Sustainable Streetwear Isn’t a Trend; It’s a Systems Problem.
Sustainability isn’t failing because people don’t care.
It’s failing because responsibility has been pushed to the weakest part of the system. This is a systems problem, not a trend problem.
Systems don’t change themselves.
Sustainability is being treated as a consumer responsibility instead of a system responsibility.
We’ve outsourced accountability downward, to customers, to workers, to suppliers, while profit stays safely at the top. It’s infuriating. And it’s everywhere.
Sustainability talk is booming while quality collapses.
Choice is increasing. Longevity is not. You don’t need to be a designer to notice it. Groceries shrink. Clothes thin. Products fail faster. That contradiction isn’t accidental, it’s engineered. And it shouldn’t be acceptable.
We are not at the end of a solution. We’re at the start of a very long curve.
Sustainability fails the moment it asks the weakest part of the chain to carry the most responsibility.
Fast platforms. Endless drops. “Capsule wardrobe essentials” released weekly. Externalised costs dressed up as innovation. Profit-first systems with zero consideration for product lifecycles, and even less for people.
This is why Mongrel Logic exists as an outlier.
When I first sketched the Designer range, the goal wasn’t to make a cap. It was to make something that lasts a lifetime, with a traceable lifecycle and no future landfill. Not just something you wear, but something that rewires how you think about what you wear.
True sustainability isn’t boring.
Yes, it can be slow. Yes, it can be unsexy. It involves trade-offs. It involves constraints. It involves admitting what you don’t control.
But working inside limits isn’t a compromise, it’s a test. A test of whether new ways of thinking, working, and creating are possible without pushing profit upwards and damage cascading down.
Most systems won’t even try. I will.