For many, the appeal of “clean” fashion is personal.

“There’s a level of overwhelm people are experiencing when it comes to pollution and toxins in everyday life,” said Summer Dean, founder of Climate Diva. “Part of the reason this ‘clean’ movement has skyrocketed across the political spectrum is because no one can escape toxic pollution, no matter how well-off or privileged they are.”

The notion itself is hardly new. Long before “clean fashion” was coined, Indigenous communities and many non-Western cultures practiced clothing systems grounded in repair, reuse, and respect for natural materials. In the West, today’s movement traces back to the countercultural politics of the 1960s and 1970s when anti-capitalist and naturalist ideals fueled small but influential experiments in rejecting mass production. Homemade, thrifted, or mended clothes became symbols of moral commitment and political dissent. By the 1990s, “sustainable fashion” had entered the mainstream, offering a more palatable, market-friendly version of earlier radical critiques.

As the term spread, however, so did the marketing. Brands launched “eco,” “upcycled,” and even “clean” collections, often without meaningful change to their business models. Critics argue that these efforts, often lacking regulatory oversight, veer into greenwashing. “It’s a marketing term brands can use however they want,” said beauty critic Jessica DeFino.

Even so, “clean” fashion remained a genuine concern for years, driven by grassroots calls for regulation largely confined to left-wing circles and ignored by the wider industry. That is, until today. Dean now sees common ground in the frustrations voiced on both sides of the political spectrum. “Both conservatives and progressives express the same frustration with being taken advantage of by corporate greed,” she said. “The difference is simply what conclusions they reach.”

These divergences are even visible in how clean fashion is worn and what it signals. For climate activists, it’s a sartorial refusal of fast fashion’s waste. For conservative lifestyle brands, it’s pastoral nostalgia, typically in the style of linen dresses, lace, and prairie silhouettes paired with traditional femininity. Brands like Ballerina Farm—a Utah-based lifestyle brand built around trad-wife influencer Hannah Neeleman’s highly stylized portrayals of rural domestic life—and American alt-right women’s media company Evie Magazine are leading examples: Evie recently launched a “milkmaid” dress made from “raw organic cotton” with “100% feminine energy,” according to the magazine’s Instagram. “This idea that all your products should be natural obviously fits into that conservative, idyllic vision of the past that we need to return to,” DeFino said.

The result is an ideological blur, where “raw” cotton dresses signal both eco-consciousness and tradwife nostalgia, and where natural fibers double as climate solutions and markers of cultural identity.

But convergence also brings complications. “When people overstate the science around toxic chemicals in fashion, beauty, or any industry, it provides ample fodder for backlash and undermines the real issues associated with toxic chemicals,” said Lindsay Dahl, activist and author of Cleaning House. Fashion is especially vulnerable, she explained, because while consumer safety dominates headlines, the worst harms fall on workers and communities near production sites. “All too often, the conversation about what is ‘safe’ is focused on how we use the products as consumers, when the larger safety questions are hidden down the supply chain.”

For DeFino, the challenge lies in polarizing narratives. “We tend to associate people on the right with ‘everything is toxic, nothing is safe, only use natural products,’” she said. Meanwhile, the establishment press often suggests that chemical concerns are overblown, framing synthetic ingredients as mostly safe. “‘Everything is safe, there’s no such thing as a bad chemical.’ These are both pretty extreme positions,” she said. “The truth is somewhere in the middle.”

But reaching that middle ground is difficult when “clean” itself has no clear definition in fashion.

Unlike certified terms such as “organic” or “fair trade,” it carries no legal standard in the U.S. or the EU. There are no binding rules on which chemicals must be excluded, how materials are sourced, or what qualifies as “non-toxic.”

That vacuum has consequences. Words like “natural” and “non-toxic” appear everywhere, but with no shared criteria, anyone can use them to mean anything. “The brands don’t have to change how they operate, and consumers think they’re making sustainable choices but aren’t given the evidence of how,” said Teju Adisa-Farrar, executive director of the Black Fiber & Textile Network. “Profit often drives the language more than truth.”

In fact, the language itself has been so normalized that it’s “tricky” to separate genuine safety concerns from opportunistic branding, warned sustainable fashion creator Jazmine Brown. Meanwhile, figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and “MAHA” influencers have adopted the rhetoric to promote broader distrust of science. “What started as a valid critique of corporate chemical overreach and regulatory failure is now reinforcing new kinds of harm,” Brown added.

It’s partly why Dean is skeptical about the conservative embrace of clean fashion. “While [Trump voters] support the ‘clean’ and ‘nontoxic’ movement, they continue to vote for officials who are polluting and killing our environment in every other way,” she said. “Until these communities form a more holistic view of sustainability and wellness, I don’t see much hope in their interest.”

The current administration has already weakened air pollution rules, defunded protections for communities hardest hit by toxic chemical pollution, and delayed long-fought bans on asbestos and PFAS in wastewater. At the same time, proposed legislation that could establish clearer chemical safety standards in the U.S. and in the EU has faced industry pushback and sluggish implementation over the past few years.