The biggest lesson that I’ve learned along this sustainability journey has been that you can’t consume your way to a more sustainable Earth. That being said, I do think that knowledge is an exception to this statement. Yes, we should be mindful of what we’re consuming (especially with social media), but ultimately, the pursuit of lifelong education and knowledge is a core principle of mine.
Going off of that, one of my goals for this year was to read more. Reading is something that I’ve always enjoyed but fell out of the habit of as life got busier. While the internet provides us with a plethora of information, I still think that the long-form structure of a book allows the author to dive deeper into the specific topic of interest and potentially address more perspectives as well as interrelated topics.
Sustainability and sustainable fashion, in particular, are two topics that I’ve wanted to formally learn more about. Here are the top 8 sustainable fashion books by industry leaders that you should add to your booklist.
1. Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion by Elizabeth L. Cline
We can’t talk about sustainable fashion without mentioning this iconic book by Elizabeth L. Cline. Elizabeth is a New York-based author and journalist whose 2012 release revolutionized the conversations we were having around cheap (fast) fashion. This book explores the impacts of fast fashion on the environment, economy, and society and is a founding book on the ethical and sustainable fashion movement worldwide.
Who This Book Is For:
Anyone who is just starting out on their sustainable fashion journey. This book covers the impact of fast fashion on our current society and is a great starting point to get inspired to take action.
Book Description:
“Cheap fashion has fundamentally changed the way most Americans dress. Stores ranging from discounters like Target to traditional chains like JCPenny now offer the newest trends at unprecedentedly low prices. And we have little reason to keep wearing and repairing the clothes we already own when styles change so fast and it’s cheaper to just buy more.
Cline sets out to uncover the true nature of the cheap fashion juggernaut. What are we doing with all these cheap clothes? And more importantly, what are they doing to us, our society, our environment, and our economic well-being?”
1.5 The Conscious Closet: A Revolutionary Guide to Looking Good While Doing Good by Elizabeth L. Cline
Cline’s latest 2019 release is a practical guide to implementing sustainable fashion in your everyday life.
Who This Book Is For:
Someone who is inspired to take action and make personal changes to their wardrobe. This book covers different aspects of sustainable fashion and will give you the tools that you need to begin to make a change.
Book Description:
“Whether your goal is to build an effortless capsule wardrobe, keep up with trends without harming the environment, buy better quality, seek out ethical brands, or all of the above, The Conscious Closet is packed with the vital tools you need. Elizabeth delves into fresh research on fashion’s impacts and shows how we can leverage our everyday fashion choices to change the world through style. Inspired by her own revelatory journey getting off the fast-fashion treadmill, Elizabeth shares exactly how to build a more ethical wardrobe, starting with a mindful closet clean-out and donating, swapping, or selling the clothes you don’t love to make way for the closet of your dreams.
The Conscious Closet is not just a style guide. It is a call to action to transform one of the most polluting industries on earth—fashion—into a force for good. Readers will learn where our clothes are made and how they’re made, before connecting to a global and impassioned community of stylish fashion revolutionaries. In The Conscious Closet, Elizabeth shows us how we can start to truly love and understand our clothes again—without sacrificing the environment, our morals, or our style in the process.”
2. Naked Fashion: The New Sustainable Fashion Revolution by Safia Minney
Safia Minney is the founder of People Tree, a fair-trade and environmentally-friendly online clothing retailer. The brand has been sustainable and ethical from its inception in 1991, long before being green was trendy. Her 2012 book, Naked Fashion interviews designers and creatives to gives you an inside look on what people within the fashion industry are doing to enact change.
Who This Book Is For:
Someone looking for positive inspiration from the production side of fashion. As consumers, it can sometimes feel like a one-way battle to be more sustainable in our practices but this book provides a different perspective to the sustainable fashion equation.
Book Description:
“Naked Fashion invites you to join the movement of consumers, entrepreneurs, and creative professionals who are using their purchasing power, talents, and experience to make fashion more sustainable.
