Reimagining Growth
Image: Madeline Brunnmeier, from the series Gestalten. Photoworks.
Breathe the word ‘degrowth’ in a room of business executives, even those attuned to sustainability, and watch the colour drain from their faces. In a survey by non-profit Textile Exchange, almost two thirds of industry participants said they couldn’t even use the term internally, that is, within their organizations. “One would not be taken seriously, nor invited for comment, let alone to attend key meetings,” shared one respondent. Current conditions of global financial instability have made it worse. “I would feel uncomfortable using it at a time when protecting the growth of the business is so important due to economic challenges,” admitted another.
“[Degrowth] has the ability to stop conversations before they even start,” offered a further voice. And yet, these are conversations that need to be had. As planetary distress widens and deepens, the sheer size of the fashion industry and its mandate to keep growing sits at increasingly violent odds with its need to become ecologically balanced. Since 2000, global fiber production has more than doubled to 124 million tonnes in 2023. It is expected to grow to 160 million tonnes in 2030 if business as usual continues. Polyester, now the most widely used fiber in the world, contributes most significantly to this increase. What the exact numbers of new products produced looks like is unknown; only 11% of the world’s largest fashion brands actually disclose how many units they make annually. What is known is that fast fashion companies are capable of churning out at least 7,000 new styles a day, backed by billions of dollars in advertising.
In its report Reimagining Growth Landscape Analysis, Textile Exchange examined the industry’s strenuous resistance to change. The tight alignment of measures of success with current business models made alternatives difficult to imagine. Tensions between long-term investment versus the requirements for immediate financial performance were another contributing factor - alongside the glaring lack of road maps and case studies, the complexity of existing supply chains (who will really feel what where?) and the comparative disinterest of most consumers to wider issues. Faced with these challenges, business leaders grasp eagerly at the concept of ‘green growth’, defined by the OECD as “fostering economic growth and development while ensuring that natural assets continue to provide the resources and environmental services on which our well-being relies”. Decarbonizing through new tech while revenues continue to rise may certainly sounds fantastic, but, as the report points out, impact is illusory. To work, green growth would need to happen everywhere - and it would need to happen immediately. The industry, in its current incarnation, gives no sign of being up to the task. In fact, the concept of green growth might actually hold things up. As Global Fashion Agenda’s Pulse of the Fashion Industry 2019 report pointed out, “fashion companies are not implementing sustainable solutions fast enough to counterbalance increasing negative environmental and social impacts of the rapidly growing fashion industry.”
Making degrowth a little less scary
That’s not the only problem with ‘green growth.’ By focusing on emissions, the theory fails to consider other elements of a wider material footprint including land use and accompanying biodiversity and animal loss, water use, and minerals and rare Earth elements. Plus, even if a company is making things efficiently, with ‘better’ materials, it’s probably still making too much. As Kate Raworth, author of the seminal Doughnut Economics: 7 ways to think like a 21st century economist, writes, “Unending growth cannot be decoupled from resource use on anything like the scale required to bring us safely back within planetary boundaries.” In current circumstances, this kind of ommission cannot be tolerated.
A more nuanced understanding of degrowth might help. It exists already. When economist Jason Hickel published Less is More: How Degrowth will Save the World, in 2021, he defined degrowth as “a planned reduction of energy and resource use designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being.” Reductions would take place mainly in high income nations and in those sectors where there is most ecological damage and highest volumes of unnecessary consumption (hello, fashion). Certain developing economies would still have space to grow relative to planetary boundaries to meet basic human needs. Green growth would even be encouraged, albeit in areas such as renewables or regenerative farming.
Expressed this way, degrowth sounds eminently reasonable, particularly in the face of planetary collapse, but fashion and other systems based upon growth models have yet to take up the challenge. To address this, Textile Exchange’s report outlines ten pathways for business, routes to regenerative economies and post-growth global futures. In materials, for example, the report points out that “limits on resource consumption in line with planetary boundaries will help support reduction in the number of new items produced in the industry.” Without question, new virgin fossil-based resources must be dispensed with, in favour of sustainably sourced renewables or closed loop recycled resources. Durability, transparency and traceability become vital in the conception and production of new clothes, alongside reducing the number of items produced. The report recommends actively exploring the potentials of circular business models over new product creation, while shifting to other forms of ownership and governance. That last is key: “governance structures should be in service of purpose and innovative in design—such as to be democratic, inclusive, collaborative, decentralized, networked, and adaptive.”
