Welcome to the final episode in our arc on the fashion industry, where we ask an uncomfortable question: are we trying to make fashion more sustainable, or are we mostly trying to manage the side effects of a system that produces more clothing than the world actually needs?

Over the past few weeks we've explored the industry from several different angles. We interviewed Kristina Elinder Liljas at the Apparel Impact Institute about climate risk and why sustainability is increasingly becoming a competitiveness issue.

We sat down with Áine Clarke at the Business and Human Rights Centre to discuss to discuss labour and human rights and the social realities embedded within global supply chains. We also spoke to two industry specialists, discussing the potential for fashion circularity with Niccolò Cipriani from Rifò and the world of deadstock and recommerce with Kanchan Bharwani from Empire Apparel.

At first glance, there is no obvious reason why those conversations should belong together except that they’re all aspects of the fashion industry. The further we got into the series though, the more we realised that sustainable fashion is not really a story about clothes.

It's a story about how an industrial system optimised for speed, volume and cost interacts with water, energy, labour, materials and waste. Once you see that, many of the industry's sustainability challenges stop looking like isolated problems and start looking like the consequences of the system doing exactly what it was designed to do.

The choice is not between cheap clothing and expensive clothing. The real question is which costs are currently included in the price and which costs are not. A garment can be inexpensive because the system producing it has become genuinely more efficient, but it can also be inexpensive because part of the cost has been transferred elsewhere — to workers, communities, ecosystems and future generations.

Fashion sustainability is often presented as a question of products but our conversations suggest it may be a question of systems and processes. And if that is true, building a more sustainable fashion industry may require far more than making better clothes. It may require asking whether many of the industry's environmental and social challenges are not accidental side effects, but the consequences of a system that has become exceptionally good at delivering exactly what it was designed to deliver.

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