Fashion media is as unsustainable as fast fashion. It's only getting worse.

Hey there, it’s JD Shadel and Amy Miles, the editors at Good On You. Below, we’re bringing you a teaser for the reimagined Behind the Seams newsletter and coming to you under the anxiety.eco masthead.

And who hasn’t felt the eco-anxiety this year? Yes, these are anxious times. But that’s what we’re here to help tackle together. We’ve made this one line our mantra: The antidote is collective.

Each week, we’ll send one thing to help you make sense of it all and go, well, behind the seams of the fashion industry. This’ll include a mix of deeply reported original features, profiles of small designers and brands worth knowing about, timely essays, secondhand style guides, quick tips and briefings on the news to track.

Some weeks we’ll deliver a reported long-read. Other weeks, it’ll be short briefings. This week, it’s a bit of a manifesto: a long-form essay from JD on why it’s past due that mainstream fashion media faced a reckoning for its failures, and what we want to build with anxiety.eco instead.

Next week, we have a short briefing on the future of secondhand shopping — and more will be revealed as we kick off anxiety.eco’s soft launch.

Thanks for reading! Find the full article below.

JD and Amy

Anyone who works in so-called “sustainable fashion” journalism is having some version of this conversation in 2025.

For me, it was 8am on a Friday in September when I stood, overcaffeinated and overstimulated, in a crowded lounge at London Fashion Week’s kickoff breakfast. I guzzled a second coffee as Laura Weir, the new CEO of the British Fashion Council, made inspiring opening remarks about improving Fashion Week’s accessibility for emerging designers, shining a brighter spotlight on local fashion economies, and remembering the labour that goes on behind the scenes to make any such event possible. After she concluded, the room erupted into a cacophony of enthusiastic networking. I stepped onto the balcony for some air, bumping into a media colleague who has worked on fashion’s sustainability issues for a decade. 

Our catch-up quickly became an extended commiseration about the mainstream fashion press’s abrupt scale-down on such stories this year. By the time the event ended, we were the last people there. We joked we could’ve recorded a three-hour podcast about all of fashion media’s problems. And like podcast hosts, we achieved little other than catharsis.

But the fact remains: Fashion media hasn’t faced a meaningful reckoning for its role in the industry whose reputation it launders and bad deeds it conceals — all while promoting lifestyles that aren’t aligned with what scientists term “planetary boundaries”. Fashion media must also answer for the role it plays in the worsening climate crisis, in waste colonialism, and the over-promotion of new clothes while mountains of textile waste are literally visible from space. 

There are, of course, exceptional examples of meaningful reporting and criticism within mainstream fashion media, but such scrupulous journalists today occupy a minority position in an unscrupulous system. In 2021, the Communication and Media Research Institute at the University of Westminster published a policy briefing about the very issue: fashion media’s culpability in the industry’s problems. Researcher Anastasia Denisova observed: “Fashion is among the biggest polluters, yet the media still promote throwaway fast fashion. The growing fashion public relations industry encourages and enables this media coverage.” The report suggested reimagining editorial agendas to focus more on restyling and secondhand, and putting sustainability at the heart of the editorial mission. 

To this, publishers might invariably reply, “but low traffic to this sort of content shows readers don’t care!” But what if the real issue is publishers’ own lack of credibility? Or at least, their failure of imagination? Can you really blame readers for behaving the way you, the fashion media, suggest they should — by buying more trend-led looks than they actually need, when the fast fashion knockoffs are the only versions the average reader can actually afford?

Leaders in fashion media usually sidestep this stuff. When longtime Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour announced her successor at Vogue, she did an interview with New Yorker editor David Remnick who asked at least one pointed question: “It’s no news to you that the world right now is in so many ways in really bad condition,” he observed. “How do you make a case that fashion is important in the midst of all that?”

Wintour repeated the answer we often hear from industry establishment figures: “It’s a question of self-expression and a statement about yourself. I think fashion can say so many different things. And, forgive me, David, but how boring would it be if everybody was just wearing a dark suit and a white shirt all the time? I think people are individuals and they ought to be able to express themselves. It’s a form of creativity, and that’s why we need fashion and we need great designers.”

Look, self-expression is clearly not the problem. Chances are you, dear reader, probably love style as much as I do. We both probably love design and craft. But we don’t need to ignore the exploitative nature of the fashion industry to love those things. Style existed before our modern fashion system did, after all. Wintour’s conflation of style and the fashion industry is a distraction. 

If anything, fashion media today is less about self-expression and more about making you feel inadequate, uncool, off-trend enough to buy more new stuff — promoting the kind of endless growth within a take-make-waste system that is beyond unsustainable. It is truly out of this world. 

Social media algorithms make micro-trends. PRs push products. Fashion editors, while less powerful than they were in the era of Devil Wears Prada, still influence the looks that ultra fast fashion brands rapidly knock off. Influencers promote more cheap clothes than the world needs. Wintour isn’t the problem as much as she is an avatar for the wider media’s avoidance of acknowledging its culpability.

It’s no secret that fashion media is increasingly advertorial in nature. Advertisers have always gotten special treatment in the glossies, sure, but the legacy media model’s collapse means any remaining lines have become hard to spot. Certainly, editors today commission more stories celebrating the most over-producing brands than they do critiquing them. And it’s well established among fashion journalists who dare do any actual reporting about climate crisis or labour injustice that higher-ups are going to cut the negative references to advertisers. 

