The ‘Wellbeing Wardrobe’ as a tool to promote just transitions in the fashion and textile industry

In this paper we discuss the pressing need for a just transition in one of our most environmentally and socially problematic contemporary industries: the fashion and textiles industry. We detail the current injustices in the industry, from both environmental and socio-economic standpoints, and then move on to providing some suggestions as to how these entrenched problems with the industry could be addressed. Specifically, we identify five key action areas that could take us towards a just transition for the fashion and textiles industry: establishing limits, developing new indicators, promoting fairness, implementing just modes of governance, and creating new exchange systems. We propose policy interventions in each of these five action areas and discuss how they could practically be put into practice. In doing so, we develop a novel theoretical concept for a more just version of the global fashion industry: the ‘Wellbeing Wardrobe’, which draws on wellbeing economics and de-growth thinking applied to the contemporary fashion industry.