Policy brief Author: Marula Tsagkari
Report authors: Tansy E. Hoskins & Morena Hanbury Lemos
Policy Brief
The policy brief was elaborated by Marula Tsagkari based on the report “Extraction Fashion” (see below) produced by War on Want and Research & Degrowth International.
The policy brief highlights the results of this investigation and calls on EU decision-makers to take action to transform the fashion industry. The brief proposes a degrowth approach to fashion, stressing the need for a radical reduction of material and energy consumption in clothing production and challenges the ideologies of constant novelty, overconsumption, and fast fashion.
Defashioning
- Dismantling the dominant global fashion system which is rooted in capitalist, extractivist, and colonial logics.
- Replacing it with diverse, localised, sustainable and care-based clothing practices.
Defashioning in practice: clothing libraries, clothing swaps, repair workshops, upcyling…
Policies to degrow fashion
Consumption
- Standardised labels for products
- Advertisement ban
- Fashion week ban
- Online shopping regulation
Production
- Fashion cap & share system
- Ban on planned obsolescence
- Government subsidies & tax breaks for local producers
Just transition
- Support trade unions for fashion industry workers
- Training programs for repair, redesign and reuse
- Public auditing of labour conditions
Marula Tsagkari is a political ecologist from Athens, Greece. She is currently a Margarita Salas postdoctoral researcher at ICTA-UAB. Her work focuses on energy communities, energy self-sufficiency, technology, and values. Marula holds a Ph.D. from the University of Barcelona and MSc in Environmental Science Policy and Management from Central European University and the University of Lund. In 2022-2023 she was a postdoctoral researcher at TU-Delft.
Report
The study conducted by Research & Degrowth International and War on Want, authored by Tansy E. Hoskins and Morena Hanbury Lemos, found that fashion-related consumption in the EU in 2021 alone required:
- close to 230,000 square kilometers of land
- close to 190,000 kilotons of minerals and 46,000 kilotons of metals
- Over 4.5 million years of human labor in wage hours
The report reveals a stark geographical asymmetry: fashion for the EU is not produced locally, but rather through large-scale appropriation of land, resources, and labor largely from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Today, there are a number of national and international policy frameworks aiming to regulate the fashion industry and its impacts. However, these are often limited to voluntary commitment and self-reporting by corporations or consumer awareness strategies. These are insufficient. Strong regulation is required to incur a material and a mental shift away from clothing systems based on colonial extraction and exploitation.
The policy brief proposes the adoption of a degrowth lens to transform the fashion industry.
next steps
With the Policy Brief, our aim is to position the issue of degrowing the fashion industry firmly on the political agenda. Help us do so by sharing this summary within your network or by reaching out to us or the author to organize an event, an interview, or any other project.
contact us!
Policy Brief author: Marula Tsagkari
E-mail: marouko.tsagkari@uab.cat
Publisher: Research & Degrowth International
E-mail: project@degrowth.org
further reading on degrowing fashion
· Hoskins, T. E., & Lemos, M. H. (2025). Extraction Fashion: unequalexchange and degrowth explored. Research & Degrowth International.
· Niessen, S. (2022). Defining defashion: A manifesto for degrowth. International Journal of Fashion Studies, 9(2), 439–444.
· Cosciemee et al. (2022). Unfit, Unfair, Unfashionable: Resizing Fashion for a Fair Consumption Space. Hot or Cool Institute
· Tomé, C. (2025,). Fashion Commons: A Cap-and-Share Model to Tackle the Fashion Industry’s Overproduction Crisis. Equal Right: Economic Justice Without Borders.
The report and the policy brief have been produced as a result of the crowdfunding launched in 2023. Thanks to all the kind donors for making this possible.