H&M's on a mission to make sustainability fashionable

17 April 2016 - 02:00 By Aspasia Karras

Aspasia Karras recently travelled to Paris where she connected with the team behind H&M’s latest Conscious Exclusive Collection to find out more about the brand’s drive towards sustainability Once upon a time the alchemist's greatest quest was to turn coal into gold. It was a case of wishful thinking , but as I stand in the exquisite rooms of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in the Louvre in Paris, I feel the rush of alchemical success. Why bother with the old coal into gold trick when you can turn faded denim into Denimite (a denim fibre material), plastic bottles into Tencel recycled polyester, and recycled glass into beads and rhinestones?And for your next trick, you take all this latter-day alchemy and wave a fashion wand over it so that it manifests as an elegant, beautiful structured version of an 18th-century Jacquard riding jacket for a very contemporary woman, or a subtle ball gown with a deep neckline and trompe l'oeil painting of marble drapery, or a mini asymmetric dress in the manner of a Gustave Moreau painting - all inspired by the archives of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. It's a kind of magic.It's the kind of magic our planet urgently needs right now. I could scare you with statistics about global warming, but suffice to say that it is the 11th hour and the global fashion industry is deeply implicated. So it is gratifying to see first-hand evidence that global super players such as H&M are actively trying to hold back the tide.story_article_left1Anna Gedda, the head of sustainability at H&M, says: "We need to not only make fashion sustainable, but to make sustainability fashionable." It is initiatives such as the 2016 Conscious Exclusive Collection, which launched last week with the opening of 'Fashion Forward - 300 years of Fashion at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs', sponsored by H&M, that make these links tangible. Gone are the notions of sackcloth and ashes which have characterised "sustainable fashion". This is high art.Ann-Sofie Johannesen, the creative advisor at H&M who runs the design teams that work with the special designer collaborations (Balmain anyone?) and the Conscious Exclusive Collections, tracks their aesthetic and practical development. "We couldn't have done everything we do now five years ago.When we started the Conscious Exclusive Collection, we could only find organic cotton and the quality was not great. We can't do everything yet. But we now have sustainable beads, for example, which is innovative, and we are committed to investing in new technology, such as Denimite. It's an investment in the future."And it makes for a pretty delicious pair of earrings too.Still, fashionable sustainable collections can only go so far before they start to look like window-dressing for a really nasty problem. H&M has a long-term approach. Gedda argues that, to survive as a business and exist for the next 50 years, they must become sustainable in the long term. "It is the prerequisite for our growth," she says.This is not a touchy-feely marketing exercise, it's about leveraging the company to fundamentally alter the way the business of fashion is done. "We have the opportunity to act if we are set on something, like sourcing more sustainable cotton, for example. When we call, people actually answer. We can get those meetings. We can get that leverage." As a result, H&M is the world's biggest buyer of organic cotton.The other side of the sustainability coin is also the ugly side of fast fashion; the fact that cheap clothes come from cheap labour. H&M has set a goal that 1.6 million textile workers employed by its suppliers (about 1926 factories) will benefit from a fair living wage by 2018. H&M has created a coalition of 19 brands that share many of these suppliers to ensure the change happens and to lobby governments in countries where production takes place to introduce fair labour legislation.Gedda says: "Our job is to make sustainability as easy and attractive as possible." So all stores participate in the global garment collecting initiative - and we, as consumers, can also be part of the challenge. Drop off your unwanted clothes at an H&M store, starting this weekend, and they will be recycled. So far H&M has collected 25,000 tons of clothes worldwide. This translates into the fabric equivalent of more than 100 million T-shirts.H&M also launched the Global Change Award in 2015 and is actively looking for innovative projects to sustain the future of the fashion industry. One of the winning projects turns lemons into fabric. Quite literally.When the world gives you lemons, make clothes, I say...

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