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The Sustainable Fashion Office Hours LIVE tour continues, this time in Brussels next week at the Future Fabrics Expo, which takes place alongside the Textiles Recycling Expo.

If you’re a young professional with an interest in chatting sustainable fashion careers with me, please join me on Wednesday, June 24 at 4pm-5pm CET.

This interactive edition of my regular mentoring calls is designed for anyone building a fashion career rooted in impact and purpose. Expect an open, solutions-oriented conversation. Bring your questions about career pathways, leadership, skills development and systems change.

It will be an intimate session with space for just 12 people. To attend, you need to meet the following criteria:

• Ability to be in-person at the expo

• A young professional with no more than five years industry experience

• (On this occasion, this session is not open to students)

You can sign-up to do so here. First come, first served - details to follow registrations on where we will meet.

I look forward to seeing many of you there.

You can also read more about our experience at ChangeNOW in Paris here:

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One of the main questions I’ve been asked since posting about my trip to Kantamanto market in Ghana and the issues it presents, is what solutions exist, and what we should be doing about it.

To recap: Kantamanto is one of the largest secondhand clothing markets in the world. Every single week, millions of items of clothing arrive there from the UK and other countries, with the intention of being resold and reused. But the volumes are too much and the quality increasingly too low. The consequences are everywhere: polluting the lagoon, piling up in informal dumpsites and washing in with the waves on the beaches.

“Too much clothing, not enough justice” is the tagline of The Or Foundation, the nonprofit organisation based in Ghana that I visited to see its work at the intersection of environmental justice, education and fashion development in person. And this summarises, of course, exactly what you see on the ground when you’re there. (Read the full post here for all of my reflections on this).

So where does one start with how to address it? Lots of the queries I’ve had have been on a personal level - what can I individually do and how do I best dispose of my clothing so as not to contribute to this in a negative way? While I have many thoughts here, my focus is first on what the industry could and should be doing - it is here we find the ones not only the most responsible, but with the most power for change.

Fortunately, The Or Foundation have been working on this for the past 15 years and thus have a lot of the answers already. It’s by no means simple, but it is grounded in the reality of what is physically happening, and the lived experience and contextual understanding of what is needed to change it.

Tied directly to the work I personally do elsewhere in this industry, we need to start with brands publishing their production volumes. Speak Volumes is a campaign from The Or Foundation that asks brands to do so annually by units. The fact is, we don’t know currently how much is produced across the industry, though estimates state it to be anywhere from 80-150 billion new items every year. That is a large gap, suggesting just how wildly unknown this actually is.

And yet finding out shouldn’t be that hard - as with much in this space, it’s about political will more so than technical ability. As I wrote last week, if there’s one thing Kantamanto makes extremely clear is that this should be mandatory and it should be standard practice. As The Or Foundation explains: “If we are going to clean up fashion’s waste crisis, develop data-driven policies and transition from a linear to a circular economy, we need to know how many garments exist.”

Speak Volumes sits within The Or Foundation’s broader Stop Waste Colonialism campaign, which calls for Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) policies to be globally accountable. EPR requires brands to pay a fee for the management of the waste their products create. Making it globally accountable acts as a just-transition tool by ensuring the money doesn’t just stay in the countries collecting those fees (such as in Europe as one example), but it goes to the places actually dealing with the end-of-life of those garments, like Ghana, which is otherwise left managing the consequences without the infrastructure or resources to do so.

A justice-led EPR programme, according to The Or Foundation, would rest on three principles. First, a per-garment fee on all newly produced garments to fund waste management systems. Second, fair distribution of those funds to account for the loss and damage caused by the irresponsible exportation of waste to under-resourced communities. And third, mandatory disclosure of production volumes alongside reduction targets of at least 40% over five years.

