Fashion is a popular or latest style of clothing, hair dress-up or the way of living. Right from the days of Indus Valley Civilization, fashion has played an integral part of human lifestyle, solving the needs and serving the tastes of people at large. Also, be it through the ancient beads-made amulet, medieval stone-studded crowns or the modern hairbands, fashion has had it’s manifestation in form of human creativity in all these things.

However, with the onset of industrialization, large scale urbanization, rapid growth of population topped with globalization, there has been intensification of commercial fashion which now puts a heavy toll on our natural resources and biodiversity at large. It is at this juncture that a case for Sustainable Fashion deserves a hearing in the court of our lives.

But before we delve into the pleadings, let us, at first, understand the way modern fashion affects our environment through a few observations:

Cotton and the Calamity:

We know that in tropical countries, cotton clothes are hold dear among people due to extreme summers in such places. Nevertheless, cotton plantation besides leading to large scale depletion of ground water and the subsequent lowering of the ground water table, causes indiscriminate felling of trees for making lands available for cotton cultivation.

Dyes and the Danger

Various colorful clothes that we wear to keep up with the trending ‘insta’ reels may appear cool to the virtual eyes but what often goes unnoticed in the entire process is the large scale water and soil pollution that occurs due to manufacturing of a list of harmful chemical dyes that color our fabric. Indirectly, the chemical detergents that we use for washing our clothes also add to this pollution chain like a silent killer on the go.

Leather and the Lethal

‘Genuine Leather’ may be a fetish-factor for some but the commercial tanning industry falls as a curse on the lives of thousands of innocent animals out there. These animals are illegally poached, killed, and traded across the world for their skin and this pushes their lives to the verge of extinction in the near future.

Nevertheless, sustainable fashion aka eco-fashion can act as a panacea to all the above mentioned problems and the like. For it is not merely a method but a philosophy for making our earth greener and healthier. It is a type of fashion that seeks to meet the needs of the present generation without sacrificing on the needs of the future generations. It addresses the entire manner of cloth production and specifically aims at reducing the carbon footprint.