Designing a new future for fashion that won’t wear out

Adopting a culture of ultra-fast fashion is what not to do if you want humanity to have a future wearing clothes. Right now the industry comes with a critically high price tag, causing 10% of all global greenhouse gas emissions.

But is one of the world’s worst emitters changing its appearance. According to journalist and author, Lucianne Tonti, yes it is. In her new book, Sundressed: Natural Fabrics and the Future of Clothes, Tonti takes us inside the revolution to takeover and makeover the fashion industry and give it a look that shouts sustainability.

Sundressed is a journey to meet the innovators transforming the industry: producers and fiber farmers inspired by ideas from regenerative agriculture, Mongolian goatherders, hemp farms – all worlds away from the toxic world of fashion that has been battering the planet for decades.

“If we want to have a sustainable fashion industry, we have to dramatically reduce the amount of clothes that we make and that we consume,” she told me on Inside Ideas. “So we need to buy less, wear what we already own more and only invest in pieces that we’re going to be able to keep and wear for a really long time.”

As the fashion editor of The Saturday Paper and a regular contributor to The Guardian, where she writes the weekly series Closet Clinic, Tonti has a voice – and she’s putting it to good use in the service of the planet.

If you want to learn how to throw away all your old ideas about fashion and try on a whole new look that future generations will thank you for, catch up with Lucianne on season 4 of my podcast.