Live Fashion and Degrowth Panel Discussion | Extinction Rebellion UK

The fashion industry produces up to 150 billion items of clothing a year, using excessive amounts of natural capital and bonded human labour, cutting a swathe of destruction across the natural world and emitting tonnes of greenhouse gases. Any lull in the industry created by the pandemic will be eliminated by a desperate scramble back to ‘normal’. Despite a plethora of frameworks and action plans, the industry is still nowhere near the level of carbon emissions it needs to reach in order to play a viable part in hitting the Paris Agreement goals.  Going back to business as usual will make this impossible. Now is the time to address the elephant in the room: that the fashion industry in the Global North is too wedded to models of exponential growth and profit to “mark its own homework” any longer. Or, according to Global Fashion Agenda’s 2019 Pulse Score, “findings demonstrate that fashion companies are not implementing sustainable solutions fast enough to counterbalance the negative environmental and s