Business of Fashion Magazine reports that Dôen, a California-based brand known for its prairie-dress silhouettes and vintage-floral prints, made an unusual admission on its website: “We do not consider ourselves to be slow fashion or a sustainable brand.” Instead, the owners said on Instagram that they “are not claiming to be a sustainable brand when we are, in fact, a seasonal fashion brand that is working towards environmental responsibility,”

Sustainability is fashion’s word of the moment, encompassing any effort by a brand to operate more responsibly. Its definition, therefore, is hazy. Often, brands don’t need to use the word “sustainable” at all to communicate a moral high ground to their customers. Marketing images set in nature, product descriptions that emphasise natural fibres and talk of timeless styles are among the signals that have come to imply they are environmentally responsible.

Now that sustainability marketing has become commonplace, there are signs that consumers are getting savvier. More brands are disclosing more information about where and how clothes are manufactured, raising the bar for rivals.

So, Dôen plans to release a comprehensive “resolutions report” that shares more details about its supply chain and employee conditions than ever before. The documents covers raw materials (31 percent of its cotton and cotton blends were organic in 2020), production traceability (in 2021, it aims to be able to trace 80 percent of its raw materials, up from 2 percent in 2020), factory auditors, the wages of factory workers at its primary factories, employee benefits, anti-racism efforts as well as its efforts to reduce plastic packaging, among other topics. Doen plans to hire a director of impact in 2021 to lead its efforts to collect more data.

As fashion consumers continue to push companies toward more sustainable and ethical business practices, we will likely see more of this in the future. We believe this trend will have a big impact on domestic manufacturing and companies’ decisions to bring manufacturing back to the USA.

Read more HERE