H&M head of design on making fashion sustainable

On the topic of scale, you mentioned grape debris. How much of that is needed to make one bag?

It's very hard to say with grape debris. The only thing I know is that we do Conscious Exclusives once per year. Last year [in April] we had a dress made from bionic yarn, which comes from plastic waste gathered from the shorelines of China. I can tell you that 89 plastic bottles went into that one dress. And it was really beautiful, too. It's a good concrete example of this whole process.

What challenges are there that you feel consumers don't understand about the sustainability debate?

For us, it's still a question of making fashion that people want to wear. We have to be able to merge the two worlds even better – to make sustainability fashionable and fashion sustainable. That's the challenge and that's what Conscious Exclusive is about. We can make really beautiful clothes today using sustainable fabrics and make it all fashionable, because making sustainable clothes just for the sake of sustainability, without making them fashionable, makes no sense. That's also not sustainable.

How much thought is given to how recyclable a collection is at the end of its life cycle?

To be honest, not enough – we're not there yet. Again, it's the marriage of sustainability and fashion. Everybody working at H&M, every designer, knows that we get opportunities and they know our values; they know the fabrics they can choose from. But I wish we could do more – and we have to, especially with 2030 in mind. Though now, with recycling and scientific breakthroughs like recycling-blended fabrics, it has become a bit easier.

What happens to fast fashion when sustainability catches up?

You know, we don't like this term, "fast fashion". But I met a professor in England who was thinking of extending the idea further in this way – what if we want to buy a top for going out on Saturday night; could we make it disposable? For example, after you wear it, it disappears, breaks down into cells or fibres, and can be recycled in a new way. You enjoy the party top, then it fades. That changes people's reaction to "fast fashion" – from something intrinsically bad to something very progressive. We all love new things, we want new things, and this is a way to find novelty and turn that into something positive. We want to do good. That's also why we want to be on top of change and lead.

Dutch designer Iris Van Herpen talks about not even wearing clothes in the conventional sense.

She's right! And think about this: maybe you can just scan the image of what you want to wear onto yourself. So you would have, say, a body stocking, and you just scan a picture of that perfect print or the hue you want to wear, or something like that. It's a sort of virtual reality.