data gap in the fashion industry, one that disproportionately affects garment workers and consumers with the lack of transparency. As a consumer or garment worker, if you try to look into who’s conducting the supply chain analysis/transparency index, or where a material is being sourced from--the chances are, you won’t find much of this information. Fashion is an extremely competitive industry, and if a company has a competitive edge in sourcing a material for cheaper or being able to cut costs, brands won’t want this information to be public, in order to keep a competitive edge.
This is problematic, since a lack of transparency usually affects garment workers and consumers who are trying to find more information, but are unable to do so. Furthermore, this large data gap in fashion also makes enacting change from a scientific perspective difficult. In the digital age where fake news and alternative media is widespread, some consumers who want to change are not willing to do so unless there’s information backed by data. This big misinformation problem in fashion also has environmental implications due to incorrect reporting.
It is for these reasons, that Threading Change is working hard to create a global innovation map. In the last couple of months, we’ve been gathering stories and conducting interviews with ethical fashion brands and retailers around the world who are driving change in their communities. These brands are transparent, innovative, and best yet--willing to share their knowledge and collaborate.
We will be releasing our Global Innovation Map in the months to come, if you know of a great innovative and ethical fashion brand, designer, retailer, or artist that should be profiled, please reach out to us via our contact form!
3. SDG Synergy Ambassadors:
Not many industries have connections to almost all the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), but the fashion industry does. It relates to several SDGs:
SDG 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation) with how the industry unfairly populates waterways and streams in the Global South,
SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) with the need to shift to a circular system,
SDG 13 (Climate Action) and how we need to transform our fashion ecosystem due to the extreme amounts of clothing going into landfills, microplastics in the ocean from synthetic fibres impacting the food chain, to big brands releasing copious amounts of CO2 into the air from fossil fuel material production
Pictured right: My friend Cesar and I at the UN SDGs Hub at COP25!
The need for intersectionality linking together problems in the fashion space and using the UN SDGs as a framework of problem solving therefore, is absolutely necessary. Through our SDG Research Ambassadors program, we're creating a network of passionate fashion scholars who are working at the intersection of knowledge and equity, through a collaborative and transformative lens.
Threading Change strongly believes in our vision of a circular and ethical fashion future, because that’s the only way forward. We need to be rooting the fashion design process in designing for circularity instead of purely for styles. We need to be understanding of those very people who work under very compromising conditions to create our clothing. We absolutely need to understand the incredibly troublesome and clear statistics on how the fashion industry affects our environment and climate so negatively. And lastly, we need to understand how the entire fabrication of the fashion industry is based upon what the industry churns out at us, with us consuming the good, but really having very little say in the change we wish to see. This shouldn’t be the case. As consumers and purchasers of clothing, we 100% need a say.
I acknowledge that we have big hopes and dreams for Threading Change. I’m more than willing to rise up to the challenges and make our dreams a reality, because it’s incredibly important.
To change the fashion trajectory and enact change, we must be brave, bold, and kind. This change will need all hands on deck; industries need to step up with innovation and transparency, polluters need to pay up for the large environmental damages they’ve caused, and consumers need to wake up and realize that the power is with the consumer. The power is with our dollars in what we choose to buy, in our minds with what we choose to support and wear, but most importantly-- in our hearts with how we will work around the clock in visioning and carrying out a feminist and fossil fuel free, fashion future.
About the author:
Sophia is a climate justice change maker with over 6 years of research and policy experience. She has worked for a dozen environmental organizations ranging from federal government agencies, ENGOs, to industry, and academia. Sophia is the recipient of the Starfish Canada’s Top 25 Under 25 Environmentalists award in 2017 and 2018, has attended the United Nations Climate Change conference twice as a British Columbian Youth Delegate, and DJs in her spare time. Threading Change was born because Sophia wanted to help raise young people’s voice in one of our world’s most polluting industries—the fashion industry. Doing so for our planet, and people.
