What would truly sustainable fashion look like?

Bertie speaks to fashion journalist and sustainability consultant Lucianne Tonti about her new book Sundressed: Natural Fabrics and the Future of Clothing.

They discuss issues with sustainability indexes and modern fibres created from crude oil and trees, vs the benefits of clothes made from natural materials produced through regenerative agriculture.

Podcast editing by Vasko Kostovski.

Futher reading: 

• Buy Sundressed from Island Press.
• Read Lucianne's column in The Guardian.
• Preorder To Dye For from Penguin.
• 'There is so much to say about plastic pollution. Why are we not talking about it?' on Land and Climate Review.

Find all our latest investigations, features and interviews at www.landclimate.org

Transcript

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Bertie Harrison-Broninski: 0:07

Hello and welcome to the Land and Climate Podcast. My name is Bertie Harrison-Broninski and today I'm talking to fashion journalist and consultant Lucianne Tonti about her new book, Sundressed - Natural Fabrics and the Future of Fashion, published by Island Press in the US, and Black Ink in Australia.

Lucianne: 0:27

Polyester and other synthetics like nylon are derived from fossil fuels. They're extremely bad for the environment. They shed microfibre plastic into our waterways, soils. The fashion industry is quite unregulated and we are wearing these things close to our skin and our skin does absorb toxins.

Bertie Harrison-Broninski: 0:45

I began by asking Lucianne to tell us about her career in fashion and how it led to her writing this book.

Lucianne: 0:51

My interest in sustainability probably started in my early twenties. I did a research project that was part of my honours degree and the title was Neoliberalism, Fast Fashion and the Environment. That kind of stayed with me as I was working for different designers and getting exposed to different parts of the industry, working for luxury brands, working in house for smaller, high-end designers. Just before COVID happened, I launched a showroom for sustainable designers in Paris. And then everything changed when COVID happened. It gave me a moment to pause and I started doing kind of more research around sustainability. I was reading a lot and discovered this idea of regenerative agriculture and fact that the soil is the safest place for us to store carbon when we have healthy soils. It was just such a fascinating idea that we could grow natural fibres, which is what was always the emphasis on what. I was advising brands anyway because they biodegrade at the end of their life, they're not derived from fossil fuels, they wear better anyway. The fact that we might be able to farm them in a way that was going to heal and restore biodiversity and all of these other wonderful things to those landscapes and have better outcomes for farmers was really fascinating and that was where the idea for Sundressed came from. Now I'm a journalist and that's the space that I focus on; sustainability in the fashion industry. I've got a unique perspective because I come from industry. It gives me a bit of a different lens than a lot of other writers in the space.

Bertie Harrison-Broninski: 2:12

It's interesting to hear you say that your thesis when you were younger was about neoliberalism and the relationship with fashion. There's a bit in your book where you talk about how there was a shift in the 90s from clothing that was a bit more focused on individuality and maybe DIY aesthetics to what we now would consider fast fashion. Do you think that trend has continued or have we started to reverse that now? How have you seen that kind of pattern change over your time working in this space and the discourse around it too?

Lucianne: 2:42

Well, unfortunately there's kind of two groups of people in the world. There's people who are aware of the problems that fashion causes for the environment and they're trying to slow their consumption down and they're opting for vintage, they're looking for sustainable things. We have a rise in that awareness and that brands are kind of tapping into that. But unfortunately, at the same time as that, we also have what is now called ultra-fast fashion, which is like Che and Boohoo and a host of other brands that are literally putting tens and tens of thousands of styles of new products on their sites every week. And they're very cheap. It's become this kind of trend on TikTok for people to do these online shopping hauls, these shein hauls, and then to show them off. It's like the volume of clothes that they could buy because these clothes are so cheap and they arrive so quickly is really alarming. So while we kind of have a return to that '90s individualism, because we've also seen more thrift shopping and thrift flipping and DIY tutorials and there's a return to those kind of weird girl '90s aesthetics, it's being driven by cheap new clothing as opposed to what it was in the '90s, which was more customising vintage pieces and things like that. So unfortunately, as much as I want to say everything's going to be okay, anytime I look at those stats... The stat in Australia, and the stat would probably be similar in London is or in the UK is. Australians buy 56 new items of clothes every year at an average cost of $6.50 each, which is so cheap. It's so cheap, especially when you skew it with people who are only buying three or four things at like a couple of $100 each. Yeah, we've got our work cut out for us.