Ultimately, reducing production volumes is at the heart of the change that is needed for the industry, and for places like Kantamanto. Crucially however, the trade of secondhand clothing supports a huge number of livelihoods, so this isn’t about ending that fact. Rather it’s about less but better. Again, as I wrote previously, I asked nearly everyone I spoke to in Ghana - retailers, importers, upcyclers, market leaders, NGO representatives, and more - what would be the one thing they would want to change in the Global North to make their situation better, and they all said less overproduction and better quality product.

This seems like an incredibly robust place to start (and indeed also answers how one individually can address these issues too), but of course, there is no silver bullet. This sort of change is systemic, highly complex and lengthy.

The Or Foundation’s work covers a myriad of other areas in order to address this. What follows then is by no means a comprehensive list, but rather some of the other pieces that particularly stood out on my visit, and that many of the rest of us could further learn from...

Upcycling and repurposing

A true highlight of my trip was meeting upcyclers including Nii Teiko of Kala Blaq Kintsugi, Richard Asante of Alpha Costume and Alpha Tribe, and Emmanuel Tetteh of Daily Dosage, all of whom are doing the most incredible work buying used clothing and broader textiles from Kantamanto market and turning them into beautifully creative new pieces of work. Since 2023, The Or Foundation has run a skills training programme to support community members including designers, tailors, upcyclers and beyond, with their businesses. They refer to it as helping to “foster and develop alternative pathways of socio-economic agency”. The depth of creativity and entrepreneurship that exists throughout Kantamanto is staggering. I have heard multiple people on panels in the Global North talk about how the answers for circularity already exist in such places, and the untapped potential of it is painfully true when you see it in person. Supporting people to turn their skills from informal daily work into business acumen and financially sustainable brands, is essential for the big picture.

Given the volumes of waste that results in the market, upcycling alone isn’t enough to deal with it all, however. As a result, Kanta Keepers, a clean-up cooperative established by The Or Foundation - which clear the waste from the market at the end of everyday - now also buy cotton-rich unsold items and scrap materials from the retailers. These then go to The Or Foundation’s Material Technology & Transformation Lab (MTTL), where they get sorted into colours, shredded and broken down into a pulp. This pulp is then mixed with cassava, a natural binding agent, and pressed into fibre boards. Among the things MTTL has produced so far are speakers, soundproofing panels and pieces of furniture - all in bold colourways from the sorted textiles. What they’re trying to demonstrate in doing so, is not only a commercial solution for right now, but how textiles can be repurposed at industrial scale. Critical to the model is that it is community-owned and locally operated, creating jobs while developing new technological pathways. True to its mission, even the machinery used has all been pulled together from scrap metals to do so.

Citizen science

When you’re in Kantamanto and surrounds, the evidence of textile waste is right before your eyes, as my previous piece explained and pictures showed. While the scale of it is genuinely mind blowing in person, there’s another factor to consider with it all, and that’s the impact of what you can’t see. With so many items ending up in waterways and polluting natural ecosystems, The Or Foundation has turned to citizen science to document and understand the environmental damage on a microscopic level. Microfibre and microplastic counts in the air around Kantamanto have been found to be anywhere from 20x to 100x greater, respectively, than levels recorded in other major cities around the world. In the adjacent Korle Lagoon, the picture is even more alarming: up to 45x more microfibres, and up to 200x more microplastics, than has previously been recorded in lagoon waters anywhere else on the planet.

This isn’t a solution in of itself, but having scientific evidence of what is really going on is a big first step in understanding then how to address it.

Education and community activations

Just after my visit, Whitney Bauck wrote an article for Atmos magazine about the kayayei of Kantamanto market. Kayayei, meaning ”she who carries the burden”, are the women who carry the 55kg bales of secondhand clothing on their heads. “[They] carry the literal weight of the fashion industry’s greed and excess on their heads. Some pay for it with their lives,” Bauck writes. She refers to it as the violence of the system, explaining the indescribable physical impact such head carrying has on these (often very young) women’s bodies, and indeed those who have lost their lives in doing so. She quotes one woman, Najiha Yahaya, a former kayayei, who refers to this work as a trap. The sort of option women take up when the only other alternatives they can see are stealing or sex work. “It’s something I don’t think anybody will wish to be doing. Head porting is a slavery.”

