Engaged in the clothing industry for 20 years.

How can Digital Fashion Design help us be more sustainable?

What comes to your mind when you think of digital fashion? AR filters?
Direct to avatar clothing? Skins for gaming? Digital Fashion is all of
this and more and could also help us towards a fairer and more
sustainable fashion system. And we are not only talking about the
production phase, reducing waste in samples and so on. Sustainable
practices can be adopted by digital fashion designers to ensure a
better production process, from creation to the consumer.

One key approach for a brand to consider its sustainable impact is the
utilisation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Developed by the
United Nations, the Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs are a plan
of action for people, planet and prosperity. The intention is to
deliver greater transparency and accountability. There are 17 goals
with an overall aim to end poverty, take care of and protect the
environment, and ensure prosperity for all people.

To discuss in what ways the SDGs can make the fashion system more
sustainable, we invited five experts in digital fashion and
sustainable business to share their thoughts, plans and projects. All
five have different backgrounds, but one common goal: a sustainable
planet.

What are the SDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals, for the
fashion industry?

“Every time I give a lecture on the SDGs it seems that the statistics
get worse,” says Merunisha Moonilal, academic, consultant and Digital
Professor for circularity at TDFG Academy. From the 17 global goals,
the UN specifically appointed for the fashion industry to adopt four
main goals, which are:

  • SDG 4: Quality Education. Ensure inclusive and equitable
    Education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for
    all.
  • SDG 9: Industry, innovation and infrastructure. Build resilient
    infrastructure promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and
    foster innovation.
  • SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and production. Ensure sustainable
    consumption and production patterns.
  • SDG 13: Climate action. Take urgent action to combat climate
    change and its impacts.
  • Moonilal explains, for instance, that SDG 4 is about providing
    inclusive education at all levels. For fashion, this means eradicating
    the early gender divide, where statistically more boys than girls
    attend school but the fashion supply or value chains comprises 80%
    women. While SDG 9 is about ensuring that, while technology is rapidly
    progressing, we make sure that human labour will not get replaced by
    automation. Also that it does not disenfranchise workers, but rather
    trains those workers for more skilled positions thereby allowing
    future generations to work with these technologies.

    “Human rights violations are unfortunately endemic in garment
    manufacturing. Issues of gender, class and racial diversity in senior
    job roles are still ever present, not to mention the toxic destruction
    of our natural environment and resources. However, the clothing and
    textile industry is nonetheless a fundamental economic backbone of our
    global economy, and it is essential that fashion as a whole adopts the
    SDGs on their own. Integrating the SDGs is of high relevance in order
    to modify the linear supply chain into a circular supply chain”,
    states Moonilal.

    What is the circular fashion system?

    “The circular fashion system is essentially where waste is avoided.
    And how we’re moving towards it is by trying to use resources that
    already exist, so we don’t have to use virgin resources or not have to
    produce at all,” tell us Alexia Planas Lee, the Founding Partner and
    Head of Impact Design and Innovation at Circular Fashion Summit by
    Lablaco.

    The circularity specialist also explains that “there are three stages
    of the garment where improvement can be made: materials, process and
    consumption. In the case of digital fashion, we can see how it’s
    helping at materials level with the selection of materials. There are
    companies doing excellent renderings of materials, so you don’t need
    to ship those samples anymore. Samples that end up in waste for every
    single brand or designer that wants to work with them.”

    “Technologies such as IoT (Internet of Things) allows us tracing of
    garments journeys, end to end. This allows consumers to be able to
    learn the whole journey of this garment and for the brand to be able
    to follow it. For example, we launched an IoT rental system with H&M a
    few months ago, in their store in Berlin. This enabled them to track
    their products at a consumption level. It is digitising and also
    promoting rental to keep close in the loop,” says Planas Lee.

    The potential of Digital Fashion for a sustainable system

    For Evelyn Mora, CEO & Co-Founder of Digital Village, we are still
    thinking too small as an industry regarding the potential of Digital
    Fashion in achieving a sustainable system: “We have to think about
    this on a large global scale, how digital fashion can actually impact
    physical fashion. I don’t believe that you can replace the physical
    fashion industry, which is a 800 billion US dollars industry, with
    digital fashion. But I do think that, when it comes to consumption and
    our relationship to clothes, the ways we express ourselves, this can
    be influenced by digital fashion”.

    And she adds: “the fashion industry is about selling dreams and
    identities. It’s so much more than just clothing. And I don’t think
    that any fashion brand has elevated it and uses digital in a globally
    impactful way, which changes our physical consumption habits.” For
    doing this, Mora believes that there is much work to be done by the
    fashion brands and companies, the supply chain must be involved,
    transparency should be enforced through the traceability of NFTs, and
    also we need to ensure that everyone working for the industry is
    fairly paid.

    “It’s a fact that digital fashion hasn’t created significant impact
    and results to make fashion more sustainable. Will it happen? Sure.
    It’s a bigger picture, a long term task that we are in the process of
    going through,” concludes Mora.

    For Olga Chernysheva, Chief Officer Sustainability at DRESSX, Digital
    Fashion is already impacting how products are being made and consumed.
    She uses an example from a project in partnership between DRESSX and
    Farfetch, on reducing the carbon footprint through on-demand
    production: “Before we spoke about how digital fashion can be
    substituted by physical fashion, for everyday consumption, we worked
    with the brand. We created an only digital capsule collection and we
    did all the marketing digitally. Influencers were dressed digitally,
    nothing was produced. And just after the campaign, Farfetch collected
    the orders and the physical garments were produced on-demand. For the
    40 garments created for this capsule collection, we saved 2,5 tons in
    carbon footprint.”

    To have a sense of scale, the carbon footprint of a digital garment is
    only 3% of a cotton t-shirt traditionally made. This carbon footprint
    calculation is based on a study published in 2020 by DRESSX, and the
    methodology is published on their website. There is also a study
    published by Evelyn Mora for Digital Village in August 2020 about the
    carbon emissions of Digital Fashion and its impact on sustainability
    with some counterpoints that contribute to the relevance and
    complexity of the theme.

    Sustainability as an empathetic process for the designer

    For Roei Derhi, founder and creative director at Placebo Digital
    Fashion House, “fashion is about identity. And when we talk about
    SDGs, when we talk about sustainability, a lot of people talk about
    how it’s actually impacting the environment. Sustainability for us, at
    Placebo, is how we define humans in the 21 century. Which kind of
    humans we want to be. Sustainability is empathy, is how the world
    becomes so small and we create empathy without any physical borders
    between countries and all the result of the SDGs: gender equality, to
    be empathetic to other people”.

    “Digital fashion actually exploded not because it’s new thinking about
    fashion or about sustainability. I think that people are looking for
    escapism. People are looking for a definition of themselves, and
    fashion is all about identity,” says Derhi. And as designers, we
    should be responsible with ourselves, our consumers and our society
    about how you are going to offer this escapism. The creative design
    process should start from an empathetic perspective, and includes
    social and environmental sustainability concerns.

    We all know that the fashion industry is still far from reaching the
    sustainable development goals. But different initiatives can reach a
    more sustainable system. Environmental policies, circular economy,
    digital design, digitalization of the production process, recycling,
    repairing and reusing, consumer consciousness, and more. There is no
    easy way and no one big genius solution. It is a team job and
    everybody needs to play their part.

    This article is based on the webinar “Digital Design &
    Sustainable Futures: The Goals” hosted by The Digital Fashion Group
    Academy. You can watch a sneak peak of the discussion below and the
    full webinar at TDFGA’s website.

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