For most people, fashion and activism are worlds apart. Fashion is seen as frivolous, vain, addictive and of course, fun! The purview of socialites, influencers and fashionistas. Activism, on the other hand, is serious work and in the popular imagination, involves khaddar-clad radicals holding placards outside the local press club.

But fashion is a very serious business. It is a major driver of the economy, with textiles forming the largest manufacturing industry in Pakistan. This makes fashion activism critical, because a systemic change is needed if we are to thrive in a rapidly changing global economy, without the scars of worker exploitation and abuse of natural resources.

This is a critical issue for Pakistan, where textiles make up the bulk of the exports. According to the government, it contributes almost 10 percent to the GDP, while providing employment to approximately 40 percent of the workforce.

COMPOUNDING THE CLIMATE CRISIS

Despite contributing less than one percent to global greenhouse gas emissions, Pakistan ranks eighth among the countries most vulnerable to long-term climate risks. The country faces severe challenges from climate change, including frequent floods, melting glaciers, droughts, erratic weather behaviour causing troubling changes in agricultural patterns, reduction in fresh water supply and loss of biodiversity. These environmental stresses threaten to reduce Pakistan’s GDP by at least 18-20 percent by 2050, according to a 2022 report of the World Bank.

It is clear these issues need urgent redress, but could a change in our approach to mainstream fashion be one of the answers?

After all, that is the intrinsically wonderful thing about fashion: by its very nature, it is always changing and perpetually ripe to be disrupted. On its best days, it can be an innovative force for self-expression, decent livelihoods, inclusion and visibility, preservation and celebration of cultural heritage and a force to reach both cultural and sustainability goals.

Despite this transformative personal and political potential, the fashion industry today is the third most polluting in the world, producing nearly 10 percent of the global annual carbon footprint, according a 2019 report of the World Bank.

Disconcertingly, high greenhouse gas emissions are not the only problem: the sector also consumes enough water to quench the thirst of five million people every year, while creating millions of tonnes of plastic and other waste that pollute our air and oceans.

Cotton, a beloved natural fibre that currently dominates half the world’s market, and its complex environmental footprint have come under greater scrutiny in recent years. Its farming practices rely heavily on use of water, pesticides and fertilisers, which strain natural resources and threaten biodiversity and human health. 

Other mainstream options include synthetic fibres that release non-biodegradable microplastics and petrochemicals into oceans and food chains, insidiously worming their way into even fetal bloodstreams.

DARK SIDE OF FAST FASHION

For a culture where every child knows that a Royal Dansk tin serves out its true purpose as a long-term eclectic storage unit and no self-respecting plastic theli is truly single-use in a desi household, we seem to struggle with heightened consumption when it comes to clothing. There is a growing trend of seeing outfits as disposable and designed for the curation of that perfect but one-off, never to be repeated look.

In the bigger cities, we buy at an unprecedented rate, because we can, or because an influencer or celebrity on Instagram tells us to. Also, because it’s cheap, and not because we need or even want it.

Meanwhile, the world’s fast fashion obsession is destroying the environment, polluting drinking water and also eroding artisanal, heritage skills, handed down through generations in communities across the world, and of particular significance to us in Pakistan.

So many people depend on those skills to feed their families and yet, their future seems uncertain. It is odd to see craft and artisanship being undervalued in mainstream markets in our country, while historic crafts are collected and displayed in museums and photographed for coffee table books.

What happened to the days when people craved a handmade mulmul [muslin] kurta versus a mass-produced, twinning everyone else, print lawn shirt for the summer?

HONOURING INDIGENOUS CRAFT

Pakistani fashion manufacturers are under pressure to embrace more sustainable and ethical business practices from markets in the West. There is also a growing trend of combining traditional handcrafted techniques in these markets and positioning craft as the new luxury. However, these changes are not reflected on Pakistan’s high streets.

While it is important that Pakistan leverages this as an export opportunity, there is also a need for craft artisanship to be revalued through partnership of tradition with sophisticated design that can honour and value the history of craft and its makers in the local context.

And while culture and heritage are priceless, the true value is that it brings self-sufficiency to disadvantaged groups. The beauty of handmade items is that each piece is unique and has its own story. And the world is waking up to this.

What happened to fast food needs to happen to fast fashion. It needs to become undesirable and uncool. We’ve all heard the quote — fast fashion isn’t free, somewhere, someone is paying.

In an era of horrifying preventable tragedies, such as the factory collapse in Rana Plaza in Bangladesh or the factory fire in Karachi’s Baldia Town, we know that such ferocious production — and consumption, followed inevitably by tragic waste — is not sustainable and cannot be a fashion future to which the world aspires.

A CASE FOR CONSCIENTIOUS CONSUMPTION

Data shows that consumers today purchase 60 percent more clothing than they did a generation ago, resulting in waste due to early discardment, overproduction and cheap fabrication.

The good thing is that as consumers we have the incredible power to vote with our wallets. In the past, one couldn’t pick up a kurta on yet another sale for Rs1200, which meant our grandmothers had less clothes than we do. It also means that they were likely to be more selective and discerning in their purchases and took greater care of them. Some of them were beautiful enough to be passed on. How many of our clothes are?

The current greed-driven consumer culture has turned us all into passive, mindless zombies, buying things we don’t really like, hardly wear and get rid of within a year. But if every purchase is riddled with complex moral questions (is it bad to buy leather or worse even to buy its ugly synthetic twin pleather), how can the average consumer keep up?

Fast fashion’s defenders make the argument that it creates much-needed employment and is more accessible in terms of cost and size for the average consumer. While there is truth in these statements and higher priced clothes don’t necessarily equate to more sustainably, ethically produced ones, these facts do not exist in a vacuum — the legal, ethical and environmental impacts of the scale of fashion production are multilayered and complex.

While fast fashion may have democratised access to trendy clothing, a brutal price is still paid by the poorest of makers in countries such as Pakistan, and by the planet, which is choking on discarded textiles and waste.

Consumers now recognise the environmental harm and the human rights abuses behind this level of manufacturing. In a world marked by growing inequality, consumption has become a way to seek power, find meaning and form identity — a race no one can win. So how do we navigate this reality? Where do personal and corporate responsibilities intersect?

The tide is slowly turning. Greater public awareness of the climate crisis has started to pressure large retailers towards ‘green’ production chains, but the bulk of the work is yet to be done.

If everyone started thinking more about the environment, treating their fellow human beings better and creating jobs for traditional artisans, we could be looking at a greener and more inclusive fashion in the future. With a more equitable set of policies and actions, the garment industry could lift millions of workers out of poverty and drive inclusive economic growth.

In our hearts, we all know what the right answer is. The revolution and the future of fashion await you!

The writer is a social scientist and runs Polly and Other Stories, a social enterprise that connects artisans in Pakistan to global markets

Published in Dawn, EOS, September 8th, 2024