What “Sustainable Fashion” Looks Like in Practice (Not Theory)
Jenny Daphne Pitsillides – Editor | Re:Fabricate — Real Solutions for a Better Fashion Industry
The coat is older than it looks. The lining has been replaced once, the buttons twice. It has that particular softness that only time can give, not wear-and-tear exactly, but a kind of earned ease. It still comes out every winter. No press release has ever mentioned it.
This is not a story about perfection. It’s about proximity: what happens when sustainability stops being a position and becomes a set of daily decisions, made quietly, often under constraint, sometimes with unintended consequences. For an industry fluent in language but less comfortable with limits, this distinction matters.
For SustainCase readers, sustainability is rarely theoretical. It lives in spreadsheets, sourcing calls, production timelines, and negotiations that never make it into brand storytelling. The gap between how sustainability is spoken about and how it is practised is not just semantic, it shapes what actually changes.
Durability: Time as the Unforgiving Editor
Durability rarely photographs well. It doesn’t announce itself at launch; it reveals itself slowly, over years of use, repair, and continued relevance. A durable garment is not just one that survives, it’s one that remains wanted.
In practice, durability begins long before a product reaches a consumer. It shows up in fibre choice, certainly, but more decisively in construction: seam density, reinforcement, fabric weight, tolerance for repair. It also shows up in design restraint, silhouettes that aren’t too specific to a moment, colours that can age without embarrassment.
What complicates this is speed. Even brands committed to longevity operate within calendars that reward novelty. The tension isn’t abstract. It’s commercial. Making fewer, better things often means selling fewer things, or selling them differently. That requires internal alignment, between design, merchandising, and finance, that is still surprisingly rare.
Durability, then, is less a feature than a posture. It asks whether a business is prepared to be patient. Not indefinitely. Just longer than a season.
Materials: Better Fibres, Heavier Questions
Material innovation has become fashion’s most visible sustainability lever. Organic cotton, recycled synthetics, regenerative fibres, the list grows each season, often accompanied by confident claims. In practice, materials are where intention meets constraint.
Organic cotton reduces pesticide use, but yields can be lower and supply inconsistent. Recycled polyester diverts waste, yet remains fossil-based and dependent on energy-intensive processes. Regenerative agriculture promises soil health and carbon benefits, but scaling it without oversimplifying its outcomes is slow work.
The uncomfortable truth is that no material is neutral. Impact is always relative, to geography, farming practice, processing method, and volume. A “better” fibre used at excessive scale can still be environmentally costly. Conversely, a conventional material used sparingly, transparently, and for long-lasting products may perform better over time.
For industry-facing readers, this is familiar terrain. The challenge is not choosing the “right” fibre, but resisting the temptation to treat material swaps as a substitute for deeper change. Materials matter, but they cannot carry the entire burden alone.
Supply Chains: Visibility Is Not the Same as Control
Supply chains are where sustainability becomes most human, and most complicated. They stretch across borders, legal frameworks, and cultural expectations. Mapping them is difficult enough; governing them consistently is harder still.
In recent years, transparency has improved. More brands can name their Tier 1 factories, some their Tier 2 suppliers. This is progress, but it is not the same as influence. Knowing where something is made does not automatically confer the power to change how it is made, particularly when margins are tight and timelines fixed.
Sustainable practice here often looks unglamorous. It involves longer lead times, fewer last-minute changes, and an acceptance that speed has consequences borne elsewhere. It may also involve staying with the same suppliers through difficult periods rather than switching in pursuit of marginal gains.
What’s rarely acknowledged is that ethical supply chains are not static achievements. They require maintenance. Relationships, not audits, tend to do the heaviest lifting, built through consistency, fair negotiation, and a willingness to absorb some risk rather than exporting it downstream.
Circular Models: Systems, Not Symbols
Repair, resale, rental, the vocabulary of circular fashion is now well established. Less discussed is the infrastructure required to make these models work at scale.
Repair demands skilled labour and time. Resale requires sorting, authentication, logistics, and pricing expertise. Rental depends on intensive cleaning, transport, and inventory management. None of these are passive systems; all are resource-heavy in their own way.
Where circular models succeed, they often do so within clear boundaries: limited product categories, regional focus, controlled volumes. Attempting to bolt circularity onto an otherwise linear, high-volume business can expose friction quickly, operationally and environmentally.
This doesn’t make circularity irrelevant. It makes it specific. Effective circular systems are designed, not declared. They work best when integrated into product development from the outset, rather than retrofitted as a reputational layer.
Trade-offs: The Part That Refuses to Disappear
Every sustainability strategy involves trade-offs, whether acknowledged or not. Slower production can improve working conditions but challenge cash flow. Higher-quality materials can reduce replacement rates but increase retail prices. Local manufacturing can cut transport emissions while raising energy use.
The industry’s discomfort with trade-offs has fuelled a culture of over-claiming, the sense that sustainability should always look like a win. In reality, it often looks like choosing which compromises are acceptable, and being explicit about why.
For industry practitioners, this is where credibility lives. Not in claiming to have solved sustainability, but in demonstrating an understanding of its limits. Honest communication, internally and externally, tends to age better than confident absolutes.
A Closing Thought
The coat at the beginning of this piece is not a solution. It doesn’t offset anything. It simply exists, still useful, still worn.
Perhaps that’s the most practical image of sustainable fashion we have: fewer garments, made with care, kept in use, supported by systems that accept complexity rather than smoothing it away.
Sustainability, in practice, is not a destination. It’s a way of staying with the work.
Light references
Fletcher, K. (2014) Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys. 2nd edn. London: Routledge.
Niinimäki, K. et al. (2020) ‘The environmental price of fast fashion’, Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, 1(4), pp. 189–200.
Ellen MacArthur Foundation (2017) A New Textiles Economy: Redesigning Fashion’s Future. Available at: https://ellenmacarthurfoundation.org (Accessed: 24 November 2025).