There is a growing tendency to consume information the same way we consume sports: through the highlights. You don’t necessarily need to watch an entire basketball game or understand why a play worked. A 30-second clip can show you who scored, who made the mistake and who won. You get the result without necessarily understanding the game.
The same thing can happen in an industry as complicated as textiles. There is no shortage of information. There are sustainability reports, life cycle assessments, traceability systems, regulations, certifications and studies covering nearly every part of the supply chain. But how much of it do we actually read? And how much do we understand?
That question becomes more important as literacy rates decline in many countries. Reading isn’t simply about being able to get through a document. It is about comprehension, asking questions, connecting information and forming conclusions based on facts.
Consider cotton. It’s easy to repeat that a pair of jeans requires thousands of liters of water. But what kind of water? Rainfall or irrigation? Where was the cotton grown? What was the yield? What methodology was used, and what exactly was measured? Understanding the answer requires more than remembering a headline.
The same applies to polyester. There are questions around petroleum, feedstocks, energy, carbon, microfiber shedding, recycling and end of life. Yet the conversation can quickly be reduced to a simple statement: recycled polyester is sustainable. The complexity disappears.
Indigo is no different. Its chemistry, wastewater, worker exposure and treatment processes are complicated subjects. But saying that a product uses “clean indigo” is much easier than understanding what that actually means.
In this way, the textile industry has developed its own version of sports media:
“We like the highlights, not the game”
Words such as sustainable, circular, regenerative and responsible can be useful, but they don’t tell us very much on their own. Without the curiosity to ask the next question, they become conclusions rather than starting points.
Transparency has a similar problem. Putting a 150-page sustainability report on a website may technically make information available, but that doesn’t necessarily mean people understand what it says.
The textile industry is not simple enough to be understood through headlines and two-second facts. Improving it requires people who are willing to read, question, compare information and understand the details behind the claims. You cannot improve what you don’t understand, and you cannot understand something as complicated as textiles from the highlights.
