Pallavi Singh : All that glitters is not gold – the dark side of fashion.
One should make sustainability a part of their lives. You adopt sustainability into your lives once you realize the offset of everything you do. It should not be an afterthought.
How often have you walked along a showroom, fallen in love with a dress, impulsively added to your cart only for that dress to be worn just once? Interestingly, today’s average person buys 60 per cent more clothing items than they did 15 years ago but keeps them for only half as long as they used to. Before you know it, you are already in the inevitable trap of fast fashion.
MOSAIC recognizes the impact of fast fashion on the environment, a business strategy in which companies turn around cheap imitations of garments to cash in on transient fads. In this feature, MOSAIC chats with Pallavi Singh, a sustainable fashion influencer, with the truly fashion-astic conversation! Before starting as a fashion blogger in 2012, Pallavi worked in the corporate sector as a sustainability consultant. As part of the company’s CSR assignment, she visited regions of Uttar Pradesh and explored different embroidery works, where she learnt the plight of weavers and, despite the poor work conditions, how laboriously they worked to finish a design. Also, another stark experience was being body-shamed for being skinny since childhood, so fashion is something that helped her feel confident. She saw the change, personally, in how people looked at her when she dressed fashionably – that’s how her journey with fashion began.
“Fashion is not the replacement of one’s character; it is an enhancement of it.”
She explained to MOSAIC about her unique username: “MODA means fashion. I wanted a URL that said Moda Ninja, as Ninjas are cool. The idea was to be a fashion Ninja, wherein I can talk about everything that comes under the umbrella of fashion for sustainability.
Indian heritage fashion: centuries-old cultural values
In distinction to the finest sartorial endowment, centuries-old embroidery heritage has not only travelled from one generation to the next, but they have also invariably stood the test of all times, retaining their features through all the generations whilst keeping the classical attributes intact.
Indian heritage embroidery has seen a sharp decline over the years, and this may be due to many reasons, including the growth of low-cost, poor-quality fast fashion, lack of government intervention, distorted infrastructure, low wages, and poor incentives de-motivating the traditional embroiders to carry on the ‘traditional art form.
The devil wears Prada: common man wears the devil?
According to an analysis by Business Insider, fashion production comprises 10% of total global carbon emissions, as much as the European Union. It dries up water sources and pollutes rivers and streams, while 85% of all textiles go to dumps yearly. Even washing clothes releases 500,000 tons of microfibres into the ocean yearly, the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles.
Expressing her views on fast fashion, Pallavi shared, “Customers must not buy fast fashion, as these brands are encouraging Indian manufacturers to supply more cheap clothes to the customers. Fast fashion as a trend must halt, and the step can only come through awareness, learning, and inquisition.”
The fast fashion addict
A significant factor inhibiting people from adopting sustainable fashion is the mindset – to buy, use and throw. People need to free themselves of the ‘use and throw’ mindset. The brands are reckoning their profit at the cost of rare environmental resources, lush green fields, and limited land capacities.
Another challenge is the affordability aspect. Sustainable Fashion brands, 99% of the time, have higher upfront costs, which is mainly true. This is why many people have gotten into a bubble based on the statement that sustainable fashion is meant for the elitist and thus inaccessible for average income earners.
But the fact that sustainably made garments can help save you money, in the long run, has firmly stood the test of time.