Redress’s goals exist independently of where I lay my hat on a day-to-day basis, as the charity has a powerhouse engine of a leadership team. With that said, now that I’m back in Hong Kong and Asia as the borders open up, I can support [the team] by bringing a global perspective on regional challenges and opportunities.

What challenges do you see on the road towards sustainable fashion today?
Waste in Asia is a critical challenge—or opportunity. Asia is the world’s apparel and textile powerhouse producer, accounting for around 60 per cent of global exports of garments, textiles and footwear [as of 2020]. This means that industry textile waste—from fibres to yarns, fabrics, trims, buttons, garments, you name it—is within Asia. And now, Asia is also home to many of the world’s fastest-growing emerging markets, which also spells increased fashion consumption.

Covid, and the sudden drop in consumers’ clothing shopping [habits], resulted in clothing and textiles production effectively being frozen, meaning there are vast amounts of excess materials. These fully or part-produced items and textiles run the risk of soon becoming “waste”, when businesses run out of ideas—and hope—of being able to deal with excess materials. We are certainly going to see even more textile waste add to what is already a dire wasteful scenario.

How are you addressing these issues?
We must have our house in order if we’re going to fight to put out fashion’s fires—we are working with Redress’s board on our strategic objectives, funding pipeline, HR strategy and more. We’re also gathering knowledge via our research project supported by the VF Foundation [the non- profit run by US apparel giant VF Corporation] ... [with the goal of ] driving circular fashion in Asia.

What can we expect from this year’s Redress Design Award?
It will be really impactful because of its energy. We will bring the finalists to Hong Kong for the heated runway finale, in which the winner gets a collaboration with [outdoor clothing brand] Timberland. The industry, which in some cases becomes fatigued and stale, needs bold new ideas—and we will be finding these.

Tell about the initiatives Redress and the R Collective have coming up.
Redress is looking to expand some aspects of our consumer-focused work regionally, specifically our Get Redressed Month. Here, we work with leading corporates and schools to collect unwanted clothing, educate their staff and students, and organise huge clothing-sorting volunteer events—all of which crescendos at our charity Get Redressed Pop-up Shops. We are now looking to replicate this format to magnify our impact and consumer reach in other Asian regions. It’s not going to be easy, but that hasn’t stopped us so far.

The R Collective is picking up the pace of our responsible womenswear fashion brand and responsible branded corporate products, which we produce for banks, fashion and beauty brands as well as properties and malls—all out of waste materials. The R Collective also works with global luxury brands to provide secure and sustainable excess material management partnerships, in which we reuse or recycle their excess [materials], to create a raft of products and solutions to the otherwise relatively common practice of incineration.

What is the ultimate goal for Redress?
To do our bit to transform fashion—and to create the ripples of change that will continue gathering more ripples. We know the waste issues are much too big for us alone, and that our vision—of a world without waste—will not happen in our lifetime, but that shouldn’t stop us from trying.

Dounia Wone is the chief impact officer at luxury resale platform Vestiaire Collective, which was founded in Paris in 2009 and has offices in eight other cities around the world, including Hong Kong, Singapore and Seoul. The company made a splash last year when it announced it would ban fast fashion as part of a mission to fight waste in the industry.

What inspired Vestiaire Collective’s decision to ban fast fashion?
Vestiaire Collective was born to help reduce the waste in people’s wardrobes, and with a fast fashion ban, our aim is to raise awareness and act on the two major problems in our industry: overproduction and overconsumption. It’s our way of saying no to a system that supports harmful practices that are causing enormous damage to society and the environment.

[The decision was] brought to life through our collaboration with The Or Foundation [a US- and Ghana-based non-profit] focused on environmental issues [in fashion], which ... [taught us] how we can help reduce waste, and reuse and recycle items so that they do not end up in landfills.

Tell us about your role and responsibilities.
I joined Vestiaire Collective in 2020 as chief sustainability and inclusion officer and am now chief impact officer, bringing my initiative, high standards, and ecological and societal vision to a brand which aims to have a profound impact on the way its community of 23 million fashion activists think and act—the same vision, mission and values that I’ve been supporting for years.

