The History of Sustainability: Why it Matters Now by Jacqueline Senecal

The history of sustainability is crucial to understand the present and future of fashion. Without the history of fashion, we cannot fully understand the future, and where we got to today. The world, since the discovery of fire and have been manipulating land to plant, has used resources at a steadily increasing rate.

Today, we utilize 140% of resources, which means that we cannot fully sustain to live on the planet in the future if we do not change our ways. The history of sustainability shows how through time we change our thoughts and ways of viewing the planet.  History shows what we have done to the world, along with how we have used the resources of the world. It is shown in the way that full civilizations no longer have a place to live, animals are being run out of their habitats, and places such as California are experiencing serious droughts. The world has experienced the history we have put upon it through climate change. If we don’t change our ways, this will seriously impact the future of the planet and could lead to irreversible consequences.

Specifically, in fashion, resources have been used at an alarming rate since the industrial revolution. Fashion is the second largest polluting industry, and uses resources to make fabric, and water to clean and dye that same fabric at catastrophic rates. In the 1950s, producers have revved up their production and told us that we constantly needed more (Leonard 2007). By believing what they were saying, this has completely changed the way we think, and now our planet cannot sustain this amount of production. Therefore, knowing this history is important to show when we changed our ways, and what influenced us to change. Fashion needs to take steps to be able to come to a more harmonious production with the planet, otherwise the world as we had known, and know now, will be gone forever.