After 15 Years of the Global Fashion Summit, Can the Industry ‘Unlock the Next Level’?

The Global Fashion Summit: Copenhagen Edition’s most brutally honest moment manifested on the main stage more than 24 hours after a troupe of barefoot dancers gamboled to a strings-heavy rendition of “Believer” by Imagine Dragons and a mezzo-soprano in a voluminous, projection-screen-doubling dress belted out a cover of “Rise Up” by Andra Day. (It was “a bit Eurovision,” someone confided.)

Industry conferences can be overly manicured, self-congratulatory affairs, but Eva Kruse, who founded Global Fashion Agenda in 2009, was in no mood for platitudes, not even on the 15th anniversary of the first Global Fashion Summit, then known as the Copenhagen Fashion Summit. “Those of you who know me know that I’m a stubborn optimist; I still am,” she told the event’s 1,000 attendees. “However, I had no idea how slow this would go.”

“This” is the fashion industry’s plodding pace of progress in fixing its multitude of social and environmental sins. Sustainability may have moved from a peripheral issue to a top agenda item in corporate boardrooms, but it’s still not getting the “right amount” of attention or money, said Kruse, now the chief global engagement officer at innovation brand Pangaia. More critically, everyone is “still talking about the same things” 15 years on. “That’s not what we meant by ‘circularity,’” she said. “I’m quite disappointed in all of us, myself included, that we haven’t been able to push further forward. We already know what to do.”

By saying the quiet part out loud, Kruse gave shape to the frisson of frustration—perhaps even dread—that punctured the otherwise celebratory air. It was a feeling that several people in the audience later admitted they shared. Workers’ rights in major sourcing destinations like Bangladesh and Myanmar continue to be under attack, even as starvation wages remain the norm rather than the exception. The European Environmental Agency estimates a 63 percent uptick in clothing and footwear production by 2030, much of it derived from virgin fossil fuels. The Apparel Impact Institute expects the sector’s climate emissions to soar by nearly 40 percent by the close of the decade, even as experts say they need to be slashed by half to stave off the worst effects of climate change—effects that are already becoming more evident with the increasing frequency of extreme weather-related calamities.

Sustainable fashion, as Vanessa Friedman, fashion director of the New York Times, put it, is an oxymoron much like “jumbo shrimp” or “down escalator.” Fashion is about planned obsolescence. Sustainability is about preservation. “They literally mean opposite things,” she added. “And lately it seems like every time a flower blooms, we get a new collection.” Businesses might like the concept of things like material innovation, Friedman said, but they’re not necessarily willing to spend money on it. Take R&D, for instance. Estimates show that the industry is putting between 1.5 to 2 percent of its operating income in that bucket when other sectors like software, pharma or food are shelling out in the double digits. And then it wonders why promising innovations fail.

It’s a Catch-22, Adam Karlsson, chief financial officer at H&M Group, said on a panel about collective financing models for climate, where he spoke about the Swedish giant’s decision to team with Bestseller and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners to develop Bangladesh’s first utility-scale offshore wind project. “In my view, a sustainable business needs to be profitable,” he said. “But you can only be a long-term profitable business if [you’re] sustainable.” Syre, the polyester recycler that H&M Group co-launched with investor group Vargas Holdings, might get a fairer shake with the $100 million infusion that it revealed during the conference.

To be fair, progress has been made, said Peder Michael Jorgensen, the Global Fashion Agenda board member who wrote the Nordic Fashion Association’s 10-year sustainability plan in 2009. For one thing, when the United Nations Climate Change Conference known as COP15 was held in Copenhagen that same year, there was zero mention of sustainability in fashion, which is how the inaugural Copenhagen Fashion Summit came into being in the first place. COP28 in Dubai in December, on the other hand, was a wholly different affair in terms of industry representation.

The problem, Jorgensen said, is that business models have evolved in such a way that the “gap between where we’re at and where we need to be” has grown and fashion conglomerate owners have gotten richer. And with talk about collaboration increasing, there’s a danger that collaboration could become a “potential figleaf” for inaction. “And I think that has been the case for the past 10, 15 years for many companies,” he added. “Collaboration has been about incremental change…but it’s not transforming the way we run our businesses, how we develop products and deliver products into the market.”

Collaboration isn’t a given, either. Nor is “unlocking the next level,” as the conference was themed. While Asos, H&M Group and Calvin Klein parent PVH Corp. were among the banner names that signed a set of binding agreements that could help IndustriALL Global Union affiliates in Cambodia better execute collective bargaining agreements with suppliers, boosting both wages and working conditions, Inditex proved to be a notable holdout. Having the Zara owner on board would give the commitments, which include ring-fencing wages and guaranteed order volumes, more heft and improve their chance of success, said a person familiar with the deal. An Inditex spokersperson said that the Spanish juggernaut wants to ensure better conditions for Cambodia’s entire industry, rather than individual factories, and remains committed to the purchasing practices laid out by IndustriALL’s ACT (Action, Collaboration, Transformation) initiative.

“Having [a] legally binding [agreement] creates an accountability mechanism for all,” Michael Bride, senior vice president of corporate responsibility and global affairs at PVH Corp., said at a panel announcing the agreements. “You know, I really like listening to all the contributions on stage; I think they’re great. But I think we can also admit that a common theme from the last few days is that ambition will only get us so far, right? The more brands sign the legally binding agreement to say, ‘We’re going to support this,’ the more factories will sign the CBA.”

