What is Restorative Production?
If you are an avid fashion consumer or work within the industry, you likely understand the massive environmental footprint that the fashion and apparel sectors wreak on our planet. In fact, the fashion industry is the 3rd largest polluting in the world. Recently it seems the entire fashion community has converged around a growing call to become more “sustainable”. Over the last few years, brands large and small have been touting their “sustainable practices” to increasingly concerned customers. In this cacophony of “green marketing” the word “sustainable” has all but lost its meaning, greenwashed and diluted into mostly empty marketing ploys.
Often in this context, sustainability focuses on fashion’s environmental footprint with concerns centered around the water consumption in preparing fabrics and denim, factory and dye pollution, and the increasing amount of end use waste (discarded clothing and unused textile excess) that fills our warehouses and landfills. However restorative production implies that we must also consider fashion’s social and humanitarian footprints.
While the globalization of the fashion industry has brought opportunity to many emerging markets, it has not charted that path responsibly. Workers right violations are rampant in countries such as India, Bangladesh and Myanmar where intricate webs of subcontracting and outsourcing have created gaping loopholes in accountability. This was tragically spotlighted globally after the Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh, where a factory complex collapsed killing over one thousand garment workers inside. Many big box brands and retailers were able to skirt blame by severing ties with these “contractors” while only middlemen and factory owners were prosecuted. Current trends suggest this system continues to spread globally, largely unreformed.
Globalization has also decimated once vibrant small towns and economies across the western world. I happen to live next to one in Florence Italy. Prato was once one of the premiere fabric manufacturing regions in the world. However, by the early 2000’s, many textile factories were closed as brands consolidated their production in the far east and a recession waned in Europe. The 2008 financial crisis only exacerbated the decline. In an eleven-year period, Prato’s textile mills were reduced to almost half. This void was filled by temporary and often illegal foreign manufacturers attracting migrant labor at wages far lower than those established by Italian businesses. These practices are still common and damaging to local economies as they depress regional wages, exploit migrant workers and create tension between immigrant and native communities.
Restorative production is a commitment to creating equitable environmental, social and humanitarian supply chains and production practices that not only produce a net zero negative outcome but create positive ones. When we talk about restorative justice, the work is focused on repairing and rebuilding relationships, lives and communities. And so, we must approach reforming our fashion production processes in the same manner.
Restorative production prioritizes material and product development from consumer waste and the disposal of excess materials in compostable and recyclable processes in order to reduce global waste instead of adding to it. It necessitates responsible manufacturing, in clean facilities, with fair and equitable wages and working conditions for employees. Restorative production also considers how we can produce locally, supporting families and small businesses in our own communities while reducing carbon emissions from international freight forwarding. This process asks us to use our businesses and products as opportunities to design solutions to the inequities and pain points we see in our own communities, while compelling our customers to understand the true cost of creating the products they love.
If you truly look for them, you can start to see parts of this throughout the industry. Independent designers working with indigenous art collectives, organizations that providing mentorship and training opportunities to refugees and disadvantaged workers, textiles produced from plastic and ocean waste.
Calling for broad reforms in restorative production rather than just “sustainable practices” provides a defined global framework for more revolutionary production practices. The word “sustainable” is defined as; pertaining to a system that maintains its own viability by using techniques that allow for continual reuse. It implies that we must only alter our current system to allow for more regenerative practices. However, most would argue that the entire fashion system is broken. It does not merely need to be reformed but completely reimagined. Instead of improving what is, we need to envision the radical transformation of what could be. If we do that, we can build a fashion production system that not only sustains itself materially but builds bridges, lifts up communities and actively repairs our world.
