May is a big month in fashion. The Met gala, often described as the Super Bowl of fashion, sees celebrities arrive at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York wearing outfits so elaborate that ascending the stairs often requires assistance. The Global Fashion Summit, which takes place later in May, sees sustainable fashion experts and designers descend on Copenhagen for what could be called the Super Bowl of sustainable fashion. At the three-day conference, delegates’ outfits are scrutinised far less than ideas, innovations and new technologies aimed at reducing fashion’s ever-growing carbon, waste and water footprints.
This year, on its 15th anniversary, the lack of progress towards industry-wide change dampened spirits. But, from fast fashion brands committing to circular business models, to advice on how to decouple carbon emissions from revenue growth, there was much to discuss. Here are 10 key takeaways:
1. It’s time for legislation
Fashion’s emissions are still growing. “The global goals are not on track,” said the founder and former CEO of the Global Fashion Summit (GFS), Eva Kruse. She was speaking at a panel described by its moderator, Vanessa Friedman, chief fashion critic of the New York Times, as “the OG summit gang”.
“I had no idea how slow this would go,” Kruse continued. “I thought at some point we would become obsolete, but we’re still here talking about the same things.” Her conclusion: “We have to call in legislation. It’s on us.”
Her calls for regulation were echoed across sessions. The European Union’s extended producer responsibility scheme, which comes into force on 1 January 2025, is likely to be the first of several steps towards legislative accountability. The legislation will have an industry-wide impact because of the global nature of fashion’s supply chains. Plus, with legislative acts also being discussed in France, California, New York and Australia, it is clear that a line is being drawn. Regulation is coming and businesses must figure out how it will affect them.
2. Primark and H&M are committed to some rental, resale and repair
There was a little hope in the shape of the Fashion ReModel project, which was launched at the summit by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF). It sees a coalition of fashion businesses including Primark, Reformation and the H&M Group (which owns Arket, Cos and Weekday) commit to replacing a portion of their revenue stream from selling new goods with income from circular business models: rental, resale and repair. At the moment, these make up 3.5% of the global fashion market, but the EMF says that, by 2030, there is the potential for these models to take up 23% of the market and be worth $700bn.
3. It is possible to grow a business and reduce carbon emissions
This may sound too good to be true but Ganni, the favourite brand of Danish It girls, announced to a home crowd that it had achieved a 7% absolute reduction in carbon emissions compared with 2021, while seeing annual sales growth of 18%, proving it is possible to decouple revenue from carbon.
It is a formula that, apparently, with the right expertise, can be replicated by other businesses. The Ganni co-founder Nicolaj Reffstrup has co-authored the Ganni Playbook with journalist Brooke Roberts-Islam laying out how. While full of detail on the challenges and financial cost, he kept things more topline at the summit. When asked what advice he had for other businesses looking to decarbonise their supply chains, he said, simply: “Just do it.”
4. Brands need to put their money where their mouth is
The slow progress of change is, according to Peder Michael Anker-Jorgensen, who is on the board of Global Fashion Agenda, which organises the summit, down to a lack of financial commitment towards sustainable solutions from brands. He said: “1.5% to 2% of operating income is going into research and development.” Despite paying lip service to sustainability: “The money’s not where the talk is.”
According to Christine Goulay, the founder of consultancy Sustainabelle, fashion’s investments pale in comparison to those by other industries. A recent report found electronics companies spend 10% to 15% of sales on research and development and pharmaceutical and biotech companies spend 20% to 30%.
5. Brands need to be more transparent
The fashion industry is famous for working behind closed doors and guarding its secrets. Consensus across the forums was that these isolationist tendencies have hampered progress towards sustainability, which is dependent on overhauling interconnected supply chains. “If each one is just looking after his own small garden without industry collaboration, we’ll never get the results,” said Attila Kiss, the CEO of Gruppo Florence, a group that represents luxury production facilities in Italy.
6. The perspectives of garment workers from the global south are still lacking
Panels were often made up of people who represented the corporate or consumer end of fashion businesses, rather than the farmers and manufacturers who produce fibres and clothes. It speaks to who gets to have a seat at the table. “When we talk about garment workers, farmers, tannery workers, we need those people to be in the conversation – not just spoken about in abstract,” said Emma Hakansson, the founding director of Collective Fashion Justice. In one instance, a representative from the Cambodian workforce, Athit Kong, joined a panel via video due to difficulties obtaining a visa to travel to Copenhagen. “The [summit] needs to take proactive steps to engage worker communities and representatives and, where necessary, provide sponsorship and support with visas,” said Olivia Windham Stewart, an independent business and human rights adviser, who moderated the panel. “Otherwise it will just be a forum for industry to tell their side of the story.”
7. AI isn’t the solution
One thing driving fashion’s environmental impacts is the sheer volume of products that are never worn, a result of the time lag between orders, production and retail. Artificial intelligence is often cited as a solution, but Dr Ahmed Zaidi, the CEO of AI platform Hyran Technologies, said that, without overhauling fashion’s manufacturing processes to be more agile and responsive to consumer demand, “using AI [as a solution] is like attaching a jet engine to a broken process”. So if anyone thought AI was going to be able to fix our broken system, think again.
8. Collaborations with Indigenous communities are moving forward
Despite fashion’s reliance on the natural world for its most luxurious materials, the Indigenous and local communities who are caretakers of 80% of the world’s biodiversity have long been excluded from corporate sustainability conversations. But there is hope in the shape of a new guide. A collaboration between the NGO Conservation International and luxury group Kering to help brands partner with Indigenous communities, it was sparked by 2022 research from Textile Exchange that revealed only 5% of the of 252 fashion brands surveyed consult Indigenous people on their biodiversity plans.
According to Dayana Molina, an activist and Indigenous designer at fashion brand Nalimo, it is a first step to “push forward to make fashion that is cooperative, collaborative and fair”.
On a separate panel, Naiomi Glasses, a seventh-generation Diné (Navajo) textile artist and designer who collaborated with Polo Ralph Lauren on a collection, said she would like to see “more brands embrace telling more stories like mine … The power of collaboration is really beautiful because there are so many stories embedded in craft and it lets us show how Indigenous cultures are still here and still thriving.”
9. Another next-gen material is here to rival synthetics
More than $500m was invested in next-gen materials in 2023. From mushroom leather to spider silk and viscose made from coconut water, innovations in the material space are often heralded as the future of fashion. But the challenges of producing them en masse at a competitive price often come as a cold shock to innovators. Nevertheless, there is a new kid on the block. New York-based Bloom Labs is making materials that feel like cotton and silk while being as functional as polyester, all from protein-rich biomass waste, including pre-consumer discarded wool and upcycled down from the bedding industry.
10. Fashion must lead or be led
“Nobody in their right minds would design a system like this,” said former CEO of Unilever, Paul Polman, of the fashion industry’s take, make, waste model. He described making fashion sustainable as “the biggest business opportunity of the century”, rounding off his keynote speech with a line that would be repeated by speakers on many panels to come: lead or be led.
• This article was amended on 30 May 2024 to correct the name of the representative from the Cambodian workforce. It was Athit Kong, not Adil Rehman as a previous version said.
