A co-authored piece from Marcel Le Roux, strategic engagement and partnerships lead at IOSH [pictured], and Daniel Hatton, founder of the Commonwealth Fashion Council, on moving the debate beyond whether fashion is recyclable or durable, asking whether the people throughout its lifecycle are protected.
Against the backdrop of today’s social media society, a garment can become a must-have almost overnight. One post becomes a trend, a trend translates to thousands of orders and, almost as rapidly, attention moves on. Yet fashion is not made at the speed of a social media feed; each garment must still be sourced, dyed, cut, sewn, finished, packaged and transported.
This growing phenomenon has established an immediate symbiotic relationship between online influence and fast-moving demand, hiding the instant supply-chain pressure and the workers behind the final product. Inevitably, the designer garment that drives your TikTok ‘For You Page’ for a week straight is then reincarnated into various iterations sold by fast fashion titans, including Shein or the TikTok shop itself.
Fashion cannot become truly circular while its culture continues to reward disposability, and it cannot become truly sustainable unless it properly protects the people who make, move, repair and recycle our clothes.
Circular ambitions VS disposable culture
Even though the immediacy of social media continues to be stitched within its fabric, the external appearance of the industry appears modern and on a mission for sustainability. There is a growing focus on circularity, recycling, resale and garment durability through leading influencers championing a variety of methods, including the popularisation of charity shops, DIY clothing and even raiding mum and dad’s wardrobes from the 80’s and 90’s.
However, the challenge to influencers in this space is embedding this beyond the seams of audiences of clinging to microtrends, fuelled particularly by frequent hauls, ‘must-have’ lists and changing shop collections. Common formats across fashion influencing include keeping audiences up to date on popular retail stock with Primark being a prime example, given their fast-moving seasons and clothing collections.
The speed and garment-led approach to fashion influencing positions novelty, volume and constant purchasing as desirable. Desirability remains the beating heart of influencing, which again, provides a challenging task for influencers to breakdown their content and shift what they advertise as ‘ideals’ to their audiences.
Reframe influencers as part of the solution
If influencers can make a new product desirable, they can also make repeating outfits, repairing garments, shopping second-hand and asking questions about production desirable. Influence is not inherently part of fashion’s problem. Properly directed, it can become one of the industry’s most effective tools for changing expectations; the global market size for influencer marketing sat at $21 billion at the end of 2023, which will have grown exponentially to 2026.
With the average person spending 2 hours and 24 minutes on social media every day, fashion influencers hold an important role in being able to step away from simply selling individual products and instead, shaping what is socially acceptable. Challenging haul and consumerism culture can shift attention towards reuse and conscious consumption.
To this end, de-influencing has started to breakdown certain high-cost consumption, questioning excessive consumption. However, this has not been transformative for the industry as the act merely redirects consumers from one product to another, perhaps a cheaper option.
When a garment is extraordinarily cheap or available extraordinarily quickly, we should ask who elsewhere in the supply chain may be absorbing the true cost. That cost may be reflected in environmental damage, but it can also be reflected in production pressure, excessive working hours, worker wellbeing or unsafe processes.
Travelling back through supply chains
A social media post does not directly determine conditions in a factory. But, when the fashion model depends on immediate availability, extremely low process and constantly changing collections, someone must meet those expectations. Without responsible planning and effective oversight, that pressure can travel backward through the supply chain.
Typically, discussions around circular fashion concentrate on materials, emissions, waste, recycling, repair and production lifespan. Albeit essential, materials do not move through a circular system by themselves. People source fibres, process fabrics, handle chemicals, operate machinery, construct garments, transport products, repair clothes and process textile waste.
Our new toolkit argues that choices about materials, suppliers, production processes, pricing and deadlines can affect health, safety and wellbeing throughout supply chains. A garment cannot be considered truly sustainable if extending its life comes at the expense of the lives or health of the people who sit behind it.
The toolkit
Our toolkit acts a constructive answer to the concerns raised across fast-fashion influencing. Developed by IOSH and Leeds Beckett University, the kit aids independent designers, and small fashion businesses in better understanding their influence over worker health, safety and wellbeing.
We’ve considered the risks at the design stage, taking accountability through setting clear expectations for suppliers, mitigating risk by checking claims and seeking evidence. To better conditions, we suggest working with good-quality suppliers and workers to improve practice and considering people alongside cost through collaborative ethical measuring.
Independent designers may not control every stage of an international supply chain, but they can ask better questions, set realistic deadlines, seek credible evidence and use their purchasing decisions to encourage improvement.
What responsible influence looks like
Influencers in the fashion space are facing a pivotal moment with an opportunity to disrupt the ever-growing reliance on micro-trends with increasingly shorter lead times. This could potentially look like a reduction in haul-style content that normalises, and therefore, encourages excessive purchasing. A switch to promoting restyling, repair, resale, rental and garment longevity could replace this content.
Transparency across their content and influencing might also lead to consumers asking more questions about where their garments are made if this is echoed through collaborations between brands and influencers. Additionally, making audiences aware when they cannot verify a brand’s sustainability claims initiates that accountability transfer up to the brands providing garments.
Designers and brands can translate accountability into their operations, considering realistic production times, understanding who’s involved at each stage of the supply chain, whilst factoring in health, safety and wellbeing into sourcing decisions.
All these actions equal greater interconnected longevity across the fashion industry through three facets: product, business and human. In making greater changes in these areas, garments will become durable, repairable, reused and valued for longer. Designers, suppliers and brands will become significantly more resilient, trusted and able to operate sustainably over time whilst those working on and with garments will feel safe and healthy. Work for them will not cause preventable injury, ill health or damage to wellbeing.
Longevity in fashion cannot describe the garment alone. It must also describe the businesses, communities and working lives that make the garment possible.
In summary
Influence helped make speed, novelty and abundance desirable. It can now help make care, transparency, longevity and decent work desirable too. The fashion industry does not need less creativity or influence. It needs both to be directed towards a model that creates lasting value without causing preventable harm.
A circular fashion economy must keep garments and materials in use, but it should also protect every person whose work keeps that circle moving.
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