Sustainability in fashion has been promised for years, with fashion brands coming up with emissions targets, sourcing recycled materials and making sustainability promises within their supply chains. However, at New York Climate Week 2026, one challenge stood out: fashioning a more sustainable future is turning out to be far more difficult than making sustainability promises, according to a report by Vogue .
Finding an alternative material or coming up with another net-zero target cannot solve the problem. This is because the fashion industry is a mammoth global industry based on complex networks of farms, fibre companies, manufacturing firms, logistics firms, retailers and consumers.
