The Rise of Degrowth in Fashion, Explained

Most conversations about sustainable fashion focus on how something is made — better materials, cleaner production. A smaller but growing movement is asking a more fundamental question: should a fashion business be structured around constant growth at all? This is the core idea behind degrowth, and it's gaining genuine traction within sustainability-focused fashion circles.

What Degrowth Actually Argues

Degrowth, as an economic concept, challenges the assumption that continuous growth in production and consumption is either necessary or desirable — arguing instead for an economy, and by extension an industry, deliberately scaled to meet genuine need rather than to maximise output and sales indefinitely. Applied to fashion specifically, it means questioning whether a brand's success should be measured primarily by year-over-year sales growth at all.

Why This Is a More Radical Idea Than It First Sounds

Most sustainable fashion strategies — better materials, improved labour conditions, reduced waste — still operate within a growth-oriented business model, simply trying to make that growth less harmful. Degrowth is a genuinely different proposition: it suggests that even a "sustainably produced" garment contributes to overconsumption if the underlying business model still depends on selling more units every year to succeed.

What Degrowth Looks Like in Practice for a Brand

In practice, degrowth-aligned brands tend to prioritise deliberately smaller, considered production runs over scaling volume, focus on repair and longevity programmes that extend a garment's life rather than encouraging replacement, and sometimes explicitly resist rapid expansion even when demand would support it — treating "staying the right size" as a legitimate business goal in its own right, rather than growth being the default, unquestioned objective.

The Tension With Conventional Business Metrics

It's worth being honest about the real tension here: degrowth principles sit uncomfortably alongside conventional measures of business success, and a brand genuinely committed to the idea has to grapple with growth-oriented pressure from investors, retail partners, or simply the practical need to remain financially viable — a real trade-off, not a purely idealistic choice with no cost attached.

Why It's Gaining Traction Now

Growing awareness of overproduction's environmental cost — covered in more depth in our post on haul culture and overconsumption — has made "more" an increasingly uncomfortable default goal for values-driven brands and shoppers alike, creating real appetite for an alternative framework that degrowth explicitly provides.

Where This Connects to Our Own Approach

We haven't adopted "degrowth" as an explicit label for our own business, but several of its underlying principles — small-batch production, resisting the pressure toward constant new drops, prioritising durability and repair over replacement — already run through how we operate. It's a useful framework for articulating why "sold out and staying that way for a while" is sometimes the more honest choice than manufacturing more simply to avoid it.

See how these principles show up in our own practices → Ethical Production Practices