How does Vestiaire Collective define whether an item is fast fashion?
The first wave [of the initiative] in 2022 consisted of banning ultra- fast-fashion brands, such as Shein, Boohoo and Missguided [from the platform]. We pinpoint the brands that encourage overconsumption and therefore overproduction. [Practices by brands are reviewed in the form of ] their amount of promotions, discounts applied over the course of a year, and renewal rate [how often new collections are released].

How do you plan to stop people from buying fast fashion?
If we continue proposing solutions, such as resale, for cheap items, we perpetuate the overconsumption system, and we might even encourage guilt-free buying. We want to progressively discourage our community from buying fast fashion in the first place—and do more prevention, [rather] than reparation, to break this fast fashion cycle.

We want to educate our community to buy less, but better, by shedding light on the impact of fashion [waste] and the necessity to transform the industry from the ground up. We encourage them to invest in second-hand craftsmanship at more affordable prices rather than turning to first- hand or second-hand fast fashion.

Does it matter that customers may be more attracted by the preserved value of second-hand luxury items than the opportunity to reduce environmental impact?
Sustainability is a driver for 40 per cent of our fashion consumers. It is the second-most important reason they shop on Vestiaire, after affordability, [which in turn is becoming less important to them] year on year.

How do Asia-Pacific consumers view second-hand luxury?
We’ve observed a rapid growth of interest in second-hand fashion in the Asia-Pacific region in recent years—that’s why we have opened offices and warehouses in these areas. In this region, consumers are very tech-savvy and feel comfortable using apps to purchase pre-loved goods. Gen Z and millennials in particular are very conscious about the social and environmental impact of the way they manage their lifestyles.

Millennials are known for being the generation most likely to buy, while Gen Zers are famously sustainability-minded; does this give you hope for a more sustainable future in retail?
Global consumers today are aware of the environmental problems we are facing, from global warming to pollution, as well as fast fashion overproduction and textile waste.

According to the Vestiaire Collective x Boston Consulting Group Report 2022, the second-hand fashion and luxury market is estimated to grow 20 to 30 per cent annually, driven by younger generations who look beyond seasonal trends and embrace circularity as part of their lifestyle.

We are just at the beginning of our circular fashion movement. Global industry players will need to cater to the growing sustainability demands of their audience while having to adjust to continuously tightening restrictions and eco- design rules enforced by different governments to create a more sustainable future.

What more can brands do to encourage circular fashion?
Brands should be more conscious of the materials and partners they work with and reduce their environmental impact by making the right choices— for example, produce less and [of a] higher quality.

[Vestiaire’s] actions that other brands should follow [include] carrying out lobbying efforts and educating consumers to change their purchasing behaviour in the long term.

Don't miss: Sustainability and Fashion: Are Shopping Second-hand and Vintage the New Trend?

One of the world’s leading experts in supply chains, Edwin Keh has been CEO of public research institute the Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel since2012, after a previous career spent working in logistics roles for some of the world’s leading companies. His focus is on making textiles more sustainable.

What are the problems with fast fashion?
We used to have spring and fall seasons, and now we have one season every month, and there’s
one collab every month coming up. We’ve accelerated the way we consume, and these large brands are growing by increasing the demand for their products.

One challenge is the sheer volume of the product. And the second one is, [due to] faster fashion cycles and more and more trends, it’s more and more difficult to be accurate about what you decide to produce—[we see this in] all the things that go on discount at the end of the season.

How can we encourage brands to slow this process down?
The question we should ask is: how can we be a profitable company without all the consequences to the environment? Can we sell less and earn more? Are there different business models? Second-hand is one that people are embracing a lot; rentals, leasing models; and then the reuse of materials so that we can we can process them ... all of these are ways to explore other ways to make money without creating more stuff.

It’s very hard to tell this to a large company and [expect them to] start making money. But I think it’s easier to say, let’s work on a more creative way for you to be successful without causing all these environmental challenges. I think what you see today is that consumers are responding to that—no consumer wants to be a fast fashion victim. What brands need to do is to give consumers peace of mind.

