Material Honesty And Production Volumes: Two New Transparency Frontiers

Fashion has been trending towards transparency for a while. Not-for-profit Fashion Revolution released its first Fashion Transparency Index back in 2016, as part of its contribution to clearing the smoke, mirrors, oversights, and gross breaches of duty of care to accumulate in the lead up to the Rana Plaza factory collapse in 2013. The number of brands in the Index’s scope has risen from 40 to 250 in less than a decade, demonstrating a growing mandate for supply chain visibility across all levels of fashion, from luxury to mass market. The appetite from brands to provide that visibility isn’t quite as voracious, however, as just 61% of the 250 brands contacted actually participated in the 2023 Index, which is the body’s most recent report.

This sustained transparency push from Fashion Revolution and organisations like it has undoubtedly moved the needle over time, but with each win – tier one supplier lists appearing on brand websites or human rights due diligence disclosures, for instance – comes a new facet of the industry that NGOs, activists and, increasingly, policy makers and legislators, are set on demystifying, unpicking, and regulating.

In that ongoing redrawing of battle lines, two key areas are emerging as the new frontiers for transparency in fashion: material honesty and production volumes. Early fields of interest such as living wage data, supply chain mapping, and reshaping purchasing practices, focused primarily on social matters – which the industry has made disappointingly limited progress on – but these two new frontiers turn the spotlight towards the impact of material selection, utilisation, and yield – and the granular detail of how planning translates into production. It’s an unsurprising pivot from campaigners and policymakers, since the mounting physical burden of irresponsible production has become clear for all to see, piled in the desert and strewn across shorelines. 

What’s it made of – really?

‘Who made my clothes?’ is a simple question, but it has proved powerful  as a lever to apply pressure to brands to release details about their direct suppliers. Now, there’s a new question on people’s lips: what are my clothes made of? It’s equally simple on the surface, but the answer, currently, appears to be equally as opaque. 

Clothes, after all, are not homogenous things. They can be lacy, silky, fleecy, mesh, knit, crochet, soft, stretchy, vegan, recycled, waterproof – all of which is very descriptive when it comes to making a purchasing decision, but not particularly accurate from the perspective of transparency. 

As noble as the vision behind them might have been, the world of animal-free leather alternatives has done a lot to muddy the waters around what clothes and accessories are truly made of. Vague terms such as vegan leather, faux leather, and mushroom leather obfuscate the real material makeup of each specific product. So-called ‘vegan leather’ has been around for decades. Previously stylised as ‘pleather’ – until a successful rebrand when veganism skyrocketed in the early-mid 2010s – it is generally made of polyurethane (PU), polyvinyl chloride (PVC), or other fossil fuel-based plastics. But brands don’t fall over themselves to relay that information. Vegetarian brand Stella McCartney, for instance, describes the material used for its iconic Falabella bag as “Matte vegan Shaggy Deer fabric with semi-gloss grain”. Only clicking through onto product care reveals that it is, in fact, polyester (55% virgin, 45% post-consumer recycled).

Stella McCartney, I should point out, is a brand known for partnering with material innovation companies. And at its SS22 runway show, it launched the Frayme Mylo, “the world’s first-ever luxury bag crafted from mycelium – the root-like structures of fungi”. Mylo, which ceased production in summer 2023, was grown in a lab and touted as a bio-based wonder material, often referred to as mushroom leather. But for it to be strong and durable enough to use in a product, it needed a PU coating. 

Piñatex (‘pineapple leather’), Desserto (‘cactus leather’) and Vegea (‘grape leather’) all feature PU either as a coating or a blend too. It’s perhaps not coincidental that the wider commercialisation and industrialisation of these alternative materials has often stalled, since their final performance remains so reliant on existing synthetic – and petroleum-derived – additives and treatments.

As an example of where and why this matters: Danish brand Ganni has used Vegea for a number of footwear styles. Its Vegea sneaker is described as 70% Vegea, 30% calf leather, and Vegea, in turn, is described as “an innovative material characterised by the high content of vegetal, renewable and recycled raw materials: grape leftovers from winemaking, vegetal oils and natural fibres from agriculture.” The listing does not mention plastic, and Vegea does not allude to any plastic content on its own website, so a consumer would have to do their own independent research to discover that detail.

This is not intended as a “gotcha” for brands or their consumers, but it is representative of where the trend towards real material honesty and transparency originates. If an alternative material cannot meet performance, durability, comfort, or other related targets unadulterated, then this is a prime example of the importance of honesty, disclosure, and data-sharing.

