Is BOOHOO 'Ready For The Future'? Or are they simply jumping on the sustainable trend?

In the beginning of my third year of fashion design here at Trent, we were given a competition briefing released by BOOHOO, the popular fast fashion brand known for its cheap and exclusively online sales presence. The brief was to design a spring/summer collection for their new more planet conscious collection. At the time, I thought that maybe this might be worth entering, as my career path intended on heading into sustainable fashion after my degree, but after my initial consideration, I decided to look more closely at this new sustainable collection because I genuinely did not know how a brand that turned over styles so quickly could even come across as caring for the planet at all or 'the future' of it.

On closer inspection of this specific collection, the opening information surrounding the garments indicated that each garment was made from over 20% "more sustainable materials". When I first read this I thought that 20% seemed like a pretty poor effort at sustainable materials and seemed more on the greenwashing route than the sustainable one. However, I then reread it and realised that they had worded it "more sustainable" rather than "sustainable" materials. This made me feel worse as i wondered whether this was just a word thrown in to describe a slightly better material such as sustainable cotton rather than normal cotton, for example. This hit me hard. Just another brand jumping on the sustainability train. To me it wasn't even worth their time creating the collections, branding and marketing for it. As you can imagine, I never entered the competition.

The sustainability page on their website gives useful advice for living a more conscious lifestyle. However, a lot of their advice is not followed with their own brand operations and ethics, such as the use of plastic packaging and "wear longer" as they are a very trend focused brand with hundreds of thousands of items added to their website every year. They focus on a high turnover of low quality, cheap items and their sustainability goals are nothing short of following the crowd. I have to give them some credit, as their whole campaign does suggest that the designs are made to be reworn time and time again, however, I just can't imagine that fast fashion can be worn for life with the quality that comes hand-in-hand with the fast fashion business model. For a lot of brands in the industry, releasing more "sustainable" collections seems to be a trend rather than something they actually care about, as they are worried about losing business rather than caring for the planet. However it must be said that something is definitely better than nothing.

I'm interested to know whether people are opting for sustainable collections only when shopping with fast fashion brands, or whether there is still a mix of both or none at all. When shopping from fast fashion business' sustainable collections, is the small amount of sustainable materials in each garment much better than shopping from their regular collections? Have you been cautious when shopping with fast fashion 'sustainable' collections?

izzy x