Is it possible to regulate our emotional attachment to fashion?

“Regulation is an important tool, but the main change has to come from the culture,” he continues. “Breaking free from that cycle is challenging”.

Measuring emotional durability

Distilling what drives a consumer to discard perfectly good clothes, at a rate of 11 kilos per year, is elusive.

The EU and France have tried to make it measurable. France has defined emotional durability according to five criteria, says Mathilde Mével, head of sustainability at digital LCA platform PEFtrust: the availability and visibility of traceability information, raw materials, the duration of commercialisation, range spreads (or how many products a brand has on sale), and repairability.

Together these criteria become an “extrinsic multiplier” which, alongside an intrinsic durability multiplier and overall repairability multiplier is used to calculate the duration of wear against a baseline average number of wears as defined under the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) methodology.

Within the five criteria are several assumptions. It is assumed, for instance, that the more a consumer knows about the provenance of a garment the longer they will keep it, that consumers will wear natural fibres for longer, and that if a garment costs more to buy a consumer is more likely to repair it. They may be fair assumptions to make — why would you repair something when you could replace it for half the price? — but none are set in stone as empirical fact.

France also has introduced a national anti-fast fashion bill, specifically crafted to penalise fast fashion’s commercial practices, which proposes to apply penalties of up to €10 per fast fashion garment by 2030, and ban advertising such products in the country, including influencer promotion. Like the EU, it will apply criteria such as volumes produced and frequency of product turnover.

Both the EU and the French methodologies are already live on the PEFtrust platform for brands who wish to make the calculations, but Mével stresses that they’re subject to change at the hands of policymakers. On the French side, there is ongoing consultation with different brands and platforms who have pointed to factors such as the size of the brands as worthy of being accounted for in calculations, and an update from the government is expected in the coming weeks. Although, given the snap national elections, the proposal is effectively on standby.

Reaching a consensus

For now, there’s no one way to measure our emotional attachment to our clothing, and how that impacts how long we keep pieces or how we discard them. Brands in the crossfire are also making their own cases. Mével reveals that the fast fashion brands the platform works with are largely accepting of the fact that they will have a lower score due to their overarching business model, but push back against other criteria. Synthetics, for example, score a zero in France’s current methodology even if they’re recycled. Is it reasonable to argue that if transparency improves emotional durability, so might the use of recycled textiles?

The future for this new niche of fashion regulation is hazy but there is hope in what campaigners have been asking for — a focus on product volumes and turnover plus promotional duration and tactics — which appears to be the foundation upon which future emotional durability regulation will be built. “Of course, it is not perfect, but it is meaningful. And we hope it will contribute to building a policy consensus on the matter,” says Berlingen.

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