We live in a fast-paced society in which keeping up with the latest fashion trends has become both a dash and an ultramarathon without a finish line. A constant pursuit of newness.

At one end of the scale, luxury fashion brands produce up to six collections a year: all the seasons plus cruise or resort. At the other end, online retailer ASOS stocks up to 60,000 styles at any one time, and will constantly update its inventory according to what’s trending.

The problem is, fashion – the way clothes are relentlessly produced, promoted and consumed – is killing the planet. In 2015, greenhouse gas emissions from global textile production totalled 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2 – more than the emissions of all international flights and maritime shipping combined. Water usage is biblical: to produce the cotton for a single T-shirt takes 2,700 litres of water – enough water for one person to drink for 900 days.

Meanwhile, rivers across the world are boiling with some of the 8,000 synthetic chemicals used to turn raw materials into final products. And for what? Of the 150 billion pieces of clothing produced each year, most are kept for less than three years and less than one per cent of the material used to produce them is recycled into something new at the end of its life.

Slow fashion is one of the proposed solutions, a means of being stylish but not wasteful.

The Principles Of Slow Fashion

In the past 15 years, global textile production has doubled to meet demand – and it’s not letting up. The industry is set to expand still further: by 63 per cent by 2030. And most of the blame is laid at the feet of fast fashion, the accelerated business model that churns out cheap, badly made gear hundreds of times a year. What’s more, according to consultants McKinsey, more than half of fast fashion items are chucked out in less than a year.