The bashing and boycotting of fast fashion might have actually created some change. This can be seen in how many of these brands are now adding sustainable fashion programmes to their roster, including the ability to get clothing repaired and altered by the brand itself.
The fashion sector, which was essentially built on consumerism and new fashion being offered at extremely affordable rates, pushing people to keep buying new things and discarding the old, is changing its ways.
Or, maybe not changing, but also trying to include options and services that at least don’t get think pieces written about them and social media users calling for active boycott.
Reports about major clothing chains having quietly rolled out in-house repair services over the past few years get a lot of eyeballs. But the question that this raises is whether this is a genuine shift, or just the industry’s latest branding exercise dressed up as concern for the environment?
What Are Fast Fashion Brands Doing?
Let’s be real, fast fashion brands have not really been having an easy time the past couple of years. With the rising pollution levels and increased drive for the sustainable fashion movement across the globe, they have been getting hammered from multiple directions.
Within such an environment, where many people are using various platforms to push for conscious and sustainable fashion and advocating for a boycott of fast fashion, it makes sense that the brand would want to pivot to gain back public trust.
Levi Strauss & Co. launched its “Wear Longer” program across the US, an addition to its existing mending and customisation services offered at its stores globally. This hand-stitching course offers to equip high school students with four skills: sewing on a button, hemming, patching a hole, and fixing a tear.
The course, taught by staff members and running for 90 minutes, is geared toward Gen Z consumers who are interested in sustainability and thrifting but don’t have basic skills such as sewing and mending clothes on their own.
Then Uniqlo’s ‘RE.UNIQLO Studio’ offers services like repair, including stitching, patching, taping, mending holes, stains, or button replacement on “select UNIQLO items”. However, this studio is currently only available in select UNIQLO stores located in the US, Europe, the United Kingdom, and some regions of East and Southeast Asia.
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Zara, headquartered in Spain and part of Inditex, launched a digital platform back in 2022 that lets customers resell used Zara pieces and request basic alterations and repairs. That platform is currently available in 17 of the roughly 100 countries where Zara operates, meaning the large majority of its global footprint still has no access to it at all.
H&M, the Swedish group with more than 4,000 stores across over 80 countries, has been candid that repairing and reselling clothing, while noble goals, are not very economically sound for a business.
While they do offer mending and redesign, called their “Repair & Remake” ateliers in select flagship stores, across Europe and the UK, where customers can bring any garment, H&M or another brand, to “replace zippers, fix tears, hem trousers, or completely customise older clothing pieces” for a fee, their wider programme is their ‘Garment Collecting & Recycling drop boxes’.
This service allows people to bring old or unwanted clothes and textiles (from any brand) to physical H&M stores in India and donate them. As an incentive, those who donate their textiles can also get a digital voucher or discount coupon.
This service is available across a number of regions where H&M has physical stores, including India (shocking, I know).
Is This Greenwashing?
One has to wonder how genuine these practices are and how much of it is to build back the PR they’ve lost and greenwashing.
To those who might not know, greenwashing is when a company tries to appear more environmentally responsible than it really is. For example, it may promote a product as “eco-friendly” while hiding the fact that its overall environmental impact is still harmful.
According to the ‘Greenwashing – the deceptive tactics behind environmental claims’ report by the UN Climate Action, “greenwashing promotes false solutions to the climate crisis that distract from and delay concrete and credible action.”
There has been a significant rise in the thrifting and secondhand fashion market in the last couple of years. According to ThredUp’s 2026 Resale Report, the global secondhand apparel market is estimated to reach $393 billion by 2030. This could potentially be a big competition to the monopoly of fast fashion brands.
The fast fashion industry might not be seeing much economic impact from the sustainability drive, but the recent customer behaviour of “ethical shopping” and “eco-conscious fashion” has brought down brand loyalty. Meaning that if tomorrow a brand starts offering budget-friendly products that are also environmentally friendly, ethical and transparent, then it wouldn’t take long for the customer base to shift their attention.
This threat has led to many brands engaging in greenwashing, claiming that their products are “eco-friendly,” “biodegradable,” or “climate neutral”.
Marketing campaigns are also being launched where the brand chooses charities and organisations to donate its profits to, or releases limited edition product lines.
So by promoting repair, recycling, charity campaigns and “eco-friendly” collections, brands can rebuild public trust and improve their image without fundamentally changing their business model, which still depends on selling large volumes of inexpensive, trend-driven clothing.
The thing is, besides Levi’s alteration services and H&M’s donation boxes, none of the other recycling or repairing services offered by these fast fashion brands is available in India.
But the interesting fact is that India doesn’t really need them, since the concept of sustainable fashion is actually quite common in the country. For generations, getting small wear and tears repaired by your local tailor, a shoe re-soled or mended by a cobbler, is just the way of life. Not a “workshop” or a PR initiative launched by some big brand with applause and aplomb.
Because many Indians understand the cost of clothes and would want to stretch out any item instead of throwing it away without any cause. It is interesting how so many of the practices common in India are now being repackaged and restyled, as if something innovative created by the West.
The rise of metal and glass in the West, after decades upon decades of promoting plastic, is one such example. For a long time, plastic was being pushed across the globe as a cheap and disposable product.
But suddenly, the West found out how harmful it was for the environment; plastic was endangering animals, land and sea, and it resulted in metal cups and straws being promoted, or paper being brought up as a cheap alternative.
Now, overall, these are good practices and will be helpful to the environment, regardless of where it’s coming from. However, Indians have always eaten off steel plates and drunk from steel glasses, carried water in reusable bottles instead of buying a new plastic one every day, and treated brass and copper vessels as things you pass down, not throw out.
But instead of being seen as environmentally conscious, these same practices were looked down on, treated as inferior and backward, a joke more than anything.
This is a pattern now: shame the developing regions out of their cultural habits, push Western concepts of modernisation on the public, and once it’s revealed that maybe those concepts are not as safe as considered, pull them back and once again shame the developing countries for being backward and not being with the times.
Image Credits: Google Images
Sources: Independent, Times of India, Reuters
Find the blogger: @chirali_08
This post is tagged under: climate activism, eco friendly brands, environmental impact fashion, ethical fashion, fashion industry climate change, fashion sustainability, fast fashion pollution, greenwashing debate, renewable energy fashion, retail activism, Sustainable Fashion, sustainable supply chains
Disclaimer: We do not own any rights or copyrights to the images used; these images have been sourced from Google. If you require credits or wish to request removal, please contact us via email.
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