The Most Sustainable Garment Is the One Made for You

By Ramola Bachchan, Founder, First Resort  ·  4 November 2026

Every season the word "sustainable" appears on more swing tags. Recycled this, conscious that, a capsule with a green leaf on the label. I do not doubt that much of it is well meant. But when people ask me what sustainable fashion really looks like, I find myself giving a much plainer answer than the labels do.

The most sustainable garment is the one that gets worn. Not the one that was bought, not the one that was photographed, not the one that sat in a warehouse waiting for a sale. The one a woman reaches for again and again because it fits her, suits her and makes her feel like herself. Everything else is a footnote.

The waste nobody photographs

We talk a great deal about fabric and fibre, and much less about the clothes that are made and never worn at all. A collection is produced in quantity, in a guessed spread of sizes, months before anyone knows what will sell. Some of it sells. The rest is marked down, then marked down again, and some of it never finds an owner. The most careful choice of fibre cannot redeem a garment that nobody wanted in that size.

Then there is the waste that happens after a sale. A dress that almost fits is worn once and pushed to the back of the cupboard. A pair of trousers that pinches at the waist is "kept for when I lose a little weight". These pieces were bought, so on paper they were a success. In any honest sense they were not.

Make it after it is ordered

This is why we make every piece to order. A garment is cut after a woman has chosen it, in the size she has chosen, rather than before, in the hope that someone will come along. It is a slower way to run a label. I think it is also the most honest answer I can give to the question of waste, because it removes the guesswork that creates so much of it.

Making to order also changes what we pay attention to. When you are not trying to clear a rail of stock, you stop designing for the rail. You design for the woman who will wear the thing, and you start to care far more about whether it will still please her in five years than whether it photographs well this month.

The most sustainable garment is not the one with the greenest label. It is the one a woman actually wears, again and again, because it was made for her.

Fit is a sustainability question

I have come to believe that fit is the most underrated part of this conversation. A woman keeps and wears what fits her. She gives away, or never touches, what does not. So when an industry offers most of its styles in a narrow band of sizes, it is not only leaving women out. It is producing clothes that will sit unworn on bodies they were never designed for.

That is part of why every style we make comes from XS to 8XL, at the same price, and why we offer a custom size for the woman whose measurements fall between the lines on a chart. It is also why alteration is free and we exchange sizes rather than refunding. The point is simple: the piece a woman ordered ends up as the piece she wears.

Buy less, choose well, alter freely

None of this asks very much of the person buying. Choose fewer things, and choose them more carefully. Prefer the shape that flatters you to the trend of the month; a well cut kaftan or tunic will outlive most trends without effort. And when something does not quite fit, have it altered rather than abandoning it. A good tailor has always been the most sustainable person in fashion, long before the word came into use.

I would also gently suggest that comfort is part of this. Clothes that dig in, cling or need constant adjusting do not get worn for long. Ease is not a lack of ambition in design. It is one of the reasons a garment survives in a wardrobe for years.

A quieter kind of fashion

I do not think the answer to fashion's waste is a better slogan. It is a quieter way of working: making what has been asked for, in the size it is needed, and standing behind it until it fits. It is less exciting than a launch, and it will never trend. But it is the version of sustainability I believe in, because you can see it in a woman's wardrobe rather than on a tag.

If every piece we make is worn, and worn often, then we have done our job. That is the only measure I really trust.

Ramola Bachchan is the founder of First Resort, a size-inclusive Indian resort wear label sized XS to 8XL.

Also shop: Kaftans  ·  Tunics