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Circular fashion is developing and innovations are plentiful across Scandinavia. However, there’s still a gap between consumer attitudes towards circular fashion and their shopping behaviours, according to speakers at the first Vogue Business event in Copenhagen, held on 10 August during Copenhagen Fashion Week.
The event, staged at indoor/outdoor venue Halmtorvet 9 in partnership with online retailer Zalando, brought together three leading voices in fashion and circularity, each with a unique perspective. Ganni CEO Andrea Baldo, Zalando head of circularity Laura Coppen and Anna Vilén, head of communications for brand and marketing at waste management company Sysav.
Circularity takes a holistic approach to reducing fashion’s environmental impact by reducing the use of natural resources; sourcing from existing or recycled materials and extending the lifecycle of clothing via methods such as repair, resale, rental and upcycling.
“We have about 100 million tons of new textiles put on the market globally every year, and only a few per cent are recycled,” Vilén says. “So, it is a volume problem.” Sysav launched the world’s first industrial-scale textile sorting plant in 2020, allowing it to better determine the composition of textile waste in order to recycle higher volumes.
“We handle textile waste. We don't want to handle stuff that can be resold,” Vilén says, noting the challenges that recycling plants face when dealing with blended fibres, which are often impossible to recycle at scale.
Circularity starts with circular design and production, to help remedy this issue, says Coppen, who joined Zalando in 2021 and launched the company’s circularity strategy. “The largest impact of a product on the environment starts in that design and manufactured stage by the materials and the production processes,” she says. Therefore, Zalando trains all staff on circular design for its private labels and partners with companies, including Infinited Fiber, a Finnish startup that recycles cellulosic textiles, and US-based polyester recycler Ambercycle.
As well as material innovation to better source textiles and ease demand on natural resources, the goal is to reduce the amount of clothing being discarded in the first place, the panel agreed. Ganni is testing both rental and resale, however adoption of rental in particular has been low, says Baldo. With resale, interestingly, it performs much better in-store than online, he says, as the experience of shopping secondhand and the quality of the secondhand clothing handed back is better in-store.
Zalando has scaled up its pre-owned category from 20,000 to 500,000 items in the last year, but Coppen notes the attitude gap between what customers say they want and how they actually shop.
“We're still trying to understand how we change customer behaviours, what information is relevant for our customers and how we encourage the adoption of entirely new behaviour,” says Coppen. Last year, Zalando carried out research that found very high belief and desire to adopt new behaviours, to repair clothing, to resell, to trade in for recycling. However, unfortunately, very little action has been taken. “The behaviour gap is really big and particularly large in the circular space. And that's predominantly because there's just not accessible solutions at scale for customers to repair, to resell.”
Communicating circularity is a challenge for brands and retailers. And it’s important to be transparent and honest about your failings as you develop circular strategies, Baldo says. When he joined Ganni three years ago, less than 10 per cent of products were [what Ganni deems] responsible, meaning products made up of 50 per cent organic, certified low impact or recycled textiles. Now, more than 90 per cent of products meet this criteria. “And now, we are more than 90 per cent, in just three years. Is it enough? No…We are very positive, but we are not a sustainable brand.”
This panel was sponsored by Zalando.
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