Bertie Harrison-Broninski: 4:25

Do you think the corporates are better at kind of latching onto those trends now and finding ways to almost appropriate them without changing the underlying patterns that are happening in the industry?

Lucianne: 4:36

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's like a perfect storm. They've got access to more data, they've got more direct access to all of us because we've all got little advertising machines in our pockets that we're addicted to. They've also got much faster technology and ways of producing these garments that don't rely on any of the kind of old systems where you would have to place an order for fabric six months in advance and wait for it to arrive and design it and then send it off to be produced. And the turnaround time is three months. These companies can have the ability to produce cheap fabric in the same location as where the garments are being made. So the turnaround is really accelerated, which is a shame because we could be using all of those forces for good as well.

Bertie Harrison-Broninski: 5:24

One thing I thought you did really nicely in the book is talk about how the histories of agriculture and fashion are quite intertwined. We should explain what regenerative agriculture is in a minute, but maybe before we do that, could you talk a bit about that history and how those two industries do kind of move in parallel?

Lucianne: 5:43

What we know now as agriculture is industrial agriculture, which is kind of you think of huge farms with like one type of crop that's been planted and you can't see a tree for days and big machines are harvesting, spraying chemicals, breaking up the soil, which is called tilling. And that is kind of something that's really only happened in the last like 70 years. We weren't farming that way until we had the chemicals that kind of came around World War II, which is nitrous oxide, to kind of accelerate the growth of plants and the growth of crops and to do it without relying on other techniques that you needed. Kind of the cycles of nature. When we kind of look back through history and you see the changes in the fashion industry, which is as the industrial revolution came through we were able to make fabric faster and kind of produce clothes using machinery and align with the forces of a capitalist system. Codden is a good example of something that throughout the course of history has started lots of wars and caused lots of harm. If you think of, say, like in America, where the arrival of the English and the displacement of the Indigenous people and then planting cotton fields and manning them with slaves. I'm not a purist. I don't believe we have to return to complete localisation, but we do need to return to some localisation because it's important to have the connection between the ground where your cotton or your wool is growing, the mill where it's being turned into yarn, and then the place where it's being turned into textiles and then into clothes. When we completely outsource all of those things, we do leave the farming and their production up to really big companies who aren't necessarily going to treat the people along their supply chains well.

Bertie Harrison-Broninski: 7:30

Our loyal listeners might remember that we did once before do a podcast on regenerative agriculture with Liz Carlisle, another author. I don't know if her, but for those that don't know, how would you define that term regenerative agriculture? How do you interpret it in the context of the clothes industry?

