Wearing Our Clothes Until They Can’t Be Worn Anymore (a story of longevity)

Growing up in Malaysia, Clarisse Mar lived a low-waste lifestyle. Today, faced with modern rates of consumption, Clarisse believes that longevity is a crucial aspect of building an eco-friendly wardrobe.

Every June, without fail, the fashion industry undergoes a sudden, temporary makeover. Brands that spend the rest of the year driving hyper-consumption and dropping endless new arrivals wrap themselves in shades of green. For a moment, the industry seems to be reckoning with its conscience. Then the summer sales hit, and the relentless machinery of “newness” resumes as if nothing happened.

I’ve watched this cycle play out for years, and it bothers me, not just as someone who built a brand around sustainability, but as someone who grew up before “sustainability” was even a word people used for it.

Growing up in Malaysia, my mother didn’t talk about the environment, but neither did she waste things. Clothes were worn until they genuinely couldn’t be worn anymore.  Practicing low waste wasn’t a movement or a value system she’d articulate; rather, it was just necessity. I spent 20 years in advertising after that, and I loved that career, but the industry moves fast and somewhere along the way I started noticing the gap between how I was raised and what I was helping to sell. 

Building Rawform was, in a way, a return to those original values.

The brand came out of something much more ordinary than a grand sustainability mission, though. Like many women, the moment I walk through my front door, comfort takes over from everything else.  I wanted something I could comfortably keep on all day, something natural, durable, and made responsibly. Something not perishable or driven by trends. What I kept coming back to was a question the industry almost never asks: what does sustainability actually mean if a garment can’t survive a single season?

The regional fashion dialogue has long prioritised the front-end story, celebrating organic origins and certifications. However, modern shoppers are discerning. They’ve realised, as I have, that “sustainable” has often been weaponised as an aesthetic category rather than a metric of true utility. McKinsey estimates that customers miss out on up to $460 billion each year by throwing away clothes they could still wear, and across the GCC, billions of dirhams are discarded annually in the form of prematurely ruined clothing.

The UAE launched Naseej to address exactly this, a nationwide initiative designed to revolutionise textile recycling and build a more sustainable fashion ecosystem. However, for that initiative to succeed, we need to focus on the pieces that are used daily, the items we need to withstand wear and tear.  In the Gulf, intense summer temperatures and humidity dictate our daily choices, and constant contact with moisture and rigorous, frequent laundering can damage fabrics.

Choosing high-quality fabrics can help with this problem.  The answer lies in construction as much as origin. TENCEL™ Lyocell and bamboo lyocell are both produced through closed-loop processes that maintain structural integrity across repeated washes, without the microplastic shedding associated with many synthetics. Organic Pima cotton, with its longer staple fibre, resists pilling and breakdown far beyond what standard cotton offers. Hemp and European flax linen have earned renewed attention for their durability and relatively low resource requirements. At Rawform, I chose Lenzing™ Modal not just for its sustainable sourcing, but because it holds its shape wash after wash. A well-made garment, which is cared for properly, will always outlast something that falls apart after a handful of washes, despite what the label says.

That distinction feels especially important on occasions like World Environment Day, which deserves a more honest conversation than it typically receives. 

My mother never needed a certification or a hangtag to understand any of this. She already knew: if it doesn’t last, it doesn’t count.