What is the role of luxury groups and brands when it comes to driving sustainability?
Luxury [brands] have a role as a trendsetter. As they set the trends, they will also drive the direction of how everybody else in the industry behaves. The challenge of luxury is if you look at the amount of materials that they use, it’s insignificant. Take leather as an example: the consumption of leather in luxury is fairly low, so it’s still in other parts of the industry where you have to tackle this. [Leather] really touches upon durability; it’s a very robust material that has a lot of utility to it.

The more challenging part is with post-consumer use. So if you make a pair of leather shoes out of
a piece of leather, that leather shoe has a PU, PVC or rubber outsole, it has a leather lining, it has all sorts of glues and adhesives that are put on the shoe and painted a colour. There are so many chemicals and different materials that are that are used, it makes it very hard to recycle.

Read more: Is Alternative Leather the Future of the Fashion Industry?

The best thing is to start at the design stage: how do you design that into your product? How can we be more thoughtful about how we use the materials and how we reuse them? [It starts with] picking the right materials, the right way to assemble the apparel and then giving clear instructions on how it can be reused in high-value applications.

What do luxury brands overlook when communicating with consumers?
The hard reality is that our industry has not changed. We still think we are in a design-driven world, while we are actually in a social impact-driven world. If you look at TikTok and all the online influencers, they are part of your peer group, they drive a lot of fashion trends, so it’s bottom-up. But the fashion world still thinks it’s a top-down [model]. What we need to do when we talk about training the next generation is have a different skill set, and be a lot more aware of where the influences are coming from. You don’t go shopping in Europe anymore to figure out what the what the trends are; you go online.

How are luxury brands doing in this respect?
One of the clear leaders is Kering, which has been talking about the triple bottom line and environmental profit and loss (EP&L). And there’s Stella McCartney and people like that, who have been very clear about what they want to do. [Unlike fashion trends], a lot of those types of influences and leadership in the industry are still in Europe. In Asia, there are still very few global fashion leaders; we still are European-dominated, and that may be true for a little while longer.

What else is missing from design education in this respect?
We have a mismatch: a lot of young people want to be artists; that’s why they become designers. But [many of the sustainability issues] are engineering problems and scientific problems. To be a success in this industry, you have to be a lot broader and have some knowledge about chemistry, material science, engineering and manufacturing processes as all that impacts the opportunities for materials that we use. Earlier this year, we were working with a museum in Sweden—we produced a cotton material that absorbs carbon dioxide, and they used it in their uniforms because they were trying to be carbon neutral– that was clearly a material science chemistry problem. 

It’s not just an art anymore, it’s a science and an art. Are we equipping young people to think like scientists, engineers, as well as artists? Are we attracting the right people into the industry? Are schools teaching the right things? I don’t see the curriculum catching up to the demands of the of the environment for our industry.

One way to think about is you wouldn’t buy a ten-year-old cell phone, because the functionality is slow, it can only do so many things. And cell phones today are your heart of communication, your social life—it does everything for you. But tomorrow, if you buy a T-shirt, it’s the same T-shirt that you bought 10 years ago; the technology hasn’t changed, the functionality hasn’t changed. Our industry basically hasn’t moved with the lifestyle changes of a generation. So, the functionality, the application—those are opportunities for us to rethink the industry.

What more needs to be done to achieve the goal of carbon neutrality?
Net zero is zero without offsets; [businesses] buying offsets may be a short-term fix, but the long-term [reality] is you have to be become carbon neutral. Energy use is one dimension; there’s also water usage, hazardous chemicals, the use of other types of resources, like arable land. And instead of growing cotton, maybe we should be growing food, because the population is growing. So all those things add up to two fundamental shifts [needed] in the industry.

The nightmare scenario for the fashion industry is “too little too late”. We have the aspiration to be more sustainable, but unless we move courageously to disrupt the industry, [younger] generations would blame us for moving too slowly. Because we can incrementally improve our way to be climate neutral or sustainable, we have disrupted some things: a simple one is polyester; we can’t continue to [create] new polyester from petroleum by-products. Another goal is to consume less red meat, so there should be less leather. We are very short-sighted in that we only care about next season, we only care about what looks good now. But we need to have a ten-year view— there are some radical shifts that are happening, and the industry just needs to look a little bit beyond.

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