Designers and creatives from all over the world—including photographers, models, illustrators, actors, and journalists—talk about what they are doing differently to make fashion more sustainable:
Inside you will find fair trade and environment, styling and modeling, up-cycling and “slow” fashion, how we can change the high street, an ethical brand directory, and stunning visuals throughout.”
3. ReFashioned: Cutting-Edge Clothing from Upcycled Materials by Sass Brown
There’s been a lot of talk about circular fashion and upcycling in the sustainable fashion space. Circular fashion refers to a process of producing clothing such that the entire lifecycle of these products is considered from the very beginning. Our current production cycle is incredibly wasteful and not only are clothes tossed after only a handful of wears, but a lot of waste is generated in the making of these garments as well. ReFashioned presents us with an understanding of how design itself can help us shift towards a more sustainable clothing cycle.
Who This Book Is For:
If you’re looking to get inspired by the innovation that is occurring within the fashion industry, this book is for you!
Book Description:
“In a fast-fashion world of throw-away clothing, it is the ultimate expression of the slow-fashion movement, with each piece individually conceived and crafted from scratch, using different materials each time.
ReFashioned features 46 international designers who work with recycled materials and discarded garments, reinvigorating them with new life and value. The result is beautiful and desirable clothing and accessories that also make an important statement to the fashion world about its wasteful and exploitative practices.”
4. Cradle to Cradle by Michael Braungart
An oldie but a goodie, Cradle to Cradle presents us with the idea of radically shifting our perspective on the current state of manufacturing so that the system instead acts to sustain the world we live in rather than destroy it. This book looks at regeneration and restoration not just in sustainable fashion, but within all of our manufacturing practices.
Who This Book Is For:
If you’re looking for a philosophical exploration of the current state of the industry, look no further.
Book Description:
“‘Reduce, reuse, recycle’ urge environmentalists; in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage. But as this provocative, visionary book argues, this approach perpetuates a one-way, “cradle to grave” manufacturing model that dates to the Industrial Revolution and casts off as much as 90 percent of the materials it uses as waste, much of it toxic. Why not challenge the notion that human industry must inevitably damage the natural world?
In fact, why not take nature itself as our model? A tree produces thousands of blossoms in order to create another tree, yet we do not consider its abundance wasteful but safe, beautiful, and highly effective; hence, “waste equals food” is the first principle the book sets forth. Products might be designed so that, after their useful life, they provide nourishment for something new-either as “biological nutrients” that safely re-enter the environment or as “technical nutrients” that circulate within closed-loop industrial cycles, without being “downcycled” into low-grade uses (as most “recyclables” now are).”
5. Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion by Tansy E. Hoskins
We all know that fast fashion is hugely problematic on the environmental and human rights front, but have you ever stopped to think about all the nitty-gritty details about how it pervades and negatively impacts our everyday lives and culture? Stitched Up is a book that wonderfully connects all the different aspects of the fashion industry, from environmental impact to its implications on self-esteem.
Who This Book Is For:
With this book, you begin to understand exactly how interwoven everything is. If you’re looking for a broader perspective on the fashion industry and what its social implications are, this book is for you!
Book Description:
“Stitched Up delves into the alluring world of fashion to reveal what is behind the clothes we wear. Moving between Karl Lagerfeld and Karl Marx, the book explores consumerism, class, and advertising to reveal the interests which benefit from exploitation.
Tansy E. Hoskins dissects fashion’s vampiric relationship with the planet and with our bodies to uncover what makes it so damaging. Why does “size zero” exist, and what is the reality of working life for models? In a critique of the portrayal of race in fashion, the book also examines the global balance of power in the industry.
In a compelling conclusion, Stitched Up explores the use of clothing to resist. Can you shock an industry that loves to shock? Is “green fashion” an alternative? Stitched Up provides a unique critical examination of contemporary culture and the distorting priorities of capitalism.”
6. Thrive by Kamea Chayne
I love Kamea Chayne and her podcast (Green Dreamer) so Thrive is extremely high on my reading list. Thrive is a comprehensive book that takes a more holistic look on what it means to live sustainably. While this book doesn’t touch on sustainable fashion specifically, I think that the mentality shift that comes with living more sustainably is a huge part of the journey and this book presents exactly that.