Lucianne: 7:52

Regenerative agriculture is beyond organic agriculture. So the first principle is you're not spraying chemicals, you're not spraying pesticides, and you're not spraying fertilisers. And then what you're doing on the farm is you're trying to restore natural cycles to the landscape. If you think about what a meadow looks like, I think it's always a good place to start. There's lots of different species growing in the soil, lots of different types of grasses and trees and shrubs and flowers, and nothing is alone. There's not one type of crop like as you would have on a big industrial farm. So that's the first thing. What that does is biodiversity draws in even more biodiversity. So you need different pollinators, so you'll have different insects, you'll have birds who are flying around and bringing the landscape to life. In addition to that, you need to have animals grazing the landscape as well. Whether that's cows or sheep or ducks or pigs or whatever it is, we need to have the complete spectrum of biodiversity for a farm to function in a regenerative way. Those things are kind of wonderful because they're visual and you don't really need to be trained to be able to tell whether or not they're happening. You can see them, you can hear them. So that's step one. No spraying. Bring back biodiversity. What the biodiversity does for the soil is it draws down all kinds of different nutrients. So when we have healthy soil, which is the second pillar of regenerative agriculture, you want to make sure that you never have any bare ground, so soil will sequester carbon and will have a healthy exchange of nutrients with the air and the sun and water and things when it has active roots in it. When you're looking across a regenerative farm, you shouldn't ever see any bare ground. Bare ground is the enemy of carbon sequestration and the enemy of healthy water retention and all of these other things that we need. To keep the soil, they describe it as like being dark brown, like chocolate cake. But of course, somewhere like Australia, where we have red soils in some places, that's not necessarily the case, but you want it to have that kind of cakey texture, I suppose. And then the soil should be full of worms and other bio-organisms that are actively exchanging the nutrients for the atmosphere with the soil, healthy soil, stores of water, which is better for resilience to floods, to fires, to other extreme weather events and put that in place by restoring more sources of water around the farm. I hope I have painted a picture for you of what a regenerative farm might look like. Of course, it poses some problems with farming at scale in the way that we're used to farming, because obviously, if you're growing cotton and you're not growing like acres and acres of cotton in single fields, you've got to have mung beans beside your cotton and sunflowers and then chickpeas. To have that biodiversity that I described, you need a different way of harvesting your cotton. You can't come through with a big cotton picker. So there are these little challenges. When we're doing wool it's much easier because you use the animals in a way to keep them all close together and make them mimic the patterns of a herd in the wild. So they're never staying in one kind of area of grass or part of the farm for too long. They never have the opportunity to eat the plant all the way down to the roots and leave that bare soil. Then the roots die. Wool and cashmere is a little bit easier to do, silk, you do it by growing the mulberry trees, regeneratively. There are really great examples of smallholder cotton plots, wool and cashmere that's restoring landscapes. Silk is being grown regeneratively and linen and hemp, which are the two other fibres I talk about in the book, are slightly different because they're already quite low-impact fibres.W. here they're grown, which is mainly across France and Belgium, they don't need many chemicals or fertilisers to grow. They're growing with the irrigation from the North Sea. There is also a movement to push for linen to be grown more regeneratively too. And hemp is a very small part of the fibre market but famously has very long roots. It's very good for regenerating soil health and biome remediation and all other kinds of things. But yeah, it's not quite so far along with those two fibres, I guess.

Bertie Harrison-Broninski: 12:14

We've touched a little bit on demand reduction as one of the solutions to this scaling problem in terms of just we need to produce fewer clothes. What about meat consumption? Do you have a view on that, take on that or are you not really going there?

Lucianne: 12:30

It's a tricky area. I have an article coming out in the Guardian today about vegan leather, actually. But look so meat reduction. Yes, we absolutely need to consuming less clothes, making less fibres and consuming less meat. No question about it. Meat is a huge source of carbon emissions, especially the way that we farm w. hen we farm it industrially, in intensive beef lots. With regenerative agriculture, because we need the animals on the farms, w. e need the sheep, we need the cows, a. nd when you're grazing them, regeneratively in this way, it is the opposite. You cannot compare an intensive feedlot system to a regenerative grazing system. They can actually restore landscapes. With leather, while we're consuming as much meat as we are, those hides are going to waste. As much as they're making progress in the vegan leather space, most vegan leathers have plastic in them because plant matter does not function as well as real leather for what we need it for in terms of footwear. Leather has innate properties that it can be restored for over and over. If you take good care of it will last a lifetime, if not two. Those things are yet to be replicated and we do not know if they'll ever be replicated in the vegan leather space. I believe in reducing consumption by wearing the most beautiful things that last for the longest time. While I'm sympathetic to the - if you're a vegan, obviously it's a different kind of scale - but so long as we're eating meat, I think we should be embracing leather not letting it go to waste. At the same time as that, overall, we need to reduce our meat consumption and we need to only be farming, eating meat from animals that are being used to heal landscapes. It's a tricky space, but ultimately we do not want to be relying on fossil fuels. There's no equation there. Like, plastic is terrible for the environment. It's going to sit in landfill, it makes your feet smell. It's not comfortable. It sheds harmful microfibres into the environment. On the broad kind of scale of how we're taking care of animals, it's not doing any better. But it's a very complicated space.

Bertie Harrison-Broninski: 14:34

How big a problem is the plastic problem? What's the sense of scale with it?

