#goals

Fashion & Sustainable Development

I reverse-engineered Giorgia Lupi’s 2017 MoMA installation Capstones to examine the impact of the fashion industry on sustainability.

Capstones by Giorgia Lupi

Using data from Glasgow Calendonian New York College's Fair Fashion Center and their Quantum Redesign of Fashion, Capstones charts the progress of 8 fashion items toward meeting the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals across 15 Areas of Impact that form the commercial life cycle of a product.

Evaluating Capstones as a high-level snapshot of common practices by large apparel and footwear companies, I extracted the relationships between Areas of Impact (industries) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for each item.

Here’s how the data looks for a white t-shirt.

Each point indicates a stage of the product development cycle for which the Quantum Redesign model identified the potential for clear sustainability efforts, mapped to the Sustainable Development Goals that they impact.

I then synthesized the data for all 8 items, highlighting the points in the commercial life cycle that are most targeted by sustainability efforts.


Circle size corresponds to the number of key fashion items that share the same intersection of industry and sustainability.


Larger circles indicate that more fashion brands are focused at those intersections.

If all key fashion items were made with a more sustainable approach at every stage of production, they could become a catalyst for a transformation of the entire industry.

By reorganizing the SDGs within the framework of Planet, People, and Prosperity, we can visualize where sustainability campaigns in the fashion industry place their focus.

From here, we can investigate which stages of product development have the most active sustainability efforts, sorting from those with the highest impact:

1. Manufacturing
2. Social & Labor
3. Waste & Circular Living

...to the industries with the lowest sustainablity impact:

13. Transportation & Logistics
14. Retail & eCommerce
15. Marketing

Consumer Engagement and Transparency & Government are also comparatively low-impact for sustainability, ranking at 11 and 12 respectively.

Retail spaces, marketing campaigns, influencers, and consumers are an under-utilized resource in current sustainability efforts.

Especially consumers.

We don’t have enough information yet to effect change through our purchasing power.

Consumers need a standardized metric by which to evaluate the ethics and sustainable practices of the companies responsible for clothing us.

If we all start asking questions of our retailers about how their products are designed, sourced, manufactured, and transported, we can exert pressure on the industry to embrace a more transparent model.

Analysis based on data from Data Items by Giorgia Lupi

Written, designed, and engineered by Leah Welch