A steadily growing cohort of ‘clean’ fashion brands is challenging the chemistry of our clothing.
“People have detoxed their cleaning products, detoxed their beauty products, detoxed their cookware, and are now turning their attention to their wardrobes,” says Amanda McCourt, co-founder of UK-based brand Not Basics, which she launched in 2024 with her sister Katie after developing allergies to synthetic clothing. “I think that we’ve all been very distracted by the fact that our food is wrapped in plastic. We forget that we are as well.”
Other brands in the clean fashion space include Cottonique, Pact, Mate the Label and Everlane, which in June this year launched its Clean Luxury campaign, promising that the way it tests, designs and makes its clothes is “better for you”. Such brands are generally aligned in their use of organic natural fibers, limited inclusion of synthetics and underlying wellness messaging. They’re working to remove harsh chemicals like PFAS (a group of manmade chemicals also known as “forever chemicals” due to their environmental persistence), petroleum-derived plastics, heavy metals and pesticides from the things we wear.
Clean fashion follows in the footsteps of clean beauty, which had a significant rise in the early 2010s when brands such as Beautycounter began formulating products free from chemicals like parabens and formaldehyde — widely linked to health issues spanning from hormone disruption to cancer. But like clean beauty, clean fashion is an unregulated term that evades a precise definition, opening up concerns over greenwashing and false claims in an industry where they’re already rife.
What does ‘clean’ really mean?
Much like ‘sustainable’, ‘clean’ doesn’t have a singular, sector-specific definition. To some brands, such as Cottonique, it means forgoing synthetics altogether. For others, such as Everlane, it means implementing an extensive restricted substances list (RSL) within its supply chain to ensure safe chemical inputs and outputs from the farm level to the factory and the final wear. But testing chemical safety isn’t an easy or straightforward process.
“I think it’s entirely fair to ask the chemical industry to make sure that [chemicals are] safe, especially when we’re thinking about community exposures and industrial pollution,” says Lindsay Dahl, consumer safety expert and author of Cleaning House: The Fight to Rid our Homes of Toxic Chemicals. She believes extensive prior safety testing is more cost effective than having to retrospectively recall and reformulate products, or clean up contaminated land. Voters in the US (which lags behind the EU in restricting harmful chemicals such as phthalates and PFAS) agree, with 92% believing the government should enforce the proven safety of products before companies are allowed to put them on the market.
However, Phil Patterson, managing director of textile consultancy Color Connections and chair of the Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals (ZDHC) independent MRSL (Manufacturing Restricted Substances List) Council, argues that testing chemicals for an endless variety of possible scenarios stunts innovation. Patterson says clothing today is the safest it has been since the invention of synthetic dyes in the 19th century, but there s never been more noise about it. “If we applied the same level of caution with cars as we do with chemicals, cars would move slower than snails,” he says. “It doesn’t mean that in future that certain currently permitted chemicals won’t be restricted if evidence does emerge, but where does the precautionary principle end?”
Without consensus, Dahl says internal communication guardrails are essential for brands to avoid misunderstanding or misrepresentation. “Given clean is an unregulated term, any brand using that term to market their products needs to have a clear definition of what it means to them, available for the public to see,” she says.
Everlane plans to revisit a familiar concept to do so. “For the customer that wants to scroll further down the details page, just like they did for price transparency years ago, you will see that coming. We want to make it a truthful, transparent, receipt-based database,” says Everlane CEO Alfred Chang. Until then, the brand has click-out tabs on its product pages to explain terms such as “ever-better factory” (which covers environmental management systems), “cleaner chemistry” (meaning they adhere to RSLs), and “cleaner cotton” (organic, regenerative, or recycled).
Many clean fashion brands cite certifications to add weight to their clean messaging and (absent a single definition) provide internal guardrails for what clean means. Industry-leading certifications, standards and frameworks in chemical safety and harmful substances include ZDHC, which promotes chemical management via restricted substances lists and wastewater guidelines; Oeko-Tex, whose Standard 100 tests against over 1,000 substances that may be harmful to human health, including formaldehyde, phthalates and PFAS; Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS), which sets standards for approved chemical inputs across all tiers of natural fiber manufacturing; and Bluesign, which assesses and approves chemicals while setting limitations for their use within manufacturing and final products.
Though much of the language around clean fashion is aimed at the health of the consumer, experts are keen to stress that benefits for those working in the supply chain should be considered, too. “In my opinion, clean fashion also should mean that the manufacturers use chemical management that is clean for them, not only for the end consumer. Clean fashion should mean that the production is clean,” says Barbara Oswald, chief commercial officer at Bluesign.
An imperfect solution
Everlane leant on chemical system solution company Bluesign’s restricted substances list, which is updated annually via its chemical expert group, to build its metric for chemical standards. This list includes hundreds of substances including formaldehyde, many flame retardants, heavy metals such as chromium and lead, bisphenols, and PFAS. Bluesign-certified suppliers are also identified on the organization’s annually updated System Partner list.
