For more than five decades, Margaret Howell has held fast to a simple credo: clothes must be fit for purpose and built to last. It’s a philosophy shaped as much by the stoicism of Britain’s Blitz spirit—the London-based brand’s namesake was born just after World War II—as by a rejection of fashion’s trend-driven churn. Practically speaking, any addition to the oeuvre has to pass what employees have dubbed the “Margaret test.”
“Can she wear a pair of tailored trousers to cycle to a swimming pool?” Sarah Coleman, head of development, design and sustainability for Margaret Howell, said at a Source Fashion panel on cost, speed and durability at ExCel London earlier this month. “Can she wear the same cashmere jumper for 10 years and have it last through multiple washes?”
Howell’s instincts proved to be prescient. Once dismissed as an unprofitable luxury, a marketing bonus or even a quaint holdover from a make-do-and-mend past, durability may be emerging as fashion’s next competitive advantage, according to the Waste and Resources Action Programme, better known as WRAP.
A February report by the circularity nonprofit argued that by reducing the environmental impact of clothing, durability is becoming more of a mandate than a nice-to-have. It also comes as reputational and regulatory pressure mounts around forthcoming legislation such as the European Union’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, which sets proposed minimum performance standards, and various extended producer responsibility frameworks that use eco-modulated fees to reward durable, repairable products, including California’s Responsible Textile Recovery Act.
“We’ve done the data analysis and we believe if the system is not invested in, and it collapses, there is going to be a 200 million-pound ($268 million) cost to the U.K. for dealing with textile waste,” Mark Sumner, project lead for textiles at WRAP, said in an interview. “Right now charities are doing the service with some commercial support, but if they fail because there isn’t enough value in that post-consumer textiles landscape for collecting, sorting, reuse and recycling, either the public will have to pay, brands or, more likely, local authorities.”
The risk of modern slavery rises in low-value sectors, he added.
Consumers are also clamoring for longevity amid mounting cost-of-living pressures. In a recent survey across five of Zalando’s key markets—Germany, France, Italy, Sweden and the United Kingdom—“value for money” topped the list of purchase drivers, while “durability of the material or item” came in third. Some 66 percent of respondents also said they’re making more intentional purchasing decisions with sustainability considerations in mind, including opting for items made for the long haul.
“From a consumer perspective, affordability always comes first, but durability is also important; you don’t have to give up one to have the other,” said Kate Baker, EPR technical manager at WEFT, a U.K.-based consultancy that helps the global fashion and textiles industry prepare for EPR regulation, and a member of the Leeds Institute of Textiles and Colour team at the University of Leeds that helped WRAP with its durability research, at Source Fashion.
A Primark-backed study she worked on during her PhD in 2023 concluded that retail price cannot be used to predict a garment’s physical durability. A 15-pound ($20) pair of budget jeans performed virtually the same in durability tests as a pair 10 times more expensive. Similarly, a budget T-shirt that cost less than 5 pounds (almost $7) was the second most durable of 17 items tested, beating a luxury version priced at 10 times as much. Of all garment categories tested, only men’s hoodies showed a somewhat consistent trend of higher-priced items outperforming lower-priced ones.
But the way Baker sees it, there are two forms of durability that are distinct, if interconnected: physical and emotional. While a garment’s physical durability—remaining functional without showing signs of damage or degradation—dominates the conversation, it also needs to be emotionally durable if it is to remain relevant and useful in someone’s life.
“If you take the example of a garment that is physically perfect in terms of construction, but it doesn’t necessarily resonate for the wearer, so they get bored of it very easily and they’re not going to wear it, technically it’s not durable,” she said. “We see the reverse happening as well with people wearing garments that are worn out and faded because they just love them so much.”
That’s something that Howell got right, too: making sure that a garment is relevant to the wearer is a major part of what makes it durable.
“Our customers still want high-quality, authentic, functional clothing that meets their needs, lasts, and they’re going to have a relationship with it,” Coleman said. “And they do expect more information to be available. So they want to know where it’s come from—like, where’s the fabric from? The traceability aspect. Are there any chemicals they should know about? They do want to know how it’s produced, who our manufacturers are.”
