Global Fashion Summit—Focus Needed, Notable Absentees, And The O Word

The annual Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen drives the sustainability narrative for fashion, convening brands and retailers, materials and tech innovators, and, this year, policy makers. It is also a meeting point for NGOs, academics, and overlapping industries, such as logistics and agriculture. The summit does a fantastic job of convening the listed stakeholders based in the global north; it's just that the industry operations and where the environmental impacts and production of goods happens is in the global south, and the stakeholders representing the industry there are farmers, textile mills and garment manufacturers.

Those attending the Summit in the hope of learning how the fashion industry is solving its sustainability problems were likely to leave disillusioned—not because the solutions don't exist, but because those at the coalface who understand and implement them are not the industry's spokespeople. Representatives from mills and manufacturers do attend the summit, but two that I spoke to said they couldn't pay the required amounts to be represented on stage, preventing them from taking part to explain why sustainability isn't moving faster, and why industry emissions continue to rise when they are supposed to be in decline.

When framing sustainability, it's essential to remember the source of fashion's biggest emissions: energy usage for garment production. Within this, the most energy-intensive phases are textile production, and within this, it's dyeing and finishing (in addition to raw material growth (cotton) and extraction (polyester)). Knowing this, we must recognize one other truth: brands don't make clothes—they procure them from manufacturers who are experts in sourcing raw materials, making fabrics, and designing, developing, and constructing garments from initial design idea to final product at mass scale and on a slim profit margin, on behalf of brands. In fact, many of the products we see in fashion stores were proposed by manufacturers, not designed by brands.

This context is not to diminish the role of brands in creating an economic success story that has seen millions of garment workers lifted out of poverty and freed them from a destiny of invisible and informal domestic work, but rather to ask: are brands and retailers well positioned to guide the industry on what needs to be done to make it sustainable? No, they are not. We are asking the wrong people, year after year, and expecting a different result (and having Antoine Arnault from LVMH saying that luxury is a separate “industry”, that should leave fast fashion to pursue its own sustainability efforts through the likes of the Fashion Pact, doesn’t help). The questions remain the same: Why aren’t emissions decreasing? Why is overproduction being ignored? Why is a living wage for garment workers apparently impossible? When will fashion be circular?!

If you ask brands about their efforts to reduce emissions, it's common to hear about their commitment to setting science-based targets; whereas regarding overproduction, you'd be hard-pressed to get any kind of answer at all; and on the topic of circularity, brands continue to focus on areas within their direct control, like resale, repair and take back schemes, despite these areas having no material impact on emissions reductions in light of the goal to contain global warming to 1.5 degrees.

Notably absent from the summit discussions was overproduction (the dreaded "O" word). At least one reason points back to the truth that brands procure finished products—they don't make them—and that manufacturing is a low-margin (almost commodity) business, yet fashion retail is a very high-margin business by comparison. Put another way, there is precious little risk for most brands in ordering high volumes (they can make a profit even when their goods are heavily discounted), but manufacturers can only make a decent profit if they produce large quantities due to slim margins per unit. There are solutions under development for AI-led purchasing that marginally delay brands' orders until sales data on popular styles and sizes allows for more accurate order placement. Such solutions can improve a brand's profitability (and reduce overproduction) and ease the manufacturer's burden, particularly when applied to styles that can be produced quickly and from readily available fabrics. This opportunity was not discussed at this summit; however, new EU-wide regulations signaling a ban on incineration and sending unsold stock to landfill may change that next year.

The summit wasn't without gems, and the much-expanded content offering spanned four stages, often with concurrent discussions, and shared some unique voices for the first time. Hakan Karaosman, Assistant Professor at Cardiff University and Chief Scientist at FReSCH reminded the audience that "supply chains are social and ecological systems" with imbalanced power relations, culminating in government and industry top-down approaches that are "a disaster" for the UN-mandated ‘just transition'. Since supply chains are man-made, we capture social innovation if we change them, he said.

