The fashion industry has grown exceptionally accomplished at selling the illusion of progress. A jacket stitched from recycled bottles, a “conscious” capsule collection, a resale platform launched with glossy fanfare, all of it can feel meaningful, yet the machinery of mass clothing production continues to grind relentlessly onward, churning out garments the planet simply cannot absorb.
It is precisely this gap between gesture and transformation that Safia Minney has spent her career trying to close. The founder of People Tree, the campaign network Fashion Declares, and the craft-led label Indilisi has watched sustainability become a marketing term, and she believes incremental improvements are dangerously inadequate.
“Science tells us that we should be cutting back production and consumption of new clothing by between 75 and 95 per cent,” Minney says. “That is a reduction of 75 to 95 per cent, not 5 or 25 per cent.”
A contraction of that magnitude would do far more than shift seasonal trends. It would dismantle the foundations of a global industry built on speed, volume and cheap labour, with consequences stretching from spinning mills in Tamil Nadu to assembly lines in Dhaka.
The Human Cost of Buying Less
The mantra to “buy less” is easy to repeat and extraordinarily difficult to honour responsibly. Reduced consumption is essential, but without a credible plan for the people who make our clothes, environmental progress risks becoming a cruelty in its own right.
“Obviously, what that means is that a lot of people will lose their jobs in fashion supply chains,” Minney acknowledges.
For her, the answer is not nostalgia or guilt. It is a deliberate pivot from volume to value, redirecting investment from industrial-scale output towards handweaving, traditional textile skills and regenerative agriculture. The aim is to build an industry that supports communities rather than extracts from them.
“There is now a global trend for craft, but at the moment it is considered to be high-end luxury,” she explains. Her ambition is to embed handweaving, embroidery and traditional techniques into mid-market fashion and beyond, the way they once belonged.
If consumers purchased fewer pieces, repaired what they already owned and leaned more heavily on resale and charity shops, Minney argues, they could comfortably afford the occasional handwoven garment. The economics, she insists, are not the obstacle. Mindset is.
“We can buy second-hand very affordably through the various platforms or charity shops and, of course, we can repair clothes as well. We can keep things in circulation for longer.”
Putting People Back at the Centre
The social dimension of climate action is precisely the territory that discussions about fibre blends and carbon labels tend to miss. A just transition is not solely concerned with how much carbon a garment emits. It asks who is being supported, who carries the risk, and whether the emerging system gives people the means to build secure lives.
Minney points to the millions of handweavers in India, Bangladesh and across Africa whose knowledge could anchor a lower-volume fashion economy. Investment in these skills could also create livelihoods outside the industrial cities to which garment workers have migrated, often leaving children behind in the care of relatives.
“Retraining people, providing livelihoods and opportunities in craft production in rural areas could actually make life much more comfortable for a lot of people who are living quite far away from their families, maybe only seeing their children a couple of times a year,” she says.
For designers, buyers and merchandisers, the shift demands more than adding an artisanal flourish to a collection. Production calendars must change. Brands need to make space, in time and budget, for garments and textiles that cannot be rushed.
“They can start to look at their critical path so that they can make allowances for hand production,” Minney says. “It’s not difficult. It’s perfectly doable. We did it at People Tree. We’re currently doing it at Indilisi.”
The guiding principle, she suggests, should be disarmingly simple: “How are you going to make products with as low an environmental impact as possible, but with as high a social impact as possible?”
Beyond Sustainability to Regeneration
Minney is unsparing in her assessment of what conventional sustainability has achieved. It has, in her view, largely aspired to improve an existing model, eliminating egregious abuses, curbing excessive overtime and inching towards lower-impact materials or mono-fibre garments that are easier to recycle.
Important though those measures are, she argues many should already constitute the bare minimum of doing business.
“Sustainability should be ticking all the boxes in terms of better practice, looking at what should be illegal, not covering people’s basic human rights in the supply chain,” she says. “Sustainable fashion has been an embracing of human rights and nature, but I think we needed to go beyond that.”
Regenerative fashion, as Minney understands it, demands something deeper. It means forging direct relationships with farmers through organic and Fairtrade agriculture, investing in soil health, championing GMO-free seeds and paying producers fairly for fibres such as organic cotton. Craft fits squarely within that model because its value extends well beyond the reduction of harm.
“Craft does use low-impact materials. It does use traditional hand skills. It can pay people a living wage,” she notes. “If we were to use craft, that would be highly regenerative in its practices.”
Yet craft cannot be scaled responsibly through larger orders alone. Brands must cultivate close partnerships with craft organisations, learn what makers can genuinely produce, offer considered design input, and, crucially, rethink payment structures.
A handwoven fabric can take three-and-a-half months to complete. Sometimes five. During that period, artisans still need to feed and house their families.
“You need to be paying the handweaver, the hand-embroidery artisan or the hand-block printer as they’re finishing their work,” Minney insists. “Every week or every month, not nine months, or three months after the product has arrived with you in the UK.”
Preparing for What Cannot Be Avoided
After more than three decades of campaigning, Minney’s vision extends well beyond emissions reduction. Fashion companies must also brace their supply chains for the climate disruption that is already unavoidable, from extreme heat to devastating floods.
“We are not thinking about extreme heat and floods and how that’s going to impact the people within our supply chains,” she warns, “especially women who already carry the burden of making ends meet.”
Environmental, social and governance frameworks need to evolve beyond corporate reporting exercises. They must help communities build resilience, adapt to increasingly dangerous conditions and acknowledge fashion’s profound dependence on both people and nature.
Minney will continue this conversation at *Craft, Clothing & Circularity: Out of Fashion* at Conway Hall in London on Friday 11 September. Created in collaboration with Selvedge magazine, the event gathers makers, menders and campaigners for hands-on workshops in rag-rug making, quilting, visible darning and clothing care, followed by discussions exploring repair as activism and how craft and circularity could underpin a genuinely regenerative fashion system.
“Fashion needs a wake-up call,” Minney says. “If you’re a fashion practitioner or fashion lover, join our interactive discussion and create powerful action with us.”
Why it Matters
The transition Minney describes is radical, but it is not a rejection of fashion. It is an argument for restoring value to it: fewer garments, made with greater skill, from fibres grown in healthier soil, by people able to earn a dignified living close to the families and communities that sustain them. Buying less is only the starting point. The greater, more urgent challenge is ensuring that as fashion relinquishes its dependence on relentless volume, it does not relinquish its responsibility to the workers who have borne the cost of its growth. A truly just transition cannot simply close the door on the old system. It must invest, deliberately and patiently, in what comes next.