Lucianne: 14:40

It's huge. Right now, polyester makes up 60% of our garments and polyester is plastic. In case your readers weren't aware, polyester and other synthetics like nylon are derived from fossil fuels. Especially virgin polyester and virgin nylon. They're extremely bad for the environment. They shed microfibres plastic into our waterways, soils. They've been found at the bottom of the ocean, they've been found in human blood. Not to mention the emissions from when they're extracted and produced. They can also be produced extremely cheaply and at scale. That's what's driving our ability to have all this cheap, fast fashion. In terms of clothes, we shouldn't be wearing them on our bodies. They are prone to stain and to hold onto odours. Because they're made from oil, when you spill oil onto them or when you sweat in them, they lock on to the oil in the sweat and in the food stain or whatever you've dropped on them and they won't let go. That's why you'll notice that polyester clothes smell when you wear them over and over again. Even when they're clean, technically, they'll still stink. That's why you can't ever get a stain out of a polyester top. In terms of the mission with the fashion industry, when we want to make it sustainable, we have to produce less and buy less, which means we have to wear what we already own more. I don't believe that people like enjoy wearing things that smell or things that have stains on them. Polyester becomes extremely disposable extremely quickly, not to mention the hazard it presents to the environment. Recycled polyester definitely produces less emissions. Recycled polyester isn't polyester that's been turned back into polyester. The technology at the moment means that recycled polyester is made from plastic water bottles. Generally, as a general rule, plastic can go back into plastic over and over again. Plastic that's been turned into polyester can't be recycled again. Recycled polyester is a hazard because it's taking something out of this not technically a closed loop system out of almost a closed loop system and down cycling it and then its next up is landfill. So there is technology that's being developed to change that, so that fibre to fibre recycling can become more prevalent. We're not there yet, and even if were, we shouldn't be wearing it anyway.

Bertie Harrison-Broninski: 17:03

I don't think we've yet talked about rayon and these other materials, relatively new materials that are made from plants or trees. Companies tend to advertise these fibres as particularly sustainable, while some campaigners argue the opposite, say they cause all kinds of environmental problems. Walk us through your views on them.

Lucianne: 17:26

Rayon is like the umbrella term for all different kinds of viscose. What fits under the rayon umbrella is viscose, lyocell, modal, bamboo, coopero. They're all basically what we call manmade cellulosics. And the most common ones come from trees. The process of taking a tree and turning it into a soft, smooth fabric shouldn't surprise anyone when I say that it requires a lot of chemicals. The most common way is that the tree is turned into wood chips, which are then dissolved in sulfuric acid and then spun out into a kind of viscose substance, which is then turned into a material. There's enormous problems with viscose production because it's highly polluting, and when it's not managed properly, it destroys the waterways and is very harmful for the people working in it. It was actually embraced by the Nazis during World War II because no one would sell them wool or cotton. Hitler basically just turned to the forests in Austria and was like, all right, well, let's go. Let's cut down the trees. He staffed the factories with prisoners of war. The stories that came out of those factories were quite horrific because, of course, none of them had been properly trained. When you drop sulfuric acid on your skin, and it's horrible. The fumes cause psychosis and all other kinds of mental issues, not to mention other health issues. So it has this very dark past. There are companies now who are trying to make viscose production more sustainable. So if you pay attention to it, you'll notice garments made from viscose or rayon that say they are FSC or PEFC certified. What that means is that someone's tracked the chain of custody to make sure that those trees didn't come from ancient or endangered forest. 200 million trees are cut down every year to make viscose. Half of them come from ancient or endangered forests, which is a huge problem, right, because what we're talking about here is the fashion that's hopeful, that can help us regenerate the earth. One of the biggest tools that we have in that fight is forests. Forests store 70% to 80% of the world's biodiversity. They sequester carbon. They hold carbon in their roots, in their trunks, in the leaves of the plants and shrubs. And we need them. We need trees standing in the ground. We definitely don't need them to be turned into dresses. So even though those certifications help, I don't believe we should be wearing clothes made from trees. I should also say that in traditional viscose production, up to 70% of the tree is wasted, which is quite shocking when you think about a beautiful big gum tree being cut down and destroyed just for 30% of it. And the other thing I should say about it is that unsurprisingly woody matter like from trees or from bamboo doesn't actually make great clothes because of the length of the fibres. But cotton makes amazing clothes. You can kind of do it again and it is producing a better quality fabric.

