Matteo Ward would like you to see your t-shirt as a loaf of bread. “They’re made out of the same ingredients: land, water, air, energy, people”, he says.
“How, then, are we allowing an industry to extract essential resources for life to produce things that nobody needs in these quantities and with such a low quality?”
It’s a provocative question from a man who started his career inside the very industry he’s now trying to reform and regulate. But to Matteo, getting clothing brands to radically change their business model is a matter of survival — for the planet, the people who make our clothes and the industry at large.
“It’s only a matter of time until a politician says, ‘I’ve got one glass of water left for my country – I’m going to give it to agriculture [instead of] fashion,’” he says.
Matteo is the co-founder of WRÅD, a design studio and consultancy, set-up to inspire and enable others to challenge the non-sustainable status quo of the fashion system through education, design and innovation. He also hosts the docu-series JUNK — co-produced by Will Media and Sky Italia — which uncovers the impact of the fashion industry through the stories of the people and ecosystems who are directly affected by it.
First order of business when he advises brands? Stop marketing clothes as “sustainable”, he says.
“Let’s say you design a t-shirt that’s made with 50 percent less water. Congratulations. But if you double production of that shirt next season, the net environmental benefit is zero.”
The same is true if you make it with virgin or recycled synthetic fabric, he says, which sheds microplastics with each wash.
“Microplastics are a huge issue,” because they are too tiny for filters to pick up, so they increasingly end up in our oceans and enter our food chain.
But even the best filters would be useless, he stresses, if factories are paid too little to afford keeping them running. Finance matters immensely too.
That’s why Matteo helps brands think holistically, breaking down internal departments silos and bringing them closer to the value chain. The starting point is always the function of the garment: how much will it be washed and does it need to be synthetic?
While improving manufacturing processes is part of “moving the needle”, the big issue ultimately isn’t material, he says. “It’s economic and cultural.”
“The real elephant in the room is overproduction, overconsumption and how communication has been used to drive people into consuming more goods than they need.”
His end goal is to shift the 3-trillion-dollar industry to a business model that generates its revenue from durability. But that “will not happen overnight”, he concedes, and surely not without the support of stricter legislations, including bans on misleading advertising messages.
But if there’s one policy that would impact the environment most, it’s this, he says: “Pay people living wages.”
“If people are not put in the economic position to think about anything else beyond survival, they will always compromise on the environment.”
