With temperatures rising for most of the year, trends and fashion adapts to climate changea palpable reality: two seasons instead of four, less demand for winter garments and a greater presence of lighter garments in products such as cotton.
“As we can see in many places, winter is no longer as cold or summer is increasingly extreme, and this pushes the industry to adapt, both in design and production,” he explains to EFE Clara Tomé, ambassador of the European Climate Pactactivist and expert in environmental law.
The summer of 2024 would become, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) satellite monitoring network, the hottest in the world since records were made, one of the aspects of climate change that It will modify, in addition to lifestyle, the way of producing and consuming fashion in the future.
Increasingly high temperatures thus blur the traditional spring-summer and autumn-winter seasons, with increasingly shorter half-season periods that only give way to months of cold and others of extreme heat. “These seasons could lose meaning when climates change unpredictably,” he explains.
With higher temperatures, the demand for some raw materials will also increasemodifying costs. “The climate crisis can also affect the production of raw materials such as cotton, highly vulnerable to droughts and extreme temperatures, affecting its cost and availability,” the expert explains.
“In terms of design, with abrupt climate changes, it is likely that light and, above all, versatile garments will become more in demand, and Cold-weather clothing may be less in demand in some places“explains Tomé about the part linked to fashion aesthetics.
The result on an aesthetic level could give way to “a more functional and timeless fashion”, where the collections are detached from seasons and microtrends, a model that has been booming in recent years driven by platforms such as TikTok, in which in spaces of two to three weeks new trends emerge and quickly disappear.
“This has the potential to reduce impulsive drinking and promote more conscious and sustainable fashion,” explains Tomé, for whom the consumption of garments will be more focused “on durability and adapting to the variety of conditions”, an aspect that can help, in part, to achieve more sustainable consumption.
From the business side, “changing the packaging for a biodegradable or paper one is no longer enoughnor make a collection of 15 recycled polyester garments; “This superficial sustainability today is not enough,” he indicates about the need “for systemic and structural change,” he adds.
A change proposed from the production systems, which begins “from the choice of materials, since the majority of our clothes come from fossil fuels in the form of the famous polyester, until the last stages of recycling, since currently only 1% of all the clothing produced is recycled,” he explains.
With increasingly higher temperatures, sustainability will become a pending issue for companies, a mandatory requirement to be met based on regulations that come from the EU like the Strategy for sustainable and regular textiles or the Ecodesign regulations for sustainable products (ESPR).
“Implementing real changes requires time, resources and rethinking of the entire business model, which is not always profitable in the short term, especially for fast fashion brands that benefit from producing large volumes at low cost,” adds Tomé, for whom the role as consumers is also essential.
Avoiding buying in fast fashion chains is one of the tips that suggests. “Although not all, as consumers we have a great responsibility, because in some way every time we buy we are casting a vote towards the practices and values of companies,” explains the expert.
Tomé also focuses on being aware in the purchasing process. “We have to ask ourselves questions about whether we really need some clothes, where they come from, where they go next, trying to be aware of the environmental process of jeans until you reach the closet to wear them only twice,” he adds.
Solutions such as “buying second-hand, normalizing repeating clothes and searching in the closets of friends, parents or grandparents”, a practice that also encourages “a creativity and personality that has been lost by blindly following microtrends“.
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