The right fit
Tanya Dove, CEO of the six-month-old pattern-grading software startup Body and Cup Sizing System, also known as BCSizing, sees fit as an overlooked component of garment longevity. According to industry estimates, up to 40 percent of online apparel purchases are returned because of sizing and fit issues. Rather than being restocked, many of these returned items, no matter how well made, are ultimately sent to landfill.
Dove created BCSizing to solve what she called the “B Cup problem,” in which clothing isn’t designed to fit anyone larger than a B cup bust. But this default fits only 19 percent of women based on body measurements, leaving 81 percent unable to find properly fitting clothes without buying oversized items or relying on stretch from elastane—another circularity impediment.
Instead of standard—and limited—S/M/L sizing, Dove’s auto-CAD software integrates six bra cup sizes directly into garment pattern blocks, creating 1,500 distinct sizing codes based on three statures, five figure shapes and 17 core body sizes. These, according to research she conducted during her part-time PhD, can fit 79 percent of women.
“A 60 percent increase in fit is just phenomenal,” Dove said from her booth on the Source Fashion show floor. “So I quit my job and set up a company. We’re now building a mobile app that lets you measure yourself and generates your BCSizing code. Once you know your code, you’ll be able to purchase with confidence, because if your code is MRUK12, for example, anything labeled MRUK12 should fit you perfectly.”
Still, convincing brands there’s a business case for making clothes customers want to hold onto can be fraught.
“We’ve heard businesses say, ‘Hang on a minute, if I’m making all my products really durable, and I want consumers to use them as long as possible, I’m not going to sell as much, so how do I make money?’” Sumner said. “And of course, the usual response—‘you don’t need to worry about the money, you’re saving the planet’—doesn’t fly.”
At the same time, durability can serve as a consumer engagement tool, he said. By building trust with customers, a brand can grow market share, strengthen its reputation for value and create opportunities to generate revenue through alternative models such as resale—all while shifting away from lower-quality products.
WRAP would like to see a garment durability label that could add value in the secondhand market. Sumner said such an indicator could extend a garment’s life with its first owner and make it more likely to enjoy a second, third or even fourth life after resale.
Sumner prefers to frame durability in terms of wash counts, not whether a garment simply “lasts longer,” because that gives consumers a clearer benchmark—50 washes is the standard for a T-shirt. Wash-based standards, he said, are a more practical way to judge durability than nebulous longevity claims, which is why WRAP worked with the Leeds Institute of Textiles and Colour and 27 partners across brands, retailers, reuse and recycling organizations, global test houses and academia to test more than 200 garments and generate data from more than 10,000 samples.
“If a garment carries a 50-kilo carbon footprint, the aim is to spread that impact across as many wears and washes as possible,” he said. “That’s why durability is so important; it’s about getting that spread.”
Though the EU’s PEFCR framework explicitly accounts for physical durability through standardized wash-and-wear testing and “encourages the integration of emotional durability once more solid scientific approaches have been developed,” Sumner said the current physical durability baseline of 15 to 20 wash cycles, down from an originally proposed 60, is too low if fashion is to meet its Paris Agreement obligations.
Meanwhile, the EU’s Joint Research Centre, which is preparing the technical groundwork for the ESPR Delegated Act on textiles, has proposed that garments survive just five washes to pass the robustness assessment.
Margaret Howell, for its part, will continue to do things its own way. Coleman pointed to a young colleague in the office who often wears her mother’s clothes, adding that she sees the same pattern with customers. Pieces handed down through generations carry a “sense of inherited value,” giving them more meaning to the people who wear them.
She gestured to her own outfit: a 20-year-old skirt and a 15-year-old jacket, both “cherished” pieces that have earned their place in her wardrobe and still look nearly new. Coleman didn’t think Margaret Howell’s clientele was “super-interested” in the finer details of its sustainability efforts, but the brand weaves those values into its storytelling with customers.
“Durability is just one aspect of the sustainability strategy, but it’s how we’ve always worked,” Coleman said. “It’s how we’ve always designed our clothes.”
