As 2016 resurfaces in our feeds, we take a look at how sustainability wove through fashion that year — from recycled denim and water-saving techniques to early circular commitments from brands big and small.
The 2016 flashback has been everywhere lately — velvet chokers resurfacing on style feeds, matte eyeshadow swatches making a predictable re-turn. But alongside slippery-back hair and fuchsia lips, there was another kind of fashion moment unfolding a decade ago: a shift toward sustainability that would only later read as prescient.
Where beauty trends arrive and depart in microcycles, sustainable fashion in 2016 was carving out a slower kind of rhythm. It had no single viral moment, but instead a series of initiatives knitting together ideas about longevity, materials, and responsibility — early versions of conversations that would dominate industry talk in the decade to come.
At the largest scale, H&M’s Sustainability Report 2016 laid out what would become familiar language in fashion’s sustainability playbook. It committed to using only recycled or other sustainably sourced materials by 2030 and to becoming climate positive across its value chain by 2040. The company stated that 43 percent of its cotton in 2016 came from sustainable sources and that it had reduced its CO2 emissions by 47 percent compared with 2015. It also reported collecting 16,000 tonnes of unwanted textiles in its stores through garment collection programs that year. These were early signals of circular thinking for the fast fashion giant, even if the cultural conversation around sustainability had not yet fully caught up.
H&M wasn’t the only fast fashion label looking to make changes. Zara also introduced its Join Life label in 2016, identifying pieces made with materials like organic cotton and recycled wool as part of a broader move toward transparency and lower-impact production practices. Packaging for the initiative shifted to 100 percent recycled cardboard designed for reuse, and garment recycling drop-off points expanded in European stores.
In parallel to these large global retailers, brands with sustainability as a founding principle were already well into their own journeys. Patagonia had long embedded environmental stewardship into its identity, and in June 2016, it released a set of principles for the treatment of animals used to make wool garments and for land-use practices tied to sustainability. It had, following internal audits in earlier years, pivoted away from harmful water repellants and was already working toward responsible materials like organic cotton and recycled polyester. The company’s ethos was built around durability, repairs, and reuse — a stark contrast to fast fashion’s disposability.
Levi’s, too, was part of this emergent landscape. Its WasteLess line, launched earlier in the decade, featured garments with 20 percent postconsumer waste — recycled plastic bottles melted down into new fibers — and its WaterLess finishing techniques reduced water use by up to 96 percent in certain styles. By 2016, Levi’s had used millions of recycled bottles in denim and jackets, a practical example of material reuse at scale long before “circularity” became industry shorthand.
Luxury fashion also had its own pioneers. Stella McCartney had positioned sustainability not as an add-on but as a core ethos from her brand’s inception, rejecting leather and fur since the label’s launch. “I don’t want to preach. I don’t want to be that person,” she told Vogue at the time. “But I’m a firm believer that doing something small is better than doing nothing.”
By 2016, the house was integrating organic cotton and 100 percent sustainable viscose into its collections, aligning material choices with ethical values and creative design. “Effortlessly cool always has to go hand-in-hand with the sustainability side,” the designer told Forbes that year. “I’ve always believed you shouldn’t sacrifice style for fashion.”
It would be another couple of years before coordinated frameworks like the Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action under the United Nations launched in 2018, aiming to align brands and supply chains with global climate goals.
Consumer awareness of fashion’s environmental footprint was growing, but in 2016, it was still emerging from niche corners. Data linked to the Environmental Protection Agency indicated that roughly nine percent of U.S. municipal solid waste came from textiles, a reminder of the material scale of the problem even as sustainability remained peripheral to most shopping decisions.
By the close of 2016, sustainability in fashion had not yet coalesced into a shared framework. There were no industry-wide climate targets, no standardized reporting requirements, and little consensus on what meaningful progress looked like. The resale market, which is now booming, was still in its nascent stage. What existed instead were discrete efforts operating on different timelines: fast-fashion brands publishing early metrics, outdoor and heritage labels refining material and repair systems, and select designers testing lower-impact production without foregrounding it as brand identity.
Patagonia articulated one of the clearest positions at the time that is truer today than ever. Speaking to Wired in 2016 about the company’s Worn Wear repair and resale program, then-chief executive Rose Marcario called the program a celebration of quality products and their relationship to our lives. “It’s simple: keep your gear in action longer and take some pressure off our planet,” she said.
“There is nothing we can change about making clothing that would have more positive environmental impact than making less.”
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