Who This Book Is For:
Someone who is looking for a more holistic, inclusive look on what it means to slow down and live sustainably.
Book Description:
“A one-stop-read to holistic wellness for those wanting a comprehensive introduction to living more healthily, consciously, and thoughtfully… Will getting your dream job, buying your dream car, living in your dream home, and going on your dream vacation enable you to live happily ever after? Will eating balanced diets, exercising regularly, and getting enough sleep be sufficient for long-term health? Contrary to what you might think, the answers are no and no. Why? Because happiness is not something you can conquer in the outside world, but an ongoing, positive state of mind that must first be cultivated within you. And total wellness requires us to take care of not only ourselves, but also the planet that we all call home.
Through the use of research-based evidence, easy-to-do exercises, and suggestions for how the reader can participate in creating sustainability in all areas of life, Thrive shows you how to build psychological riches, boost your holistic physical well-being, make informed and sustainable food choices, shop for nontoxic, eco-conscious daily consumer products, and travel in ways that will not only transform you, but even the communities that you touch upon. Are you ready for an eye-opening journey to true personal wellness and world sustainability?”
7. Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann
One of the core problems in sustainable fashion is our rate of consumption. In the western world, we’ve developed this habit of treating our items like disposable goods and our buy-buy-buy culture is beginning to take a toll on the Earth. This book explores how our capitalistic society came to be and how our culture has shifted along with it.
Who This Book Is For:
Anyone who is curious about our economic and cultural landscape, especially as it relates to environmental issues.
Book Description:
“What we consume has become a central—perhaps the central—feature of modern life. Our economies live or die by spending, we increasingly define ourselves by our possessions, and this ever-richer lifestyle has had an extraordinary impact on our planet. How have we come to live with so much stuff, and how has this changed the course of history?
In Empire of Things, Frank Trentmann unfolds the extraordinary story of our modern material world, from Renaissance Italy and late Ming China to today’s global economy. While consumption is often portrayed as a recent American export, this monumental and richly detailed account shows that it is in fact a truly international phenomenon with a much longer and more diverse history. Trentmann traces the influence of trade and empire on tastes, as formerly exotic goods like coffee, tobacco, Indian cotton and Chinese porcelain conquered the world, and explores the growing demand for home furnishings, fashionable clothes and convenience that transformed private and public life. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought department stores, credit cards and advertising, but also the rise of the ethical shopper, new generational identities and, eventually, the resurgence of the Asian consumer.
With an eye to the present and future, Frank Trentmann provides a long view on the global challenges of our relentless pursuit of more—from waste and debt to stress and inequality. A masterpiece of research and storytelling many years in the making, Empire of Things recounts the epic history of the goods that have seduced, enriched and unsettled our lives over the past six hundred years.”
8. Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell
Cheap investigates the American relationship with finding bargain deals and the true costs of what that looks like from a global perspective. While this book explores industries outside of fashion, many of its principles and topics apply to the fast fashion industry and how our exploitative culture came to be.
Who This Book Is For:
If you’re interested in diving into our consumption habits and our relationship with cutting costs, this book is for you.
Book Description:
“A myth-shattering investigation of the true cost of America’s passion for finding a better bargain
From the shuttered factories of the Rust Belt to the strip malls of the Sun Belt-and almost everywhere in between-America has been transformed by its relentless fixation on low price. This pervasive yet little- examined obsession with bargains is arguably the most powerful and devastating market force of our time, having fueled an excess of consumerism that blights our landscapes, escalates personal debt, lowers our standard of living, and even skews of our concept of time.
Spotlighting the peculiar forces that drove Americans away from quality, durability, and craftsmanship and towards quantity, quantity, and more quantity, Ellen Ruppel Shell traces the rise of the bargain through our current big-box profusion to expose the astronomically high cost of cheap.”
So there we have it, my top 8 books on sustainable fashion (and related topics). Have you read any of these books? What were your thoughts? Are there any other books that you’d like to add to this list?