“In my own career, I’ve been asked by editors to remove the names of big advertisers from (reported and fact-checked) articles that called them out for lacking climate goals or greenwashing,” recounted journalist Sophie Benson, who has investigated the unsustainable fashion industry for a wide range of major magazines, newspapers and online publications. This was in a piece Benson wrote for 1Granary in May. She anonymously interviewed several journalists about their experience working for major fashion publications. (She also interviewed me.)

“Most of the money came from advertising rather than magazine sales [and] there would be a checklist to ensure that all advertisers were covered adequately within the magazine,” one former fashion editor told Benson. “If we went through the checklist and an advertiser wasn’t featured which should have been it was always the smaller brands (which sustainable brands usually are) who didn’t advertise that would be swapped out.” 

This is not to suggest that fashion editors were ever really beacons for sustainability. But in the 2010s it felt like fashion media was, at least, trying a little harder. Indeed, following the disastrous factory collapse at Rana Plaza in 2013, growing outrage around the unethical practices in fashion supply chains provoked a new critical consciousness of fashion’s problems. Two years after that, the hit True Cost documentary introduced many people to the scope of the problems for the first time. 

Fast fashion brands responded how? By hiring a sustainability team, perhaps — maybe also launching so-called “eco collections”, but did little else to change their overall business practices. 

Similar to fast fashion brands, fashion media responded by creating sustainability sections on their sites without thinking more deeply about the wider scope of their coverage. Editors famously like to brag about their power of influence (see: cerulean sweater), but rarely want to acknowledge their role in the value chain of fashion. 

A few publications do deserve credit for retaining their sustainability correspondents and editors, but, much like the sustainability managers who remain at fast fashion brands, despite correctly identifying the problems, carefully reporting on them, and setting the targets and benchmarks to address them, these editors are left with no real influence to change the overall shape of a publication’s coverage. Meanwhile, commerce teams dwarf the editorial teams at most major fashion publications today, leading many demoralised editors, to their credit, to want out if they haven’t quit already. 

In 2025, as the world’s most powerful corporations roll back on their commitments to environmental action and diversity, mainstream publications have also been giving less bandwidth to meaningful reporting about fashion’s role in the climate crisis. But while brands have received some pushback for their anti-ESG, anti-DEI, “cowardcore” agendas, fashion media has not received any such blowback.

The conversation I had on the balcony last month was simply a variation on a bigger discussion I keep finding myself in lately with peers: from climate justice to diversity, editors seem to have less appetite for stories that might be deemed “controversial” by higher-ups. Or, put differently, they’re avoiding stories that might counter the authoritarian tides of our time. And even when they do assign something, these stories are facing greater censorship from within than ever before. For instance, Marie Claire UK had interviewed beauty critic Jessica DeFino for an article about “MAGA beauty,” which was taken down shortly after being published. (A revised version of the article later reappeared.)  

When it comes to the issues we commonly group under the flawed umbrella term “sustainability,” from living wages through to decarbonising fashion’s supply chain, the focus has almost always been on brands. Understandably so. As I’ve observed working on data journalism projects for the past four years with the Good On You ratings team, including our annual COP report and Beauty Sustainability Scorecard, the biggest brands are not taking action. But fashion media has considerable power, too, and it’s time we put it under scrutiny. It’s time the media was compelled to do something, to answer for itself, to be accountable for its role.

Fashion weeks have similarly long faced criticism that they’re not doing enough. But now, even fashion weeks are setting sustainability criteria and shifting a greater focus to smaller brands, which is the case of the British Fashion Council. This year it trialled new minimum sustainability standards for its Newgen incubation scheme for emerging designers. This makes London Fashion Week the first of the “big four” shows to follow in the footsteps of Copenhagen Fashion Week, which fully implemented its minimum standards two years ago. (The Newgen cohort gets other support, as well, including access to transparency and reporting tools from Good On You.)

Minimum sustainability standards may be a low bar, but it’s something. And when Benson emailed me in May, requesting my comments for the aforementioned 1Granary article, I could’ve written a manifesto in response to her questions about the media’s hypocrisy. To be clear, it’s a system that Benson and I are both insiders and outsiders in, to varying degrees. I was left asking, if some fashion weeks can apply flawed sustainability criteria to their event programs, shouldn't fashion media be able to do a similar thing? 

Of course they can. But they probably won’t anytime soon.

As I told Benson: “The path forward requires both individual and collective action. Those of us working in this space need to consistently push against the limitations of current models while imagining and building alternatives. […] I remain cautiously optimistic that we can develop media approaches that serve both planetary boundaries and human creativity.”

That cautious optimism brings us to today, where we mark the launch of a new worker-owned media outlet, anxiety.eco, which aims to answer the kinds of questions I’ve been grappling with for years: What’s the point of a fashion magazine on a burning planet? What would fashion media look like if it respected planetary boundaries? Can worker-owned fashion media thrive without being beholden to the biggest corporations in the fashion industry? 

In the months to come, anxiety.eco will show you our first attempts at answering these questions, including a transparent editorial policy to challenge the establishment model; a rejection of trend-led coverage; and a clear focus on secondhand fashion and small independent designers who get ignored in favor of the cash-flush advertisers. We’ll cover fashion through the lens of climate reality. We’ll consider our role in the system because we’re a part of it too: we’re not perfect, but we’re aiming to create something radically different from what’s come before. And we’ll have some fun in the process, too, because having fun is how you stay motivated.

We are not deluded enough to think that simply creating better fashion media will solve all of our problems, but working together will get us closer. And as my friend said on the balcony, if many of us have heard some version of “vote with your wallet,” then fashion media needs some version of “vote with your clicks, vote with your attention”. Indeed, supporting the media you want to see more of in the world is the only way forward.