Why we work in fashion.
There are many reasons why we choose to focus our work on the fashion industry. First, fashion is one of the world’s most polluting industries. It produces more carbon emissions than shipping and aviation combined, and is responsible for more than 20% of industrial water pollution. Meanwhile, every year, 85% of global textile production is thrown away. This represents both unsold stock from brands and household discards. This means that the equivalent of truck full of textiles is landfilled or incinerated every single second.
Fashion is the perfect representation of how our economies have grown disconnected from the natural world, from its delicate balances and our planetary boundaries, and of how unchecked capitalism has led to a throwaway culture. It has also created a system where it is cheaper for companies to produce clothes that will never be sold through exploitative practices, than to adjust their business models, so they work in the long term for both planet and society.
Second, we choose to work in the fashion industry because of how clear the potential for change is. Fashion enables us to start accessible conversations about environmental degradation because clothes are a tangible product that everybody can relate to. We all wear clothes, every single day (or we should). Fashion can connect us back to earth. Many of us have forgotten where our clothes come from, but 30% of global textile production today comes from farmlands. At Trace Collective we work not only to increase this number, but to make sure that as many farmers as possible in fashion’s global supply chains adopt regenerative agricultural practices.
And finally, and most importantly, we choose to focus our work in the fashion industry because it is global, complex and deeply interconnected. That makes creating the large, systemic change that we want to see very difficult. But that only means that brining about that change will trigger much larger changes outside the industry.
By making fashion regenerative, we are taking a giant step in moving towards a regenerative world.
We are using fashion’s supply chains to regenerate farmland soils and move farmers to regenerative agricultural practices.
Trace Collective, our brand, is a key piece in our strategy. With it we are showing that it is possible to produce clothes differently. That consumer demand can create a market for regenerative agriculture within the fashion industry. That regeneration can sit at the heart of a commercially successful brand, and that growth can go hand in hand with increased impact.