What happened to sustainability?

Brands used to love talking about their sustainable initiatives. Why did they stop?

Picture: BooHoo

In August 2022, an LA Times investigation revealed that Kourtney Kardashian Barker, along with a list of other celebrities, had exceeded her monthly water allowance on several occasions amid a devastating drought in Southern California. One month later, the eldest Kardashian sister had some news. She was the new ‘sustainability ambassador’ for BooHoo, one of Britain’s biggest fast fashion retailers.

Obviously, there was a backlash. Here was a millionaire with a private jet posing in cheap clothes in an attempt to greenwash a brand that uploaded more than 700 new items to its website every week. ‘Good news for people who like being lied to,’ read one Guardian piece on the collaboration.

When you’re as rich as Kardashian Barker, you live in a world with less friction. Things happen easily. Maybe that’s why she thought that a fashion collection and a couple of social media posts could bring real change to an industry that’s responsible for a tenth of global greenhouse gas emissions. In an Instagram post following the announcement, she sounds genuine.

‘I went back and forth about doing this collection with @boohoo,’ she wrote. ‘I thought about the attention this collaboration would bring to people who may otherwise have no idea about the impacts of fast fashion on our planet. I thought about how pushing Boohoo to make some initial changes and then holding them accountable to larger change would be impactful.’

It’s earnest enough. I think she means what she says! Amid all the opinion pieces denouncing the absurdity of the collaboration, the partnership was pretty notable. A reality TV star with more than 200 million followers was writing about ‘the impacts of fast fashion on our planet’ in an Instagram post accompanied by a picture of her in a shiny black mac and sunglasses. If anything signalled that sustainability had moved into the mainstream, it was this.

Sustainability is, broadly, about making choices that are mindful of environmental impact, but the beige Instagram posts captioned with #sustainability conceal the concept’s more existential connotations: sustainability is the ability to sustain ourselves over a long period of time, which really means using resources in a way that doesn’t lead to the end of humanity.

In the 2010s, minimalist blogs and aesthetic Instagram feeds turned concepts like zero waste and sustainability into an aspirational lifestyle. Blogger Lauren Singer gave a Ted Talk about living so minimally that all her waste squeezed into a single mason jar. The video has 4.6 million views on YouTube. Vegan influencers shared recipes for energy balls and promoted vanilla-flavoured protein powders. Teenagers filmed thrift hauls and put ‘slow fashion’ in their social media bios. As it became more widespread, sustainability came to be represented by a series of things: moon cups, cotton tote bags, shampoo bars, jars filled with lentils, nutritional yeast.

Then, big brands started to bite. It’s hard to say precisely why fast fashion retailers decided to cash in on this trend, given the near impossibility of claiming sustainability while churning out new lines every week. Maybe it was the appealing visuals of girls in yoga pants and linen dresses; maybe it was the market research firms who said that Gen Z cared about ethical consumption.

The major retailers usually took one of two approaches to sustainability marketing. They either made big pledges – Arket said it would use ‘100 percent more sustainably sourced materials by 2030’, and Zara promised to only produce cotton, linen and polyester that's organic, sustainable or recycled by 2025 – or they released ‘sustainable’ lines, such as ASOS’s ‘Circular Collection’ or PrettyLittleThing’s recycled range. H&M went especially gungho on the whole thing: in 2019 alone, it published 12 press releases about their sustainability initiatives.

Smaller brands also jumped on the bandwagon. Tala, the fitness brand owned by influencer Grace Beverley, was all about sustainability when it first launched in 2019. Its first Instagram post was a pastel pink square with the words ‘We are sustainable’ and its website tagline was ‘Sustainable style without compromise’.

Launching in 2022, the Kourtney BooHoo collaboration was, in retrospect, pretty late to the sustainability party. By that point, the aesthetics had moved away from granola and organic linen. The marketing photos for the partnership were sexy and editorial, designed to appeal to a mass audience. The collaboration didn’t mark the start of a sleek new era of sustainable fashion, though. Rather, it marked the trend’s peak, just before it all went downhill.

Today, the ‘Sustainability’ page has vanished from BooHoo's website. When Kardashian Barker released a second collection with the brand last year, environmental impact was barely mentioned. The last time H&M issued a press release with the word ‘sustainability’ in the headline was more than two years ago, and the Conscious Collection – its range of recycled and organic clothes – is no more. The ‘Sustainability Fact Sheet’ link that used to live at the bottom of Arket’s homepage has disappeared. Even Tala, while still trying to push itself as an ethical brand, has wiped out any specific references to sustainability in its marketing. Its website tagline now reads ‘Activewear you’ll feel good in, and good about.’

Part of the reason that so many brands have rolled back their sustainability marketing is not because of a shift in cultural tastes, but a more complicated web of legal restrictions. In 2022, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) banned a series of HSBC adverts. It wasn’t because the adverts were false: HSBC said it was ‘helping to plant 2 million trees’ and ‘provide up to $1 trillion in financing and investment globally to help our clients transition to net zero’, both of which were true statements. ASA, though, said that while these were true statements, they were also misleading ones, because as well as its tree-planting and net-zero-funding initiatives, HSBC is also one of the world’s biggest fossil fuel funders. ‘We did not consider consumers would know that was the case,’ ASA said.

Legislation is slowly catching up, too. The UK’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act came into force in May. Although it doesn’t mention greenwashing specifically, it gives the Competitions and Markets Authority (the CMA) the power to fine companies up to 10% of their annual turnover if they breach consumer protection laws. That means that companies like HSBC who promote misleading or exaggerated adverts about sustainability could face a substantial financial penalty, rather than just a slap on the wrist.

Corporate circles describe the tightening of laws and the stricter enforcement as ‘greenhushing’. They say that companies are now hesitant to mention sustainability in their marketing campaigns. A survey by South Pole, a climate consultancy based in Switzerland, found that 70% of companies who had previously been open about sustainability were now hiding their climate commitments.

So, that’s one explanation: brands were lying, then they got scared that they were going to get caught lying, so they stopped. But still — there are plenty of companies who risk huge fines because they know that if they don’t get caught, they’ll make a lot of money. So why not take the risk now? I think it’s because the reward is smaller. In other words, I think consumer tastes have changed.

Simply: a lot of us are poorer. We have less disposable income. On a practical level, this changes our spending habits. We might be less inclined to pay a premium for clothes made fairly, or not have the bandwidth to be able to make such a decision. Sustainability marketing isn’t as effective if all consumers are looking for is a cheap sparkly dress to cheer them up. But it’s not just about the clothing that we’re able to buy. I think the cost of living crisis has taken the sheen out of sustainability too. It’s lost its glamorous edge.

Trends like sustainability and minimalism appeal to upper and middle class women for the same reasons that upper and middle class women find themselves caught up in diet culture. It’s about control. In The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf writes that our collective pursuit of female thinness ‘is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience.’ Sustainability is the same; it’s a way to demonstrate obedience. The lifestyle is only desirable when it’s a choice. If you can’t buy ten new luxury makeup products every month, you’re poor. If you can afford that expense, but choose not to partake, you’re virtuous. You are, as all women are told they should be, in control of your impulses.

Frequenting charity shops, mending clothes, selling unwanted items online: these ‘sustainability hacks’ no longer feel like a virtue or an aesthetic. They’re another reminder of a hard, mundane life.