Pushing for the truth

Vegan leathers, then, set the stage for what has since become a much wider  “material honesty” discussion, sparking many social media explainers as influencers and consumers began to pay more attention to how their products – and especially the composition of them – are sold to them. In October 2023, The Woolmark Company launched its ‘Filter by Fabric’ campaign. “Why should the fabrics that touch our skin every single day remain a mystery, hidden behind vague adjectives like silky, mesh, or fleece?” the company asks, claiming that they “cloak the truth”. Woolmark’s demand? Truthful product descriptions which allow consumers to filter by real fabric composition when shopping online. 

“It all started with a survey we did a couple of years ago,” Damien Pommeret, Regional Manager,  Western Europe at The Woolmark Company told me. “Less than a third of consumers are looking inside a garment at the real composition. They have a look at the outside of a product, or they look at a picture online and the description and then make their choice.”

Ostensibly, the Woolmark campaign is about allowing consumers to make purchases based upon fact, but there is a further driver – to reveal the volume of synthetics that are lurking in our clothes. “We’re a not-for-profit [with the objective of] promot[ing] natural fibre and wool. When you look at the fibre breakdown and the volumes that have dramatically increased since the 60s or 70s, it’s all plastic – and we know that 35% of the plastic in the oceans comes from the textile industry, from fashion,” says Pommeret. Indeed, 16-35% of microplastics released to the ocean each year are from textiles, and synthetics do dominate the fibre market, as both a result of their initial affordability (relative to natural cellulosic fibres) and the rise in consumer demand for garments that stretch as fashion products cross over with the performance attributes of outdoor and athletic gear. 

Volumes of synthetics produced, worldwide, overtook cotton in the mid-1990s and they’ve continued to skyrocket, to where they represented approximately 65% of global fibre production in 2022 (polyester alone makes up 54%) per the Textile Exchange Materials Market Report 2023. 

Despite the targeted nature of the campaign promoting Woolmark’s overarching aims, and the ulterior motive behind it, it is still a worthy one, as plastic’s presence in clothing unambiguously needs to be spotlighted and reduced for a raft of different environmental and biodiversity reasons. Textile Exchange has a “Climate+ strategy” with a goal of “guiding the industry towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions from fibre and raw material production by 45% by 2030”. It’s a nuanced and holistic strategy which does not seek to outright ban fibres – instead ensuring all are produced in a way that supports ecosystems and community. However, Beth Jensen, Director of Climate+ Impact at Textile Exchange is clear when she says, “it is important to note that for Textile Exchange, there is no debate over the industry’s need to move away from the extraction and use of new virgin fossil fuel-based fibres as rapidly as possible.”

Having accurate data and information, Jensen believes, can help in illustrating the urgency with which the industry should act, and in informing companies’ decision making. It may also impact consumer behaviour; according to Woolmark’s survey results, 60% of consumers are happy to make a positive, alternative choice when they are presented with accurate information.

The legality of language

Early legislative efforts for material honesty and specificity of marketing language come back, once again, to vegan leather. Portugal’s ban on the term ‘vegan leather’ came into force in January 2022, its use being considered deceptive and misleading. Leather industries in other European countries such as France and England have called for the same, citing consumer confusion as the primary culprit.

But the move is more of a boon for the leather industry in an ongoing battle against commercial rivals than it is a transparency win for consumers. In countries where terms like milk and ice cream cannot be used to describe non-dairy products, brands have simply come up with other creative names. Ice cream becomes ‘iced confection’, vegan cheese becomes ‘connoisseur slices’. They tell us as much about the ingredients as Stella McCartney’s vegan Shaggy Deer fabric description does about what the bag is made from. And the through-line from creative (or duplicitous, depending on your perspective) marketing in food and beverage, an extremely tightly-regulated industry, to the same in fashion – a historically loosely-regulated one – is likely to lead to even more consumer confusion in the pursuit of brand protection.

Case in point: the materials honesty conversation becoming couched in the industry’s ‘natural versus synthetic’ debate could ultimately hinder real progression towards transparency because it becomes more about outing certain fibres, protecting entrenched industries, and making oversimplified comparisons than it does about accurately communicating material content.

Adding it all up

The ‘who’s more sustainable than who?!’ argument bubbling under material honesty is rendered mostly moot, though, when we stack the scale of material impact alongside the skyscraper that is overproduction. An independent brand making 1,500 poly-blend items a year, for instance, has a lesser impact than a mass market brand making 750,000 organic cotton items a year, yet if the conversation stopped with materials, the outsider perception would be the reverse. Volume, in a very real way, is the villain.

