The Top 10 Environmentally Friendly & Sustainable Clothing Brands in the World
People are becoming more and more conscious of where their unwanted, unused and outgrown clothes end up. Ahem: the landfill. As a result, fashion designers and entrepreneurs are coming up with innovative new ways to create environmentally friendly and sustainable clothes.
What better time to share some of our favourite environmentally friendly and sustainable clothing brands?
I was tempted to include businesses that offer laudable vegan fashion but to be frank, just because it’s vegan, it doesn’t mean that it’s sustainable. Certain products can require lots of energy (in the form of electricity, water, etc) to produce, and when I investigated how some products are manufactured, I found words like “tanned with vegetables” or “vegan shoes made of sustainable cotton and rubber.” Some businesses touted paying their workers a fair wage. Great! That’s a great practice to sustain a business (and keep a high retention rate), but this article is not about ethical fashion. It’s about fashion brands that are friendly to the environment by weaving in sustainable practices.
To help you understand sustainable fashion, Green Strategy summarises it best:
Sustainable fashion is partly about producing clothes, shoes and accessories in environmentally and socio-economically sustainable manners, but also about more sustainable patterns of consumption and use, which necessitate shifts in individual attitudes and behaviour.
I love the last part of that quote: necessitate shifts in individual attitudes and behaviour. The current common behaviour is runaway consumerism. When a business asks their customers to change their consumer habits, that can often be an onerous request. And yet, there are many fearless entrepreneurs who are trying to do just that. Today, we’ll dive into renting clothes, trading clothes, and even growing clothes, and other ways that fashion designers are creating environmentally friendly clothing brands.