Everything You Need to Know About Sustainable Underwear
#FashionCrisis is a series that kicks off Teen Vogue’s commitment to educating our readers about sustainability and fashion. We chat with experts, influencers, designers, beauty and fashion brands about what it really means to be sustainable in 2020. In this story, Alexandra Mondalek explores just how sustainable our undergarments can be.
When thinking about fashion and sustainability, you might consider shopping on a secondhand site or donating old clothes. But for most people, that thinking stops short at pre-loved boy shorts and bras.
Consumers are commonly encouraged to “refresh” their intimates every six months, if not sooner, a practice that’s easily repeated for certain segments of the population given the average price of underwear is $20 and under in the U.S. market. (Edited, a retail analytics platform that tracks how goods are sold across the world, found that major underwear brands, impacted by the growing fast-fashion market — which pushes prices down in favor of higher sales and promotes short-term purchasing behavior — sold their goods at lower prices to be more competitive.)
Luckily, the discussion about sustainability and undergarments isn’t limited to extending a product’s life cycle. As the larger conversation over sustainable fashion begins to take up more space, brands are responding to the need for underwear that makes you feel good about yourself and your impact on the environment.
While the sustainable lingerie market only makes up about 2.4 percent of sustainable apparel overall, according to 2019 research from Edited, the segment is ripe with opportunity. (Edited reported in 2020 that sustainable undergarments only account for 2 and 3 percent of products currently retailing at Everland and Reformation, respectively, while Topshop offers a small collection of bras using recycled lace.) That doesn’t mean you’ll be able to shop secondhand underwear on TheRealReal or Poshmark anytime soon, but it does mean that more disruptive brands are doubling down on efforts to use eco-friendly fibers and make recycling underwear easier.
Dr. Timo Rissanen, associate director of the Tishman Environment and Design Center at Parsons, who focuses on fashion design and sustainability, says that “most underwear is a mix of natural and synthetic fibers,” meaning that “at best it can be shredded for insulation—downcycling—or incinerated for energy recovery.” But he continues: “If material recovery was a goal for underwear, then it might make the most sense to keep to either fully compostable or biodegradable materials—for example, cotton with biodegradable elastic—or a single recyclable material that also provides stretch.” For reference, rayon and linen can degrade in a few weeks, making them more biodegradable than cotton, according to Vogue Business. Meanwhile, silk takes about four years to start to degrade, depending on the conditions of the soil and landfill where it’s dumped.
Some fashion brands — those known less for their underwear and more for their viral print dresses and basics — are heeding the call. Eco-forward names like Reformation and Everlane have already launched their own underwear lines, prioritizing the use of materials like tencel™, a plant-based fiber that’s used in lots of clothing, including intimates and activewear, and enhances a garment’s breathability, as well as recycled lace and eco-mesh in bras, bralettes, and underwear. \
Meanwhile, a slew of lingerie and intimates-specific brands have doubled down on their commitment to sustainability. Hanky Panky, an American brand that has been around since 1977, uses “sustainably grown Supima” and organically grown domestic cotton fibers in its lingerie and sleepwear; indeed, using materials produced domestically reduces the footprint that shipping cotton internationally would create. In 2018, the company launched its “Lingeriecycle” program, which diverts products from landfills through various recycling methods.
Parade, the underwear startup that 22-year-old Cami Téllez cofounded in 2019, also uses various recycled yarns to produce virgin nylon for its underwear; its packaging is compostable and biodegrades in less than a year in a composting environment. “Of course it costs us more [to produce], but it was a no-brainer when thinking about the ethical implications of making packaging that stays around on earth forever,” Téllez says, addressing the problem that many small brands — without the scale or resources that larger companies have — encounter when deciding whether to shell out for more responsible processes in favor of cheaper but wasteful business practices.
Another lingerie company, Between the Sheets, is a certified B-corporation in the U.S., meaning it is a brand that aims to do its part to solve social and environmental problems through commitments like “One Percent for the Planet,” where the company donates at least 1 percent of its yearly revenue to support environmental causes. U.K.-based Playful Promises has not yet developed an in-house recycling program, although it does devote a page on its website to outlining how consumers can recycle and repurpose their old underthings.
“Another way of being sustainable that's often ignored is using deadstock fabrics,” says Cora Harrington, an intimate apparel expert and author. “While these aren't always recyclable in the sense we usually think of, it is a way of ensuring entire bolts of clothing aren't sent directly into the dumpster. Smaller brands like ClareBare and Kiss Me Deadly have both used deadstock fabrics to create garments.”
When purchasing intimate apparel, consumers should do as much research as possible about the materials a company says it uses in its products, considering that undergarments sit directly on the skin.
For example, Thinx, a brand known for its absorbent menstrual underwear, claims its materials are sustainable (in particular, its organic cotton line) and its manufacturing processes ethical. As recently as January, however, a report surfaced that a University of Notre Dame scientist discovered toxic materials in Thinx underwear after being asked to test a few pairs by a reporter for Sierra, a magazine run by the Sierra Club. The chemicals, PFAS, are used by a variety of industries and have been linked to certain cancers and infertility. Thinx declined to comment to Teen Vogue, but the company vehemently denied the scientist’s findings to Fast Company, saying they go through multiple rounds of testing to ensure safety standards and, “Based on these third-party tests, PFAS chemicals were not detected in Thinx products.” (In 2012, a Greenpeace report found that Victoria’s Secret, among other companies, used toxic materials that harm the environment in its products, the result of what the organization says was "little or no policy or program for chemicals management.” In the years since, Victoria’s Secret has vowed to discontinue its use of those materials.)
For as much noise as eco-friendly intimates brands like Parade and others make as “disruptors” in the lingerie space, they still represent a fraction of the market share that giants like Victoria’s Secret hold. For its part, Hanes, the $5 billion company behind its eponymous brand as well as Maidenform and Playtex, is a founding member of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, an industry alliance with over 250 member organizations across 35 countries committed to sustainable production, and says on its website it plans to “expand its use of sustainable materials in its products, including cotton yarns made from spinning technologies that require less energy to manufacture, recycled cotton fibers derived from cut fabric waste, and recycled polyester filament yarns and fibers, both from plastic bottles.”
“I do believe sustainability will become a more popular topic in the future, but it would require consumers to think differently of brands that rely on unsustainability, like Fashion Nova,” Harrington says. “So long as consumers would rather have a lot of cheap clothes with questionable manufacturing practices rather than fewer, more expensive clothes with a more ethical supply chain, we won't see sustainability take off. True sustainability will require a massive, large-scale shift in consumer priorities.”
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