"Factory owners have invested billions of dollars, but the Accord never gave them a voice," said Miran Ali of Bangladesh-based manufacturer Bitopi Group. Fellow panelist, Michael Bride of PVH Corp, acknowledged, explicitly on the record, that "brands were complicit” in factory health and safety breaches in Bangladesh at the time of the Rana Plaza factory collapse. He also stated that the subsequent Bangladesh Accord for Health and Safety was imposed as "a regime" on the garment manufacturing sector and that this approach—much maligned by Ali—was a mistake. The newly established International Accord is being rolled out in neighboring Pakistan, but this time in partnership with manufacturers. On the topic of lessons, Bride had this one for the audience: "You don't want to position yourself as a colonial brand. With local governance and local people, decision-making is slower but better."

On the subject of circularity, Tricia Carey of Renewcell explained why textile waste is a valuable resource for creating high-value outputs—a point that was undisputed but contended by Vidiya Amrit Khan of Desh Group of Companies. According to Khan, offcut textile waste sent from Bangladesh to be valorized in Europe is a loss for the origin country, undermining its ability to create economic value within its garment sector. Khan's point highlights a mismatch between the industry in the Global North’s circularity ambitions (to recycle all the clothes consumers discard) and the reality (U.S and European countries don't collect or sort discarded clothing properly, so they need to source textile waste from manufacturing countries instead).

Another highlight was an Uzbek Cotton case study, demonstrating the modernization of the industry following a 13-year boycott that ended last year. In partnership with the UNECE, Better Cotton, and Haelixa, the study drew upon eight years of work to create 134 clusters of farm-to-garment production co-operatives. With a projected 1M tonnes annual capacity, Uzbekistan looks to become a critical cotton-sourcing country and a social, environmental, and economic success story that illustrates in practice the earlier words of Hakan Karaosman. I will be digging into this further in another article.

Regenerative agriculture discussions were on the rise at the summit, but a main-stage panel discussion indicated that only a few farmers were present, and one was a panelist. "We can do with less life coaches and less consultants [but] we can't do with less farmers," said Philippe Birker, co-founder of Climate Farmers. "The average age of a farmer in Europe is 58," and with a third expected to retire within a decade and few willing to take their place, the future of land biodiversity and food cropping in Europe is of significant concern. "We need to fix the broken relationship with farmers and food companies," he said, making his first-ever appearance at a fashion conference and reporting that the same issues in the food sector appear to be true of the fashion.

The Global Fashion Summit experience led me to ponder a different sustainability dynamic. If manufacturers have the answers to fashion’s sustainability woes, what if the conference was in Delhi, for example, and they took to the stage offering to help brands reduce their negative impacts whilst creating value-added products for them, enabling them to add large margins onto differentiated products with leading sustainability credentials (and command a fairer unit price for themselves, too)? Garment manufacturers produce goods for dozens of brands simultaneously, and have an objectivity regarding impact reduction opportunities that single brands operating outside of the supply chain can never have.

Having stretched the definition of a short summary somewhat, I’ll now be brief: fashion production is where the industry’s main impacts are and where sustainability needs to happen, so let’s ask the producers (of raw materials through to garments) how to do it. They are the experts and the key to implementing innovation that can shift this industry, they are just not leading on the summit’s stages—yet.

Update 10/7/23:

The Global Fashion Agenda team responded to add: “Up to 80% of the 136 speakers were not affiliated with any commercial partnership with GFA. The Summit programme featured 33 manufacturer or supply chain representatives (only 9 of which were affiliated with content created in collaboration with partners and sponsors).”

“GFA believes that the responsibility to drive change predominantly lies with the leaders of global brands and retailers due to their sheer volumes and wide reach, therefore our Summit programme in Copenhagen primarily aims to convene these executives and empower them to act, however we do strive to include the full fashion ecosystem in the conversation too.”