is gucci sustainable fashion? are designer / luxury brands sustainable at all?
what is sustainable fashion?
The Sustainable Fashion movement aims for sustainability in the fashion industry, strongly opposing Fast Fashion, a terrible business model that produces 10% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and 20% of global wastewaters, polluting our rivers and seas. This planet-killing business practice is also responsible for the buy-n-throw and excessive consumerism culture that pollutes our soil and waters with tons of textile waste, as 85% of all Fast Fashion garments are thrown each year.
Sustainable Fashion differs from Slow Fashion in the path it takes to achieve sustainability in the fashion industry, while Slow Fashion focuses more on clothes that are produced with slower manufacturing cycles, fair trade, and supporting smaller businesses, while also caring for the sustainability and quality of its garments, Sustainable Fashion puts a little more weight in the ecological impact of its clothes, using organic, recycled materials like organic ring-spun cotton and other environmentally-friendly biodegradable materials.
At the end of the day, all these anti-fast fashion movements want to achieve the same thing, they just differ in the path they take and on what they consider more important. For example, Ethical Fashion focuses more on the welfare of textile workers, who are exploited in the Fast Fashion industry with inhumane wages and terrible working conditions, many times reaching modern slavery.
can luxury designer brands be sustainable?
We all know that designer and luxury brands are made for people with a higher purchasing power or with poor spending habits and financial education at least. The thing is, this higher price makes people think the items are much higher quality or even sustainably made. Well, this doesn’t have to be the case.
We first have to understand why the price of luxury brands is so high. The reason is that the customer doesn’t pay for the material, for the design per se nor for any other thing, the customer pays for the status that the item gives them, for the extensive marketing that the brand has paid in order for the item to be considered luxurious.
Another thing is that people believe luxury brands are making unbelievable tons of money when that is not true. For example, Dacia, a middle-class-oriented car company, makes way more money than Lamborghini, a brand that does not need to be explained in detail. Luxury brands don’t make a lot of money, that’s because even though they sell items at an enormous price, not many people purchase their products to make them earn a lot.
So, what does this mean, are luxury brands sustainable or not? Well, it depends a lot. Luxury brands are the same as any other brand, just that they may have a higher profit margin on each of the products they sell. For some companies, this means creating more sustainable products and treating the workers a lot better, for others means doing just above the industry average, you have to look into each brand to know the full picture.
In conclusion, while designer brands usually earn a higher profit margin on each of their products, they don’t make a lot of money and you can’t know if they are sustainable or not until you have researched them closely. Now we will talk about one of the most famous luxury brands in the market, so stay put.
is gucci sustainable fashion?
Gucci is one of the most well-known luxury brands in the world, and its products are usually made from quality materials. So having this in mind, is Gucci Sustainable Fashion or is it just Wacky Fashion? We shall see…
Well, investigating a little deeper into the brand, one can see that it is actually trying to be more sustainable, setting up realistic goals, and actually doing something to meet them, unlike a brand that we know of… *ahem*, we’re talking to you, Zara. It also uses some recycled and fairly sustainable materials for its products and is slowly removing the most polluting parts of its production processes.
One thing that Gucci does not do right is their animal treatment, as many of their products use animal products like leather or fur, for example. So this is a place where they could improve their sustainability, although the responsibility also comes to the consumer as well who decides to wear animal parts or not.
Regarding the treatment of workers, it could be way worse but is not as bad as other brands. They are not as transparent as Sustainable Fashion brands but also not secretive as Fast Fashion brands either. They are in some kind of limbo when it comes to their sustainable practices.
Overall, Gucci is not bad, it is definitely better than fast fashion brands, and infinitely better than ultra-fast fashion brands like SHEIN. But overall it is not a good choice either when it comes to sustainability if you have the kind of money (and terrible spending habits) to buy Gucci, you should buy real Sustainable Garments instead, which are way better to „brag about” than overpriced designer clothing.
when luxury brands are not sustainable at all
There are also luxury brands that do not even care about the consequences of their practices on the environment and society even though they could do something to improve this.
As we have said before, we can’t give you all the names and a fully objective rating of their sustainability, for that you should do your own research and find out, which is not really hard, like, just use Google or something.
We have, however, a few tips that we have talked about in our previous blog posts, that can help you determine whether a company produces sustainable clothing or wacky fashion, one of the most important things to look for is transparency, if a brand does everything right, it shouldn’t try to hide information from its customers.
Overall, don’t ever think that a luxury brand makes higher quality products, or that they make sustainable products, this does not have to be the case, and in most cases, it isn’t. And also, don’t be spending your hard-earned money on luxury products, it’s just stupid, you’re better off buying a bunch of sustainable fashion garments anyway. As Warren Buffett said, „Price is what you pay, value is what you get”.
summary
We hope you now know something more about Sustainable Fashion and luxury brands, it was a pleasure researching and making this information available to you! Don’t forget to read our other articles or Joining Our Community in order to receive news every now and then about the Sustainable Fashion community!
We are thrilled to teach people all around the world 🙂 Also, did you really know what Fast Fashion really is and its terrible consequences for the environment, the planet, the workers, society, and the economy? Do you know exactly what the Slow Fashion or Sustainable Fashion movement is? You should really take a look at these articles about this forgotten and unknown but very urgent and important subject, click here to read „Can Fashion Ever Be Sustainable?”, Sustainable Fashion, Ethical Fashion, Slow Fashion or Fast Fashion 101 | How It’s Destroying Our Planet because knowledge is one of the most powerful strengths you can have, while ignorance is your worst weakness.
We also have a big surprise for you! Because we want to give you the right to know us better, we have prepared a carefully dedicated About Us page where we will tell you who we are, what our mission is, what we do, a closer look at our team, and many more things! Do not miss this opportunity and click here to check it out. Also, we invite you to take a look at our Pinterest, where we will pin everyday sustainable fashion-related content, clothing designs, and other things that you will surely love!
