Fashion is one of the most wasteful and destructive industries in the world, in fact, it lags behind only the oil industry to fill the number two slot for the most eco-hostile industry on Earth.
These awesome sustainable fashion documentaries explore the harsh truths of this polluting industry and offer you some insight into how we, the consumers of fashion, can make a difference before it’s too late for our planet.
The True Cost
Warning! Don’t watch this without tissues to hand because it’s going to break your heart and leave you sobbing.
The True Cost sets out to examine who really pays for our clothes and once you learn about the human rights abuses, child labor, cancers from the chemicals, and the suicides that fast fashion causes, you’ll be weeping like we were.
It was released back in 2015 and has become an absolute “must watch” on the sustainable fashion scene.
The Machinists
80 million people work in the fashion industry around the world and nearly all of them are women in developing nations.
They are young women too between the ages of 18 and 35, and many of them have families to support. And the industry doesn’t care about them at all.
The Machinists tell their story. Watch 3 young women from Bangladesh in a factory in Dhaka pay the price of your clothing choices. This is the true cost of fast fashion.
Unravel
Have you ever wondered what happens to the garments that you discard?
Unravel traces the footsteps of the clothes as they come off of our backs and head over the oceans to reach India.
You’ll learn how the recyclers of Panipat turn dead clothes into useful products and the vision they have of the wasteful Westerners that keep them in business, gleaned only from their old clothes.
The Ugly Truth Of Fast Fashion
Hasan Minhaj is your host as he examines the “fast fashion” of the West and how massive clothing brands crank out new garments every few days for an industry committed to “throw it away, buy it again.”
You’ll soon see, very clearly indeed, how your “harmless habits” are actually killing the planet.
Slowing Down Fast Fashion
Yes, Alex James of the global smash hit band Blur, has turned his hand to documentary making (and cheesemaking too – but that’s not part of this documentary, sadly) and a subject that he feels is super important.
In Slowing Down Fast Fashion, he looks at the environmental damage wrought by the fashion industry and how we can all make a difference by changing our habits.
UDITA
The cost of doing something about fast fashion can be expensive too, UDITA looks at the women’s rights movement of Bangladesh’s sweatshops.
It tells an ugly tale of beatings, arrests, sackings and intimidation but leads to a hopeful eye on the future of a better business environment.
Riverblue
This is an intelligent and fascinating examination of the water waste and damage created by the fashion industry.
It consumes huge amounts of water and produces nearly one-fifth of all the world’s wastewater too.
Check them out here.
Minimalism
While not just focused on the fashion industry, minimalism looks at how we can all make our lives better by consuming less.
And of course, part of that journey, means taking the principles of minimalism to our wardrobes and cutting down on the clothes that we wear and improving the meaning in our lives, instead.
So, there you have it, the best sustainable fashion documentaries out there at the moment.
We guarantee that if you watch one or two of these, you will become committed to reducing your impact on the planet through the clothing choices you make.