FT Rethink
‘Trashion’ trends: Kenyan artisans lead clothing’s sustainability drive
Every week, thousands of tonnes of pre-owned clothes pour into African cities, from Accra in the West to Nairobi in the East. Containerloads of rejected clothes, originating from Western charity shops, end up in Africa. Oxfam estimates that anywhere between 50% and 70% of their clothing donations are sent to the continent via complex supply chains of waste textile re-sellers.
For many, second-hand clothing markets that have sprung up around these imports are a lifeline, both for the cheap garments they offer and for the job opportunities they create. However, this flood of donations has a darker side. In recent years, an increasing proportion has been made up of low-quality fast-fashion items that are only fit for the bin. In Ghana, for instance, 40% of used clothing imports (totalling 6 million items every week) are sent straight to landfill1 or are burnt in the open air. The imports have also had a grave social impact – in Kenya, the rise of the sector is blamed for a 96% fall in the number of people employed in the domestic textile industry2.
Globally, USD 460 billion worth of clothes are thrown away every year, and the industry’s vast environmental footprint – fashion production is responsible for 10% of man-made carbon emissions, with the equivalent of one lorry load of clothing burnt or dumped in landfill every second3 – is expected to grow by 60% over the next decade. In Africa, several initiatives are working to change this picture from the ground up, to turn the continent from a global fashion dumping ground into the go-to for environmentally and socially sustainable clothing manufacture.
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Artisan Fashion
Nairobi-based Artisan Fashion is leading the way. Launched by the UN’s Ethical Fashion Initiative (EFI), an international effort to use fashion to promote “sustainable and inclusive development in emerging economies”, Artisan Fashion coordinates the production of clothes, bags and accessories for some of the biggest names in fashion, including Vivienne Westwood and Stella McCartney. Artisan Fashion was the first EFI project to connect artisans living in poverty with the global fashion chain and has become a model for others to follow – similar EFI initiatives have since started in Mali and Burkina Faso.
Crucially, Artisan Fashion is purpose-driven, sourcing materials as locally as possible and promoting manufacturing processes that have minimal environmental impact. For local communities, Artisan Fashion provides education and well-paid, skilled work – more than 95% of their workers are women, often coming from marginalised or less wealthy communities. In addition to handmade craftsmanship of the highest quality, Artisan Fashion ensures full transparency on all products made, with the EFI verifying that all products conform to the highest environmental and social standards. In a world where sustainable production is becoming increasingly important to consumers and regulators, collaboration with Artisan Fashion is giving brands an edge.
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Converte-ing fashion to circularity
Working with more than 50 communities across the region, Artisan Fashion is also building infrastructure and know-how for ‘upcycling’ some of the 180,000 tonnes of waste clothing that are imported into Kenya each year. Converte World, launched in 2020 as a collaboration between Artisan Fashion and former costume designer Allison Turnley, is the result.
The first of its kind to offer recycled clothing at scale, Converte has created a hub of skilled local designers, marketers and craftspeople to design and produce new clothing exclusively from old. For founder and partner Allison Turnley, the idea for Converte came from seeing first-hand the flood of waste clothing arriving in the country: “In 2014 I was in Oxford Street [in London], and I saw all these young people buying fashionable clothes all weekend. Just days later, I travelled to Kenya, and at Toi Market I saw heaving tables of discarded clothes. The true cost of fast fashion hit me hard that day.”
Allison Turnley is determined that sustainable fashion should not be more expensive than today’s fast-fashion. “A shirt is a shirt until it is no longer required as a shirt, then it’s a raw material. Sustainable fashion is really exciting, but it’s generally very expensive. Deconstructing the linear fast fashion model, what were its strengths? It democratised [fashion]. It was affordable. I don’t want to lose that.”
“Fast fashion is a billion-dollar industry – I realised I could not, as an individual, challenge these huge companies. But I can mirror them. Democratise sustainability and change the value chain. We decided we would take the cyclical model and do it at scale, offering a solution to waste, and creating jobs.”
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The Fashion Pact
Initiatives such as Artisan Fashion and Converte are an important example to the wider industry, as fast-fashion comes under growing pressure to slow down. The Fashion Pact, launched in 2020, is a sign that the world’s leading brands are taking the problem of waste and emissions seriously.
Working closely with Lombard Odier’s strategic partner and leading systems change firm Systemiq, the CEO-led coalition of major names – which includes Nike, Adidas and H&M – has made a joint promise to work together to achieve a number of environmental goals, such as ensuring that at least 25% of key raw materials used in production are low climate impact by 2025, achieving 100% renewable energy in their own operations by 2030, and ensuring that at least half of all plastic packaging is recycled.
The question for investors will be whether slower fashion is commercially viable. If Artisan Fashion’s example is anything to go by, according to founder Robin MacAndrew, the answer is a clear yes. “If we roll back 10-12 years we were a United Nations subsidised project. Then there were many commercial parties that jumped on board, and that made us commercially viable, as well as socially sustainable. The whole ethos and [economic viability] comes from a point of sustainability. It’s really three layers of profitability. The first one is environmental profit. The next one is social profit. And then finally it’s financial profit.”
1 Fast fashion: The dumping ground for unwanted clothes - BBC News
2 How second-hand clothing donations are creating a dilemma for Kenya | Kenya | The Guardian
3 Is fashion bad for the environment? | World Economic Forum (weforum.org)
Important information
This document is issued by Bank Lombard Odier & Co Ltd or an entity of the Group (hereinafter “Lombard Odier”). It is not intended for distribution, publication, or use in any jurisdiction where such distribution, publication, or use would be unlawful, nor is it aimed at any person or entity to whom it would be unlawful to address such a document. This document was not prepared by the Financial Research Department of Lombard Odier.
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