Getting brands to disclose how much they make is no easy feat, however. Once again, Fashion Revolution has been pushing for brands to disclose their annual production volumes in its Transparency Index, but only a few brands and fashion groups are forthcoming with such information. The 2023 Index revealed that in the annual reporting period, Inditex produced over 565,000 tonnes worth of products, Adidas produced 482 million units and United Colors of Benetton produced 54 million garments. But still 88% of brands do not disclose their annual production volumes. And what proportion of those volumes were necessary to produce is an entirely different conversation.

Unlike the multi-tier supply chain, and the complexities of material compositions, though, production volumes and sales figures are two datapoints that fashion already holds and makes extensive use of.

“I think it’s really important also for people to recognise that this is information that all brands have readily available,” says Liz Ricketts, co-founder and executive director of The Or Foundation, a non-profit organisation based in Ghana which promotes a justice-led circular economy. “The sustainability movement has been asking for transparency on various data points for over a decade… and when it comes to making informed decisions about the waste management of products and about this hopeful transition to circularity, I would say the most important data point that we need is to understand how many garments exist right now.”

To this end, The Or Foundation launched its Speak Volumes campaign in November 2023 calling for brands to disclose their production volumes. Consumers were invited to call upon their three favourite brands to share their figures, and the organisation even enlisted the help of a textile zombie (performed by British artist Jeremy Hutchison) to deliver campaign letters to brands. The walking pile of clothes was an embodiment of the ecological and social burden of overproduction in the Global North places in the Global South when clothes are inevitably discarded and exported. 

The brands most nominated by consumers were H&M, Zara, and Shein (which reportedly makes as many as 10,000 new products each day) but they are yet to answer the call. Instead, unsurprisingly, it was smaller brands, with tighter holds on the relationship between demand and supply, who shared their figures. American sustainable luxury brand Collina Strada produced 20,000 pieces in 2022, British outdoor brand Finisterre produced 450,643, and fellow British brand Lucy & Yak produced 760,951. 

Finding the starting line

Speak Volumes is an offshoot of the broader Stop Waste Colonialism campaign, which seeks to create globally accountable Extended Producer Responsibility (helping to stop 15 million items per week being dumped at Kantamanto, a sprawling secondhand market in Ghana). In it, The Or Foundation calls for reduction targets for new clothing of at least 40% over five years, balanced with the increase of reuse and remanufacture of existing materials. 

Crucially, though, if we do not know the starting line, we cannot hold brands accountable for any proposed reduction in production – irrespective of what materials those new products are made from.

To that end, the Fashion Act, aka the Fashion Sustainability and Social Accountability Act, which targets brands selling in New York State, will require annual reporting to the attorney general of “the fashion seller’s annual volume of material produced, including breakdown by material type” if passed. 

The addition of a breakdown by material type – which would include fibre type and recycled content – would complement and contextualise material honesty, showing how significant, or not, a brand’s use of environmentally preferred materials is compared to total output. 

“It’s crazy that the industry does not already disclose this information,” says Maxine Bédat, founder of the New Standard Institute, and one of the industry figureheads behind the Act. “Total material volume in and of itself is a major issue because it directly relates to waste, it also directly relates to other impact areas like carbon and chemical impact. We have no way of knowing with any degree of precision what the true scale of the issue is and if, on that issue, we are moving in the right direction.”

“To reduce the emissions equation, companies have the following tools: energy changes in their supplier factories (principally at the mill), the fibre choice, and of course the sheer volume of material/garments they are producing. For companies that are driven by single use fashion, well I think they are going to have to reconsider their business model in order to achieve those targets,” Bédat continues, pinpointing exactly why many brands are so reticent to disclose – it would unequivocally illustrate the sheer ecological and economic scale of fashion’s overproduction problem, and would further make the case for a root and branch business model transformation. 

Brands may be reluctant to release their production volumes for the time being, but the pressure is on. The Or Foundation’s Speak Volumes social media posts were among the most-shared in the organisation’s history and as Pommeret points out, once something is regulated in one market, it tends to be “copy pasted” everywhere else (demonstrated by the domino effect of the UK’s Green Claims Code), so all eyes are on New York in 2024.

All of which is evidence that, whether we are talking about fibres or the more foundational question of how much product the industry really generates, the transparency landscape is evolving, and fast. With expectations growing, brands would do well to get ahead of these new demands before they become a serious reputational headache or an industry mandate.