The Or Foundation has made a feature-length film about this, called Zjili, which is inspired by many stories of different kayayei, and due to be released later this year. It is part of a campaign to end dangerous head carrying. I was incredibly privileged to accompany the team to Tamale in northern Ghana while I was there, to attend one of the many community screenings they’re organising as a form of education about what being a kayayei is really like. A whole village showed up, and an in-depth discussion between them followed on why they shouldn’t send their daughters to Accra for this work, and how important it is to keep young girls in education. We should all watch it and learn.

As already indicated, while the aim isn’t to end the trade of secondhand clothing to Ghana, it is to stop kayayei from being a necessary part of it. All of the other solutions outlined to addressing textile waste will not be a success if women are still working in such a way, and paying such consequences. Phasing it out isn’t just about education, but a much more ambitious plan from The Or Foundation to rebuild the market so that wider alleyways can enable trolleys to carry the weight of what we in the Global North throw away.

—

We talk a lot about collaboration in sustainable fashion, but actually putting this into practice is something else entirely. The Or Foundation’s approach is rooted in a deep belief in the power of cooperatives and community-led solutions, evident across all of the areas I’ve talked about as well as in the newly formed Kantamanto Obroniwawu Businesses Association unifying the market and all of its 13 sections, the Kantamanto Women’s Association putting women’s voices front and centre, and the Tide Turners clean-up team hauling waste from Accra’s beaches each week.

What Kantamanto makes clear, if you spend time there, is that the community doesn’t need to be saved. It needs to be resourced, listened to, and relieved of a burden it never asked to carry.

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I process best by writing, I always have done. What follows here then are my reflections on having spent the last week in Accra, Ghana visiting Kantamanto, one of the largest secondhand clothing markets in the world. I was there as a guest of The Or Foundation, a nonprofit organisation working at the intersection of environmental justice, education and fashion development.

There has been a lot of coverage over the past few years on what is happening here and why. My aim isn’t to be sharing new information, rather it’s to document the thoughts from my experience, and to do so publicly because I think, and hope, that there will also be things in here many people don’t actually know, or didn’t think of in such a way before.

Be prepared, there is a lot. This topic is enormous. And by its very nature - as per my title (got your attention no?) - it’s controversial. It’s one that inspires a lot of different opinions as a result, and so I’m also writing here as factually as possible. There are no regurgitated industry stats, just what I saw with my own eyes.

What I will say from an opinion perspective first, however, is that being on the ground with the reality of what the end-of-life of today’s fashion industry looks like, is so phenomenally eye-opening, that I genuinely am not sure I believe you can have a voice in this space, especially one that counters it, if you haven’t been there (or somewhere equivalent) yourself. If you’re talking at all about circularity, about secondhand trade, about waste, about recycling, or any of the above, I think you need to have seen it with your own eyes. Only then can you really appreciate the nuance of it, the people it truly affects, and ultimately what it takes to change it.

My reflections then:

• Kantamanto is a sprawling, busy, loud and very overwhelming place. It is hustle culture at its finest - from first thing in the morning when trade kicks-off through to sundown, it’s all about how each and every person does their own individual tasks within an ecosystem of some 30,000 people in order to make ends meet. The sheer scale of it is what got me the most. Very simply, there is just so much product. In the week I was there, 55 truckloads (55 shipping containers) of secondhand bales arrived into the market. However you do the maths, that is millions of items of clothing being imported. A bale weighs 55kg and at that size, 504 of them fit in a container. Every single one of the pieces inside is sent with the intention of reuse, but there isn’t the infrastructure to deal with it all.