Plagued by murky supply chains, fashion is far from meeting its responsibility to respect human rights as outlined by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Rather than paying lip service to those toiling in fashion’s service, the report demands decent work, living wages - yes - but also respecting land rights and “ensuring equitable wealth distribution systems are in place to improve livelihoods and ensure global and intergenerational equality.” Bringing rightsholder voices into decision-making processes at all levels is crucial for a just transition.
Fashion drives desire for the arguably unnecessary by exquisite marketing. Imagine what could be achieved with campaigns that create alternative cultures, bringing shoppers on board, enough for them to want to pay for clothes produced equitably? This means ditching ads that promote obsolescence and overconsumption alongside recalibrating success metrics “to prioritize well-being and prosperity for all stakeholder groups over the long-term, considering both a social foundation and an ecological ceiling.” Sounds dense, but if any industry can make complex ideas look good, it’s fashion.
Without business and government support, however, all this is just talk. “Financial actors will need to play a pivotal role in moving to a future industry that appropriately balances environmental, social, and financial outcomes,” says Textile Exchange. “Internally, this is about a less siloed approach to profit and loss — taking an expanded accounting approach to consider the wider costs and benefits from an environmental and social perspective of such change.” It continues: “Blended finance models, combining public and private capital, could help de-risk investments and encourage systemic change. This should include phasing out financing for unsustainable practices, such as extensive use of virgin fossil-based resources, business models based on rapid production cycles, oversupply, low-quality garments, and planned obsolescence.” The report also recommends moving away from short-term thinking towards longer-term and broader measures of success.
Calls to government
Creating an enabling policy environment will require a critical mass of businesses that both demand and support policy that facilitates transition: “This is critical to ensuring the level playing field necessary to achieve the paradigm shift required, ultimately enabling the resiliency of businesses and the industry at large.” Education comes into play; making sure policymakers understand (and understand viscerally) the impacts of the industry so that legislation strikes the right balance between aspirational and realistic. Business as usual must be confronted. There are real people, lands and animals who are being affected by bad choices. “Corporate advocacy needs to happen just as strongly as those fighting to resist it or protect their short-term interests, ensuring those organizations doing so are scrutinized and challenged.”
Recommendations for next steps include multi-stakeholder dialogue and action, reduction targets, research and policy papers. And concrete responses. While there is no suggestion that one solution will fit all, though many are interdependent or can be gradually introduced, what is clear - again - is that they need to happen. And where issues of planetary survival and the mass deaths of humans and more-than-human animals don’t seem to have shifted the dial, perhaps the business case may. As the authors put it: “Addressing the growth imperative should be seen as not only necessary for the future of the planet and its people, but also for the survival of the fashion, apparel, and textile industry itself.”
The report charts bleak outcomes for inaction, from competitive and reputational loss and the sheer cost of failures to meet what positive incoming policies there are to - far more crucially - the impossibility of performing business-as-usual on a collapsing planet. According to Cornell University’s Global Labour Institute and Schroders, rising temperatures and intensified flooding could see export earnings from Bangladesh, Cambodia, Pakistan, and Vietnam plummet by USD $65 billion by 2030. These countries alone represent 18 percent of apparel exports and employ 10.6 million workers; the fallout wil be catastrophic. Put another way, how can workers work in 50 degree temperatures? How can cotton grow in lands that are either under water or on fire? How can products be transported through increasing incidences of extreme weather?
Ultimately, the report “outlines the need to move beyond incremental sustainability efforts and to fundamentally redefine value creation, prioritizing environmental and social sustainability over the pursuit of perpetual growth”. After all, in climate and ecological breakdown, who really needs all this new clothing? The consumer - or the companies that make them? Textile Exchange references the 2021 landmark review, The Economics of Biodiversity, which makes clear that “sustainable development has to mean leaving behind at least as large a stock of assets as that which it inherits — in other words, taking depreciation of natural capital into account, which GDP ignores.”
“Arguably, the view of the economy as external to the environment may have been comparatively harmless so long as the biosphere was more than able to supply the demands humanity made of it,” reflected the report’s author Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta. “That simply is not the case any longer, and has not been for many decades.” The truth is, the time to take action was 30 years ago but, for lives present and future, better late than never. Time - still, but only just - for fashion to step up.
Further reading: Bjorkskov, K. Why doughnut economics and the wellbeing economy won’t drive transformation, Illuminem Magazine. March 11, 2025. https://illuminem.com/illuminemvoices/why-doughnut-economics-and-the-wellbeing-economy-wont-drive-transformation
