The Sustainable Fashion Communication Playbook highlights the importance of shifting fashion communication to enable a sustainable and circular fashion sector, drawing attention to the role of marketers, brand managers, imagemakers, storytellers, media, influencers and beyond. Published jointly by UNEP and UN Climate Change, it shows communicators how to take action through 1) countering misinformation, 2) reducing messages perpetuating overconsumption, 3) redirecting aspiration to more sustainable lifestyles, and 4) empowering consumers to demand greater action from businesses and policymakers. Ultimately it intends to help communicators explore how to assist in decoupling value creation from resource extraction and volume growth, while improving wellbeing.

Unsustainable patterns of consumption and production are contributing directly and significantly to the triple planetary crisis, not to mention social injustices worldwide. The fashion sector is considered responsible, for instance, for between 2 per cent and 8 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions as well as significant pollution, water extraction and biodiversity impacts, including 9 per cent of annual microplastic losses to oceans, while consuming 215 trillion litres of water per year.

While addressing production impacts is essential, shifting patterns of excess consumption in core markets is also a priority, which means confronting the dominant linear economic model and its accompanying narrative of newness, immediacy and disposability.

The Sustainable Fashion Communication Playbook acknowledges the power of fashion’s marketing engine, and the significant role it plays in shaping desire, aspiration and levels of consumption. It presents the need to direct such efforts towards sustainable and circular solutions as a creative opportunity. It provides a much needed framework when policies around how to communicate environmental claims increasingly come into force. By leveraging their skills, communicators can be a part of the solution rather than contributors to the problem, and, in doing so, help advance towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement on climate change.

“The balance between the science of sustainability and reimagining the fashion narrative is where communicators can excel. There is so much power in the stories fashion tells. If the fashion sector is to meet its sustainability targets, we need its enormous marketing engine to redirect its efforts towards sustainable consumption. But there is a notable void for participation in this change from communication stakeholders. The Sustainable Fashion Communication Playbook provides the practical guide that is needed. Importantly, it highlights how there is scope for huge creativity to envision and realise the world we want to live in,” said Daniel Cooney, Director of Communication, UNEP.

Ina Parvanova, Director of Communications and Engagement, UN Climate Change, said “The fashion industry recognises the changes it needs to implement are systemic. Shifting consumer behaviours and confronting the role marketing and storytelling play within this are crucial. The Sustainable Fashion Communication Playbook was developed in consultation with fashion stakeholders looking to effect change at this level. It not only provides a framework for addressing the Fashion Charter’s commitment on communication, but in doing so gives practitioners around the world the means to support the industry’s wider sustainability goals across environmental and social issues.”

The Sustainable Fashion Communication Playbook provides practical guidance, including lists of dos and don’ts for consideration and case studies as examples of best practice