H&M is not "the beast". Having kids, I am very thankful for their existence, otherwise merely buying new clothes every year would probably bankrupt us.
Before you say I should buy Second Hand: many kids clothes simply break by daily use. It is already common to give old children's clothes that are still OK to friends with smaller children, so it is not like the clothes are wasted by excessive consumerism.
On the topic of sustainability it's probably warranted to call them "the beast". Fast fashion companies are a big part of the problem if you look up how much water and resources are needed to produce a single piece of clothing. Of course having cheap clothing is great for the consumer in the short-term the same way that flying short distance instead of taking the train is comfortable, or commuting with a car instead of public transport.
I don't see where in the article they show it is green washing? They only mention some criticism H&M received, including the ridiculous uproar about the "coolest monkey" T-Shirt. If that is proof for green washing, it is not very convincing.
Fast fashion - it depends on how much gets thrown away at the end of the day? Just because clothing has a heavy toll on the environment, doesn't mean companies producing it are evil. Toll on the environment or not, people need clothes.
> Just because clothing has a heavy toll on the environment, doesn't mean companies producing it are evil. Toll on the environment or not, people need clothes.
It sounds like you are taking this for granted and something that can't be changed. In fact there are a lot of initiatives and companies that work on reducing the footprint, using sustainable sources of cotton, paying fair wages, using less harmful dying methods and filtering the water used in production. If you are interested in the topic I'd suggest to start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_fashion.
As for the green washing, there are probably better sources ([1], [2]) for that but you'll find enough if you do a little research yourself.
That's all nice and well, but I am not convinced that it scales yet to a level where you can say anybody not doing it like that is evil.
In any case, if you decide on that logic, everybody who shops at HM is evil, too.
At very basic level: have these "sustainable fashion" people figured out a way to grow cotton with less energy and less pollution? If not, they don't really have a solution for anything. If they have, they will probably prevail on the market anyway, without the "fair" marketing.
And the use of "fair" usually just implies that some people want to make the rules. I honestly don't care for that label, at least when it is used in marketing. In my opinion fair prices can only be determined by markets (with externalizations being paid for via laws).
In my neighbourhood, which hosts a critical mass of environmentally-conscious parents of young children, there is a children's clothing exchange run by a local church. It is a better version of the traditional hand-me-down culture, as it provides more of a desirable selection.
We have something like this in my neighborhood too. It's hosted in someone's basement and consists of dozens of bins labelled by age/size and clothing type. It operates pretty much like a library where people take some things they like and return them when their child outgrows them. Over time I've seen the same shirt/whatever on multiple different children in the community.
This mostly works for children's clothes because children tend to outgrow them well before they wear out. It might not work so well for adult garments. I tend to keep my clothes till the patches start overlapping, then I turn them into rags for the local maker space.
Before you say I should buy Second Hand: many kids clothes simply break by daily use. It is already common to give old children's clothes that are still OK to friends with smaller children, so it is not like the clothes are wasted by excessive consumerism.