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From a controversial appeal for a luxury-focused fashion pact, to a long-awaited guide to sustainable communication, this year’s Global Fashion Summit delivered plenty of talking points and incremental progress, but systems change remains elusive.
The theme of this edition of the summit — which is the flagship event of non-profit Global Fashion Agenda (GFA) — was ‘ambition to action’, a nod to industry-wide frustration with the pace of progress on sustainability. That sentiment was reflected in the news brands and organisations brought to last week’s event: a combination of step-by-step guides, attempts to decode complex issues, and actionable case studies for scaling innovation. It was, as GFA’s CEO Federica Marchionni said in her opening address, a bid to “champion the changemakers” and “create constructive collaborations”.
The intense two-day programme covered everything from regenerative agriculture and next-gen materials to logistics and investment, spanning four open stages and 10 closed-door roundtables.
Last week, fashion leaders gathered in Copenhagen for the annual Global Fashion Summit. There were collaborations and commitments, but voices on-stage lacked diversity.
LVMH took a leading role in the summit for the first time this year, sponsoring the closing celebration dinner and taking part in panels throughout. “The Global Fashion Summit lived up to its promise particularly well this year, bringing together an impressive number of visitors, high-level speakers as well as innovations,” says Hélène Valade, environmental development director at LVMH.
The opening panel included Jonathan Anderson, creative director of both JW Anderson and Loewe, and Antoine Arnault, who leads image and environment for LVMH Group. The latter appealed for the luxury industry to form a sustainability-focused coalition to address common challenges, taking a dig at the cross-industry CEO-led coalition the Fashion Pact for its inclusion of fast fashion brands, which LVMH says have “neither the same models nor the same impact”. It divided opinion: some attendees pointed out that fast fashion would not exist if it did not have a luxury industry to mimic, and many brands share suppliers, making collaboration across this divide crucial to progress.
Innovation in focus
On the new innovation stage — which promised to highlight actionable case studies — Copenhagen cult brand Ganni and California startup Rubi Labs shared insights from their carbon-negative cellulose pilot programme, which is running alongside similar partnerships with Reformation and Urbn-owned rental platform Nuuly. Ganni’s pilot will be the first to move into phase two, garment creation, having successfully produced a yarn from carbon dioxide emissions, which the companies say has a net neutral impact on both land and water.
“Fabric innovations like Rubi will play a crucial role in getting fashion to the point of decarbonisation. But, for this to happen, brands need to place bets, take risks and invest in innovations,” Ganni co-founder Nicolaj Reffstrup said in a statement. These bets don’t always pay off, as shown by the recent news that Mylo – the mycelium leather alternative developed by US startup Bolt Threads and backed by Stella McCartney and Ganni among others — is shutting down production after failing to secure enough funding to scale. “There are still a lot of things we don’t know the answer to, but working with innovative partners gives a lot of optimism for what the future could look like,” said Reffstrup.
Also on the innovation stage, Allbirds released the first images of its M0.0nshot shoe, which it says has a net footprint of 0.0kg of CO2 emissions. The pale grey ribbed sock-boot combines regeneratively farmed merino wool, a sugarcane-based EVA foam and a bioplastic made from methane by US startup Mango Materials.
The brand is also continuing its trend of open-sourcing innovations, publishing its so-called ‘Recipe B0.0k’ for net-zero carbon products alongside the shoe’s final look. “M0.0nshot is Allbirds’s greatest achievement, but it’s meaningless without others taking action, which is why we felt compelled to open-source our learnings,” Allbirds co-founder and chief innovation officer Tim Brown said in a statement.
Sustainability, step-by-step
As the industry’s focus shifts from strategy-setting to taking action, playbooks and roadmaps were a running theme in Copenhagen. Traceability platform TrusTrace unveiled the second iteration of its traceability playbook, this time with case studies from Coach and Kate Spade parent company Tapestry, as well as sportswear brand Asics. The playbook originally launched at last year’s Global Fashion Summit, but supply chain traceability has become more of a hot topic for sustainability professionals in the last year. Many fashion brands are now hiring dedicated traceability roles in a bid to comply with increasingly complex and demanding regulations.
During a panel on biodiversity, the Fashion Pact’s executive director and secretary general Eva von Alvensleben announced the first industry-specific guide for fashion brands hoping to implement science-based targets for nature (SBTN). The targets, set by the Science Based Targets Network in May, are intended to build on the momentum of the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) by focusing on biodiversity conservation and nature-based climate solutions. LVMH, L’Occitane, and the Fashion Pact signatories Kering and H&M Group are among the 17 global companies piloting the scheme.
The Fashion Pact’s guide, developed with non-profit Conservation International and the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, includes an introduction to the SBTN, a case study showing how targets are calculated and set, and actions companies can take immediately.
“Fashion is one of the biggest manufacturing industries, but it is also uniquely dependent on natural ecosystems. Biodiversity is the glue holding those natural ecosystems together,” von Alvensleben told Vogue Business. “We want to avoid what we did in climate — everyone came out with individual tools and methodologies which you can’t compare or sum up at an industry-wide scale. We see an opportunity to accelerate impact by working collaboratively.”
The United Nations also published its long-awaited guide to sustainable fashion communication on the summit’s main stage, calling on fashion media and marketers to play a more active role in tackling the climate crisis. “Fashion’s stories are currently directed towards a linear model of production and consumption,” playbook author Rachel Arthur, advocacy lead for sustainable fashion at the UN Environment Programme, told Vogue Business. “The industry’s dominant narratives will not allow us to reach our sustainability targets.”
Global Fashion Agenda news
GFA had a few announcements of its own. It showed the first clip of its Fashion Redressed online film series, launching in September in collaboration with BBC Storyworks Commercial Productions, and revealed the outcome of the 2023 GFA Designer Challenge, which matches designers with circular solutions providers. Collina Strada collaborated with Circulose on a bag made with recycled cotton from post-consumer clothing waste, and Puma developed a prototype for a patchwork shoe with upcycler Nicole McLaughlin, using its own offcuts. A third Designer Challenge film will be released in September, featuring Scandinavian brand Heliot Emil.
GFA also launched a new platform, Global Textiles Policy Forum, which seeks to standardise the industry response to international fashion policies. This includes a policy matrix resource, summarising key legislations around the world and highlighting how they will impact fashion industry stakeholders.
“Legislation was the missing piece when it comes to achieving impact at scale,” says GFA’s public affairs director María Luisa Martínez Díez. “There is a need to educate around policy, and spell out the legislations on the table as well as those ongoing, which is what the matrix will do. GFA is now advocating for a coherent and ambitious regulatory framework.”
There was a renewed sense of urgency underpinning all of the announcements and initiatives. “There is no more time, everyone understands that now,” says GFA’s Marchionni. “My only concern is how much action is happening and how much progress is made.”
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