Sustainable fashion: to define, or not to define, that is not the question

Fashion’s unsustainability needs transformative action, as policymakers, business, and wider society all agree. The lack of a clear definition of sustainable fashion is often given as a major reason behind fashion’s increasing unsustainability. Taking a social-ecological system perspective, augmented by a feminist critical realist understanding of being (ontology) and knowledge of being (epistemology), I examine the past two decades of academic literature mentioning the concept “sustainable fashion.” I find a definition is indeed lacking in various academic discourses and approaches related to sustainable fashion. This lack is problematic because it means the fashion industry can talk preposterously without making useful progress on decreasing its negative impacts on people and the living planet. However, the ever-changing patterns and contexts of fashion would soon outdate a single fixed definition. What is presented as a two-sided problem – whether or not to define sustainable fashion – is instead a problématique. Sustainable fashion is better understood as an unsolvable predicament in a complex dynamic intertwined social-ecological system. While no solution exists, there are appropriate reflexive responses. These start by using a critical systems approach that includes fashion’s social (non-material) and ecological (material) aspects. A social-ecological system approach prevents businesses from exploiting the slipperiness of inconsistent definitions, aids policymaking by providing context and structure for the many contributory concepts (e.g., slow, green, or circular fashion), and fosters vital transdisciplinary research on sustainable fashion.