Bertie Harrison-Broninski: 20:33

There's this bit in the book where you talk about how cotton is actually ranked as worse than polyester one of the most common sustainability indexes for the clothes industry. I wondered whether you thought there was a real need for a more reliable standardised certification or index like that and why haven't we got one already and what needs to change with that. And then, similarly, I wanted to ask you basically just what other legislative change should be happening in countries to make some of the changes that you think should happen?

Lucianne: 21:04

Yeah, we do need a standardised system so that brands have reliable information about the impacts of their fabrics that they're choosing. Higg is trying really hard to do that. The reason why it's complicated is because, really, to know what kind of impact your T-shirt had, you need to know where the cotton was grown and what was happening on that farm and then what happened at each stage of the supply chain. And that's a transparency issue. We don't have that kind of visibility. Big companies like H&M don't have that kind of visibility all the way down their supply chains. The problem with what I referenced in the book, the Higg Index, is that it's a standardised kind of global average system and it relies on data from the industry. So polyester has more data than cotton. When you're looking at industrial cotton, it's not the same as looking at regenerative cotton, but they're trying to build that nuance in. But it's very difficult. And they would also say it's not supposed to rank their fibres against each other. It's supposed to help you make a better choice within your polyester or within your cotton, which is not how anybody's using it, but it is the kind of argument you get sucked into when you're someone like me all the time. We absolutely need a better system. There are people who are trying to figure out what that system looks like. If you're an individual brand and you happen to be listening to this and you want to know what to do, you need to go to your supplier and you need to ask them where the cotton was farmed and what was happening on that farm. And do your own due diligence and not be relying on something like Higg because it's not perfect yet. In terms of regulations, the EU is making strides in this space. They're talking about banning fast fashion, they're talking about extended producer responsibility, which basically means that a brand would be responsible for their garments after they've been used and worn. Those kind of things incentivise brands to make sure that they're creating clothes that can be recycled at the end of the garment's life. If the brand has to take the clothes back, then they're more likely to be able to recycle them because they know what's gone into it. Which is key to the mission for circularity, because you can downcycle fabrics into insulation and things without having to know their fibre content. But if you want to turn material back into material, which is the Holy Grail for circularity, you need to know what the garment was made of and what kind of breakdown, is it 25% cotton or 75% polyester or whatever it is, to be able to keep it at its highest value, which is really what we're looking for. Those movements are exciting, especially I like how hard the EU is willing to go. In Australia, we're doing something similar, but they're not drawing hard lines around what they want from industry. They're kind of being like, 'well, it's self regulatory and voluntary' and all these things. Businesses already have the power to make change if they wanted to make change. Making a voluntary scheme is a little bit toothless to me. We also need better product standards, so we don't know at the moment, with all of this kind of fast fashion that's flying all around the world, what kind of chemicals are in these garments. My friend Alden Wicker is about to release a book called To Dye For. It's looking at the kind of toxic chemicals that are on our clothes and I think it's really going to change the conversation around this because it is a bit like the Wild West. The fashion industry is quite unregulated and we are wearing these things close to our skin and our skin does absorb toxins. There's been a few discussions about PFAS and other harmful chemicals and the way they kind of can disrupt hormones and things like that. Ideally, I'd like to see a scaling back of those kind of free market laws that just kind of allowed First World companies to exploit labour in developing countries, exploit their environmental regulations, everything, so that we could mass produce clothes at this rate and bring back some protections for local industries and local farmers and garment industries so that each country is kind of better, more self-sufficient, and able to clothe their population themselves.

Bertie Harrison-Broninski: 24:59

My thanks to Lucianne for coming on the show. If you enjoyed this episode, do remember to check out our other articles and podcasts on our website at www.landclimate.org. Hopefully we'll have a book review of Sundressed up there soon too. Please also remember to follow us or subscribe on whatever platform you use to listen to podcasts and we'll be back in a fortnight. Thanks for listening.