‘Circular fashion’: the truth behind H&Ms #looopit campaign
Why is it that H&M can afford to pay celebrities to endorse its greenwashing marketing campaigns, and yet still refuses to pay factory workers a minimum wage?
H&M has been trying to position itself as a sustainable brand for a while now, most notably through their so-called Conscious Collection, which (quite rightly) got them slapped with a lawsuit in Norway for misleading marketing.
Their latest stunt has been their #looopit campaign, which has also marked the launch of their partnership with Game of Thrones actor Maisie Williams, who has been appointed as their ‘Global Sustainability Ambassador’. The brand created ‘H&M Looop Isle’ on Animal Crossing, paying well-known social media influencers and Twitch streamers to visit the island and tell their Instagram followers all about H&M’s circular fashion plans.
With #looopit H&M are effectively arguing that the solution to fast fashion’s vast environmental impact is a circular model wherein garments are recycled and reused to create new garments. They’re highlighting their aim to use more recycled materials in their clothing ranges, creating a ‘loop’ where old clothes are turned into new clothes in a ‘sustainable’, circular economy.
This campaign forms an extension to their in-store recycling programme, where consumers are encouraged to donate their old clothes in H&M stores, in exchange for vouchers giving them money off new purchases at H&M. It also serves to highlight the technological solution H&M has developed, the ‘Looop’ machine which is currently operating in H&M’s Stockholm store. The machine takes clothes, breaks them down into fibres, and weaves those fibres into new items of clothing.
“To fight climate change, we need to change fashion. One way of doing this is circular solutions.” — H&M website
The dark side of influencer marketing campaigns
We’re all pretty used to influencer marketing these days, with the #gifted and the #ads littering our social media feeds constantly. But just because we’re now used to this new form of advertising invading our lives, doesn’t mean it isn’t a problem.
With the #looopit campaign, H&M is focusing on influencer marketing. Firstly, they announced their long-term partnership with Maisie Williams, who is to be their Global Sustainability Ambassador. Whilst Maisie may be an environmental advocate, she’s certainly no sustainability expert, so this is worrying in itself.
Secondly, with the launch of Loop Isle on Animal Crossing, H&M infiltrated the world of gaming, working with Twitch streamers who would visit the island live on stream and with Instagram influencers who would post photos of them with their Nintendo switch in hand.
I have no shade to throw on the influencers who choose to be a part of H&M’s campaign. Whilst I’d love to see the influencers who claim to care about sustainability start to refuse campaigns like this which are clearly greenwashing, they’re probably being offered a crazy amount of money to share the campaign.
But what is concerning is the reaction to campaigns like this that use influencer marketing. People are genuinely starting to think of H&M as a sustainable fashion company, which could not be further from the truth.
For instance, I watched a short clip of Twitch streamer freyzplayz during her sponsored segment with H&M, visiting the Looop Isle on Animal Crossing. She read out a comment from one of her viewers, saying “big up to sustainable fashion brands like H&M”. It’s actually sickening.
What’s even worse is the fact that H&M is happy to shell out god-knows-how-much on promoting the #looopit campaign with influencers, but they still refuse to pay the garment workers who create their clothes fairly. Let’s never ever forget the involvement of H&M in the Rana Plaza collapse of 2013 which killed1,134 garment workers in Bangladesh and injured over 2,500. Since then, H&M has changed nothing about their supply chain and factory policies.
So is circular fashion the answer?
Clearly H&M are pushing the idea that fast fashion brands moving to circular models of production is the answer to the enormous amounts of waste in the fashion industry. But is circular fashion the answer? Or are H&M pushing this because it fits their own agenda? I’d say it’s pretty certainly the later.
Recycling is not the answer.
The fast fashion industry is incredibly harmful. It’s an industry which has built success out of creating a culture where outfits are worn once and abandoned, where fashion trends come in and out of style so quickly that we must constantly be shopping for new items, where we are made to feel that buying new clothes is the key to happiness, and where shopping is a weekend treat or social activity. This has allowed fast fashion brands to speed up their production again and again, churning out more and more products that consumers willingly lap up. It’s in the name: ‘fast fashion’.
The fast fashion industry makes over one billion items of clothing per year, resulting in 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent emissions — accounting for 5% of global annual greenhouse gases. The clothing and textile industry is the second biggest polluter in the world — second only to oil.
And it isn’t slowing down. Between 2000 and 2014 clothing production doubled, and at the same time the average time a typical consumer keeps clothes in their wardrobes decreased by 50%. We’re producing more and more clothes, and throwing them away quicker and quicker.
Recycling more of these clothes may prevent some of them from ending up in landfill, but it’s not enough to solve the wider problem.
What we actually need is for fast fashion brands, like H&M, to drastically scale back their levels of production. We need to be encouraging consumers to buy less, and keep items of clothing for longer — discarding the culture of wearing trends, and educating on how to repair and reuse clothes to keep them in circulation for longer.
So, if H&M claims to have sustainability at the core of its business, and that they will be ‘fully sustainable by 2030’, why aren’t they talking about this critical need to shift away from the constant cycle of purchasing clothes?
The answer to that is simple: scaling down production and encouraging consumers to stop buying would harm their profits, and potentially put them out of business.
“Honestly, the idea that whizzy recycling solutions will metabolise the billions of garments being needlessly churned out by fast fashion brands every year and let them off the hook so we can all merrily keep on shopping is… what’s science for ‘total horseshit’?”
- Lauren Bravo, author
H&M are not a sustainable business. They are a huge and profit-hungry brand worth over $18 billion, and they will never do or promote anything that would harm their business model.
I think H&M are scared. They’re scared because people are realising that the real answer to environmentally friendly clothing is for us to buy less clothes that will last for longer, and their cheap, disposable clothing won’t cut it. They’re scared because the second hand clothing market is projected to nearly double the size of the fast fashion industry by 2029 — and we’re seeing this already with the rise of second-hand marketplaces like Depop and Vinted.
“I don’t believe that providing fashion on a large scale and working in a sustainable way needs to be a contradiction.”
- Anna Gedda, Head of Sustainability at H&M, in their 2017 sustainability report
Their Conscious Collection and #Looopit campaigns are panicked attempts to stay relevant in a world where consumers are wising up, and making decisions based on ethics and environmentalism. And for that reason, I expect we’ll see many more pathetic greenwashing campaigns in the coming months.
So when we do see those campaigns, remember this one message: fast fashion brands like H&M will never be truly sustainable, no matter what their marketing or the influencers they pay to promote it can say.
