This sustainable fashion thing has got my goat. From around the time teen activist Greta Thunberg has been on an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with Trump, every industry seems to be jumping on to the sustainability bandwagon. Unlike Trump, they perhaps quake at the ice-cold Swedish stare of this plaited, slip of a girl-activist.

But what is sustainability in fashion? It’s not just the use of earth-friendly material. It goes far beyond that and challenges the fashion industry itself that thrives on different looks at different times of the day, let alone months, seasons, years.

Fashion dictates that you have an early morning fresh yoga look, a corporate roundtable meet look, a mid-day brunch with friends look, an early evening do look and the late night snooze party look. If it weren’t for the industry, people would have donned one set of clothes in the morning till they peeled it off to go to bed.

So it was sustainable fashion when the Duchess of Cambridge dolled up her adorb princess in a plaid skirt presumably worn by her earlier. But the likes of me in the third world have for aeons worn hand-me-downs.

So there was this green woollen coat with a hoodie and a monkey face on it that was worn by my elder sibling through her childhood and then by me, eight years later. It was even preserved for posterity for my mother’s grandchildren!

A red coat whose satin-lined insides were just as soft and cosy as it was when it was bought probably from the Wachel Molla’s, Calcutta’s first department store, from where my father’s knickerbockers also came. My school uniform skirt was another hand-me-down from my sis. The woollens would be sunned and mothballed after every winter for the future grandchildren, who turned out to be grandsons.

That is what I call sustainability. Not that my parents knew much about climate change in the 60s. But funnily the GenNext or GenZ or the GenYen would probably not have too many hand-me-downs.