Boden one of first major fashion brands to ban planet-polluting sequins

They spend moments on the dancefloor and hundreds - if not thousands - of years in landfill. Is it time the festive favourites were outlawed, asks Chloe Street?
Boden champions lurex and beading as sequin alternatives for Christmas 22
Boden
Chloe Street15 December 2021

Sequinned dresses have become as entwined with Christmas as Pret’s stuffing sarnies, carollers on the tube and savage prosecco hangovers.

But the festive sequin mini dress’s days could be numbered, as brands begin to champion more sustainable ways to add sparkle to partywear.

One such label is Boden, which this year has made the decision to remove all glitter and sequins from its womenswear and childrenswear ranges in a bid to make its Christmas collections eco-friendlier.

“We listened to our customers and wanted to be brave and make a firm decision, taking this unique stance,” said Cristina Gilkes, Boden’s Director of Product Development & Buying. “We know that sequins and glitter do drive sales but we were creative and thought of other ways for us to excite and delight our customers this Christmas.

“On average, 8 million tonnes of plastic end up in our oceans every year, so we decided to take responsibility to prevent petroleum-based plastic being washed into waterways during the manufacturing and laundering of garments.”

Boden proposes metallic lurex as a sequin alternative
Boden

Not only can washing a sequin dress cause microplastics to be swept into our oceans, but the production and processing methods required to make synthetic plastics are often environmentally damaging and, once in sequin form, can also produce toxic chemicals like carcinogens and hormone disruptors – not great when rubbing on bare skin.

Even if you wear a layer under your sequin maxi, never put it in the washing machine and wear it dutifully every Christmas for several years, once you do chuck it out, that sequin dress will sit in landfill for hundreds and hundreds of years. The reality is that the majority of sequin clothing has a short lifespan in our wardrobes and 1.7 million sequined items of clothing will end up in landfill after Christmas in the UK alone.

And yet, the appetite for festive shimmer is strong. Everyone from Halpern to Prada featured sequins in the AW21 collections, and a quick search of “sequin” on Net-a-Porter reveals 363 results while a similar scan of ASOS reveals a whopping 662 items.

For brands that don’t want to give up the sparkling paillettes entirely though, there could be another way.

“Sequins are fabulous but, unfortunately, an environmental disaster,” says Rachel Clowes, founder of The Sustainable Sequin company, a Future Fashion Factory-funded project setting out to perfect UK-manufactured, commercially viable biodegradable sequins made from renewable materials including waste and by-products. The aim of her project, she says, is to create “maximum sparkle with minimum adverse environmental impacts; plastic-free sequins which look great, perform perfectly and biodegrade at end of life.”

Sequins made from biodegradable materials + 20% PET
Sustainable Sequin Company

So far the prototypes are not nearly as festive as their planet-polluting counterparts, but with cross-company and industry collaboration, Clowes hopes to get there.

“I think it’s great that Boden has highlighted the issue with synthetic plastic sequins,” she says. “It shows us how collaboration is needed between large brands and small innovators and manufacturers to solve the sustainability issues within fashion.”

So this Christmas, rather than reaching for a sparkly new pair of sequinned trousers, why not consider something in jazzy metallic lurex or a beaded satin? There’s nothing very festive about sequin minis piling up in landfill.

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