Is it possible to regulate our emotional attachment to fashion?

This article is part of our Vogue Business membership package. To enjoy unlimited access to our weekly Sustainability Edit, which contains Member-only reporting and analysis, sign up for membership here. You can measure the physical durability of clothing by how it stands up to wear and tear, how well it washes, and how it snaps back into shape after being stretched. But how long clothing is deemed desirable and socially relevant — and therefore more likely to be worn — also matters when it comes to determining a product’s sustainable lifecycle. So how do you measure its emotional durability? It’s a question EU policymakers will have to answer as they add the concept — more formally known as extrinsic durability — to the raft of criteria they’re seeking to regulate to bring fashion’s escalating impacts under control. The idea was first proposed during the final stages of European Council discussions on the revision of the Waste Framework Directive (WFD) in late June. The discussions focused on Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) policies, which require producers to pay fees to deal with end-of-life textile waste, in relation to physical durability and sustainability markers like recyclability and reusability. However, some experts say that focusing solely on physical durability doesn’t get to the heart of the issue of overconsumption, and that brands should also be held responsible for the fast-paced trend cycle that encourages consumers to buy — and discard — more. “Problems such as tearing and discolouration are not the only reason — and maybe not even the first reason — we buy new clothes. Fast fashion’s commercial and marketing strategies are largely responsible for the current unsustainable consumption level,” says Flore Berlingen, advocacy officer for the French coalition En Mode Climat, which has been campaigning for the inclusion of extrinsic durability in regulation. “We ask for a legal framework because voluntary initiatives cannot be enough, [and] the least environmentally friendly choices give brands a competitive advantage in the current market conditions.” Berlingen admits that creating such a framework will be tricky as there are so many factors at play, but the coalition proposes to penalise the commercial practices specific to fast fashion, which are broadly agreed to be among key drivers in reducing emotional durability. They include placing high volumes of product on the market, frequently releasing new products, and using promotional strategies that create a false sense of urgency to buy. It’s far from cut and dry, however. Emotional durability is in many ways an abstract factor that hinges upon myriad social, psychological, cultural and personal drivers. Financially penalising brands for volume placed on the market doesn’t necessarily address the unsustainable nature of the trend cycle itself and everything that feeds into it. “We’re looking for status, we’re looking for discovery, we’re not in total control of what we desire. If we don’t pay enough attention to what we want and why we want it, we just tend to crave for what’s next,” says Kevin Straszburger, co-founder of denim upcycling community platform Objet. “Regulation is an important tool, but the main change has to come from the culture,” he continues. “Breaking free from that cycle is challenging”. Measuring emotional durability Distilling what drives a consumer to discard perfectly good clothes, at a rate of 11 kilos per year, is elusive. The EU and France have tried to make it measurable. France has defined emotional durability according to five criteria, says Mathilde Mével, head of sustainability at digital LCA platform PEFtrust: the availability and visibility of traceability information, raw materials, the duration of commercialisation, range spreads (or how many products a brand has on sale), and repairability. Together these criteria become an “extrinsic multiplier” which, alongside an intrinsic durability multiplier and overall repairability multiplier is used to calculate the duration of wear against a baseline average number of wears as defined under the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) methodology. Within the five criteria are several assumptions. It is assumed, for instance, that the more a consumer knows about the provenance of a garment the longer they will keep it, that consumers will wear natural fibres for longer, and that if a garment costs more to buy a consumer is more likely to repair it. They may be fair assumptions to make — why would you repair something when you could replace it for half the price? — but none are set in stone as empirical fact. France also has introduced a national anti-fast fashion bill, specifically crafted to penalise fast fashion’s commercial practices, which proposes to apply penalties of up to €10 per fast fashion garment by 2030, and ban advertising such products in the country, including influencer promotion. Like the EU, it will apply criteria such as volumes produced and frequency of product turnover. Both the EU and the French methodologies are already live on the PEFtrust platform for brands who wish to make the calculations, but Mével stresses that they’re subject to change at the hands of policymakers. On the French side, there is ongoing consultation with different brands and platforms who have pointed to factors such as the size of the brands as worthy of being accounted for in calculations, and an update from the government is expected in the coming weeks. Although, given the snap national elections, the proposal is effectively on standby. Reaching a consensus For now, there’s no one way to measure our emotional attachment to our clothing, and how that impacts how long we keep pieces or how we discard them. Brands in the crossfire are also making their own cases. Mével reveals that the fast fashion brands the platform works with are largely accepting of the fact that they will have a lower score due to their overarching business model, but push back against other criteria. Synthetics, for example, score a zero in France’s current methodology even if they’re recycled. Is it reasonable to argue that if transparency improves emotional durability, so might the use of recycled textiles? The future for this new niche of fashion regulation is hazy but there is hope in what campaigners have been asking for — a focus on product volumes and turnover plus promotional duration and tactics — which appears to be the foundation upon which future emotional durability regulation will be built. “Of course, it is not perfect, but it is meaningful. And we hope it will contribute to building a policy consensus on the matter,” says Berlingen. Sign up to receive the Vogue Business newsletter for the latest luxury news and insights, plus exclusive membership discounts. Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.

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