“The most important thing is that the supply chain is transparent and has clearly adapted the right [chemical] management system across the whole supply chain, not only Tier 1,” says Oswald. Alongside building a restricted substances list, Bluesign assesses how chemicals react differently to different processes or within different environments, she adds. Everything from storage methods to whether a certain machine is housed or not can play into whether a chemical is deemed to be safe, Oswald explains. This makes chemical management tricky for producers.
Ben Mead, managing director of Hohenstein Americas, the largest provider of testing for Oeko-Tex, says some limitations are so strict that even contamination on the machinery from previous runs can show up in testing. Therefore, thorough cleaning, separate production runs, or even prohibiting the chemical in question altogether may be necessary for compliance.
Chang notes that one of Everlane’s factory partners said it is difficult to produce for the brand because of its high chemical standards — a point of pride for the CEO. McCourt charts the challenges in finding a GOTS-certified factory that could meet Not Basics’s minimums and quality standards last year, when the brand moved its production from Bangladesh to Türkiye in search of better agility. For the time being, Not Basics is working with an Organic Cotton Standard-certified facility and will not make any claims of being “non-toxic” until it has finalised a GOTS-verified supplier.
Certification isn’t a perfect solution, warns Alden Wicker, author of To Dye For: How Toxic Fashion Is Making Us Sick, as it can be open to fraud and may lack transparency. However, it currently represents the best available option, as comprehensive regulation is not just slow-moving but under threat.
In the US, the drawback of government oversight under the Trump administration threatens to weaken regulatory progress, such as the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), which was updated in 2016 to give the Environmental Protection Agency more powers to evaluate the safety of chemicals.
In the EU, the Omnibus Simplification Package and other recent bids to streamline regulation and boost competitiveness have seen proposed updates to the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH), as well as the Classification, Labeling and Packaging (CLP) Regulation (which seeks to reduce risks posed by chemicals) delayed. Without regulation that mirrors modern scientific concern, Wicker recommends that brands adopt multiple layers of protection via multiple, overlapping certifications that span raw fiber to finished product. Dahl, meanwhile, recommends brands undertake the Chemical Footprint Project, which calculates the total mass of chemicals of high concern used by an organization and evaluates chemical management systems against industry best practice to measure and reduce overall footprints.
Practical considerations
In a delicate political and cultural landscape, brands must walk a fine line in discussing the benefits of clean fashion without fueling panic and misinformation. “Not all chemistries are bad. There are reasons why we use them. You can’t just take a raw fiber from the farm and turn it into something without it being very scratchy and unwearable,” says Everlane sustainability director Katina Boutis. “We need to be able to communicate in a way that you don’t need a PhD to understand, but we also don’t want to trivialise the issue. It’s a really intricate balance.”
Brands must also be cognisant of their limitations — not just due to the nuances of chemical management, but also due to the broad church of sensitivities their consumer base may have. “If you want to make an allergy-free brand, it’s impossible,” says Patterson, adding that chemical exposure is highest on the first wear, therefore it would be appropriate for brands to advise consumers to wash before wearing.
Practical considerations stack up, too. Without synthetics to rely on for stretch and grip, Cottonique uses drawstrings, which could be considered fiddly and bulky, or too much of a trade-off, particularly for undergarments. Other brands use small proportions of elastane to help garments feel more familiar and to design with less compromise, but competing with the properties of synthetics is hard. “The feedback we get on the leggings is that cotton doesn’t snap like a polyester legging would,” says McCourt. Currently, all of Not Basics’s form-fitting products have a 95% cotton, 5% elastane split, but the brand is exploring options such as adding a further 1% of elastane or strategic seams for closer fits. McCourt says it’s a constant battle between offering the expected level of functionality and prioritizing organic content that isn’t sensitizing for wearers.
As clean fashion finds its feet, brands are forming their own rules, while consumers are defining their chemical comfort levels.
While the press for tighter chemical regulation wages on, Wicker believes lawsuits will act as de facto regulation to keep bigger brand claims in check, citing the suit against period underwear brand Thinx, in which plaintiffs claimed the underwear, which was marketed as being “free from harmful chemicals”, contained PFAS. Thinx agreed to a settlement, but denied that it did anything unlawful or improper. Gore-Tex, Fabletics and even school uniform retailers have been the subject of chemical-related lawsuits in recent years.
In the long term, Dahl hopes the guesswork will be removed from the scenario entirely. “I think it’s more helpful to pass regulatory structures that make sure chemicals are safe before they end up on the market,” she says, though concedes that simply holding the line on what already exists and fighting against rollbacks is a very real battle today. “I would rather focus on going upstream [to regulate the chemical industry] and solving the real problem versus micromanaging brands.”
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