Earth Action: Become a Sustainable Fashion Influencer | by Orca.c | Mar, 2023

Earth911 is honoring the 52 years of Earth Day with 52 Actions for the Earth. Each week through Earth Day 2023, we will share an action you can take to invest in the Earth and make your own life more sustainable. The environmental impact of the global textile and fashion industry is so big that EarthDay.org has made sustainable fashion one of its major campaigns. This week, you can use social media to take action for the Earth by becoming a fashion influencer.

We’re so used to $10 T-shirts, seasonal trends, and shops that rotate merchandise every two weeks, few of us can imagine a world without fast fashion. The average person today buys 60% more clothing than they did 15 years ago. But they only keep their clothes for half as long. The average garment may be worn as few as 10 times before disposal.

But every aspect of making, selling, and replacing all that disposable clothing has a big environmental impact. The fashion industry is responsible for nearly 10% of total greenhouse gas emissions. Every year, 40 million tons of textiles are disposed — many of them never worn. It takes nearly 3,000 liters of water to make one cotton T-shirt and 3,781 liters of water to make a pair of jeans. Yet cotton, especially organic cotton, is a better fabric choice than synthetics. More than half of our clothes are made of oil-derived synthetic fibers that contribute to 35% of all ocean microplastic pollution. After technology manufacturing, the garment industry is the next leading cause of modern slavery and child labor.

Quitting fast fashion for good and investing in sustainable fashion isn’t easy, especially when social media is overflowing with haul videos and #ootd (outfit of the day) images that encourage a throwaway approach to dressing. You can take inspiration from EarthDay.org’s Fashion for the Earth Ambassadors and shift your own influences by following more sustainable fashion influencers in 2023. But it’s even better to become an influencer for good yourself.

As part of EarthDay.org’s sustainable fashion campaign, they are renewing My Planet My Closet, a showcase for the efforts of regular people to move past fast fashion and develop a more sustainable wardrobe. To participate, make a short MP4 video showing off your sustainable closet, and share it with EarthDay.org. They might use it on Twitter, other social media channels, their web page, or all of the above.

You can follow EarthDay.org’s guidelines and join their campaign or just do your own thing. On the social media platform of your choice, create a video, reel, image, or text post that relates to sustainable fashion. Demonstrate how you reduce the impact of your wardrobe, show off your creative remixes of your capsule wardrobe, or share facts about the environmental impact of the fashion industry. If you know how to mend or recently hosted a clothing swap, make a how-to video or blog about the experience. Read some of Earth911’s articles on making fashion sustainable if you need inspiration, and don’t forget to tag @Earth911!