That labor issues had less of a platform at a time when crackdowns on freedom of association are becoming more blatant didn’t go unnoticed. One insider wished there had been a greater diversity of perspectives from the human rights side, which was “not prominently there.” Another felt it was “just different faces blabbering on the same old stuff,” though it was less a criticism of the event itself and more of an indictment of the rate of change in the industry. Overall there was a sense that the event needed more critical rigor, more candid discussions about the challenges ahead and fewer obviously sponsored sessions that, as another attendee put it, felt “sanitized and seemingly positioned for favorable PR.”

But all of this is also emblematic of fashion’s many contradictions. (It is large. It contains multitudes.) Off stage, Global Fashion Agenda convened several closed-door roundtables, which some felt were more productive because they could speak more freely in the absence of pesky journalists. There was a focus on next-gen voices, an innovation showcase, a panel about working with indigenous communities and the first Trailblazers Programme award that gave Bloom Labs a $200,000 fighting chance at scaling up its waste-derived regenerated protein fiber. Overproduction, the elephant in the room that few, if any, fashion conferences have addressed, received a dedicated session, dovetailing with an announcement by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation that it’s linking arms with the likes of H&M Group, Primark and Zalando to explore decoupling profits from production. And Federica Marchionni, who succeeded Kruse as CEO in 2021, warned executives in her opening spiel that “every company must depart from business as usual” and that performance on the stock market shouldn’t be the “sole measurement of business performance in the context of the climate crisis.”

Global Fashion Agenda also published a “sister” edition of its CEO Agenda, a “succinct checklist” for achieving a net-positive sector that was last updated in 2023. Its five priority areas—respectful and secure work environments, better wage systems, resource stewardship, smart material choices and circular systems—didn’t change as such, said Holly Syrett, the organization’s vice president of impact programs and sustainability. But they were rejiggered, with input from stakeholders, to home in on the “transformational unlocks,” from “redefining growth” to “prioritizing people.”

Syrett said that companies tend to approach sustainability in a fragmented manner—emissions, materials, worker welfare—where what’s needed is a more sophisticated, holistic systems approach spearheaded by cross-functional teams. “I think that’s perhaps the biggest unlock of them all,” she said.

“We urge the industry to use the Global Fashion Summit as a catalyst to take these important conversations out of the confines of the three-day event, roll up our sleeves and do the work that will make these crucial ideas discussed a reality,” Andrés Bragagnini, manager of stakeholder engagement at the Apparel Impact Institute, wrote in an email afterward.

“Action over perfection” has been Ganni’s guiding philosophy, Nicolaj Reffstrup, the Copenhagen It Girl label’s founder, said at a session on decarbonization, where he warned about “analysis paralysis” over data. Despite growing by 18 percent over the past year, Ganni has managed to tamp down its emissions by 7 percent, which he credits to the carbon insetting work it’s been doing in Portugal despite “flawed” data at the outset. That’s not to say there isn’t a measure of sacrifice, however.

“There’s a direct cost involved,” said Reffstrup, who recently co-authored “The Ganni Playbook” with the journalist Brooke Roberts-Islam. “In the insetting case, we’ve installed solar panels with four suppliers in Portugal. We didn’t wait for an industry-wide initiative, though I would have appreciated the help. And we don’t control those suppliers; they work with a lot of our competitors. And it’s worked out surprisingly well. One supplier was able to cut its carbon footprint by 40 percent. My point is there’s so much you can do without waiting for others, without waiting for the data, just by committing to it and doing it.”

The fact that fashion has an outsized social and environmental is “beyond debate,” Ryan Gellert, CEO at Patagonia, said in a one-on-one conversation with Marchioni. And the only thing that will “fix the problem” is systemic change “from the inside out” and through regulation “from the outside in.”

Patagonia is wrestling with its own set of challenges, among them microplastics, apparel-to-apparel recycling and decarbonization within factories and mills that it neither owns nor has a majority production volume in. It’s been able to solve the so-called “easier problems” over its 51-year-old history, Gellert said. It’ll take collaboration—there’s the c-word again—to tackle the bigger ones.

Still, ask him what gives him hope for the future and Gellert will say nothing. Hope is a passive idea, not a strategy, he said. What gives him energy and motivation, however, is a belief that the industry has created existential problems that it now has a responsibility to solve. It’s action over pessimism that will get the job done, Gellert added. Or in the words of climate campaigner and former Unilever chief Paul Polman, who gave the keynote presentation, “lead or be led.”

Even so, Kruse thought that the Global Fashion Summit would be “obsolete” at this point because there wouldn’t be a need to meet. The sector, she said, not only needs to “step it up” but it also needs to get uncomfortable, a concept that Polman also touched on as a way to gauge whether someone’s “in the right space.” Legislation may be able to give lollygaggers the kick in the pants they need, Kruse said, but companies cannot lean back and wait until it happens to get moving. There simply isn’t enough time. It’s “on us.”

“For too long, we are sort of staying in this space where things are nice; it’s fun, we can play around with innovative materials, we do a little bit here and there,” she said. “But we’re not going to get there if we don’t get uncomfortable. It’s going to be difficult for us to meet net-positive on all accounts. You need to make choices that hurt. ”