Thread by @Telegraph

❓Sustainability at Primark prices?

🛍️In a new strategy revealed today, the retailer announced a veritable haul of measures aimed at addressing its ethical and environmental impact.

There has to be a catch, writes @laurenbravo 🧵👇

telegraph.co.uk/fashion/style/…

✍️"On first read, it certainly sounds like good news," she writes.

"Primark, a brand that has been synonymous with fast fashion since long before the likes of Boohoo and Shein entered the ring, is promising to make sustainability 'affordable to all'"

The retailer announced measures including:

❌Making clothes more durable
❌Halving carbon emissions
❌Eliminating single-use plastic
❌Empowering vulnerable women
❌"Pursuing" a living wage for workers

… all without raising its famously low prices

🗣️"Our ambition is to offer customers the affordable prices they know and love us for, but with products that are made in a way that is better for the planet and the people who make them," Primark CEO Paul Marchant said

✍️"But just like each suspiciously cheap piece of high street fashion, one immediately starts to look for the flaws.

"Where’s the catch, Primark?" Bravo asks

❌There are a few points noticeably absent from today’s plan, she writes. No mention is made of slowing down production…

👚"By churning out new clothes at unfathomable speed, the greed and impatience of mass-produced fashion reverberates all the way along its supply chain"

🛒Nor does the strategy do much to address the product of all this overproduction: overconsumption.

👢"Which is hardly surprising, since our trend-hungry, 'get it or regret it' mindset keeps its tills ringing in turn"

💰It's hard to understand where the extra cash to pay higher wages is going to come from, without raising prices, she writes.

"Perhaps the billionaire Weston family will be coughing up out of their own pockets?"

🔎Read Lauren Bravo's full comment piece here 👇

telegraph.co.uk/fashion/style/…