• The majority of bales arriving into the market last week were from the UK. Or they were labelled as though they were - two colleagues with me, both once exporters, were clear that a large volume were likely from other countries and falsely labelled as the UK for the fact they sell for higher sums. Either way, the majority of the product I saw was from such domestic brands - Marks & Spencer, Next, F&F, George at Asda, as well as global labels like Nike, Adidas, et al.

• One key thing to note is that we (the UK) are not simply shipping our clothes to Ghana as if to blindly get rid of them. This is business. Importers in Ghana are buying them. They request specific bales (each bale is labelled by different garment types, eg women’s tops, mini skirts, football shirts, kids items, etc), though in practice they must accept a mix within each container, a condition set by UK exporters who need to balance and shift the full variety of what they have. It is a commercial transaction on paper, and that matters because if this is trade, it can in theory be regulated, taxed and made subject to proper accountability. But this is also not a neutral market that developed organically. Under British colonial rule, Ghanaians were required to dress in western styles to access education, employment and public life, in doing so creating demand for western clothing that was never of their own making. The secondhand trade grew directly from that foundation. What looks like a free market exchange is in fact a structure built for, and still serving, the interests of the Global North. This is evidenced, for instance, in the murky practices you see along the way - from much lower quality items being slipped into the bales than they’re labelled as, and as already mentioned, items from other countries being mixed in. These are not quirks of an otherwise fair system, they are features of a trade relationship that was never designed to be equal. More to the point, all of this grants permission to the Global North to keep overproducing - because there is an established route for these items, no matter the consequences at the other end.

• The power dynamics within the market are also huge, with the importers calling the shots. With thousands of potential buyers, they can determine pricing as they see fit (more on this in a moment). While they argue that they take risk - which they do in terms of shipping, currency fluctuations, insurance costs, geopolitical impacts etc, as well as the large volumes of what they are buying (multiples of containers on ships at sea at any one time) - they sell a bale to the retailers in the market without seeing what’s inside it. So their risk doesn’t ever connect to whether the products can ultimately be sold (the same goes for some distributors and wholesalers who act as middle men too). They have to trust in the relationship with the exporter back in the UK, who is the one that actually holds the real power in this chain. A retailer meanwhile - most likely a woman - has to open the bale and take the risk that what she has paid for it, may not be recoverable if what is inside isn’t fit for purpose (whether stained, damaged, unsuitable, the wrong fabric, poor quality, not fashionable etc etc). As I said before, she might be buying what she expects to be the best grade of product, but it doesn’t mean to say that is what she’s actually receiving.

• The maths doesn’t math. One really poignant example I was given of the pricing issue in the market lay in a kidswear bale from the UK. This would have been bought by an importer in Ghana for $120 USD (equivalent in GBP), as every bale leaving the UK is standardised across the industry in price. The kidswear retailer in the market, however, told me she pays anywhere from $700-$1,200 per bale because demand for kids items is so high (making it one of the most expensive bales there is). To make her money back, she needs to sell each piece for a minimum of $3, which she very rarely achieves across the board. What’s key to note here is that this is more money than I would expect to buy a secondhand kidswear item in the UK. The retailer showed me a pair of short dungarees for an 18-month old child from a UK supermarket brand; an item that I would probably pay about $1-$1.50 in USD for it if on Vinted or in a charity shop here. And yet, the buyers of these items in Ghana are primarily women living on the poverty line who need these clothes for their kids (clothes that people in the UK are giving away thinking that they will indeed go and clothe someone who needs it in Africa for free). And these women can’t afford them at those prices. But the women selling them also can’t afford to lose money on them either because their debt to the importers becomes so high. There are major issues in the whole socio-economic side of this trade, and pricing is central to it.

• There is a really important human rights element to the way the market operates also. To get the bales from the importers, distributors, storage spaces and beyond, young women are paid small sums of money to carry them on their heads. This is the primary way the bales are moved because the narrow passageways and uneven ground doesn’t allow for any other options. There are hundreds of these Kayayei (”she who carries the burden”), as they are called, doing so every day, and known examples of fatalities that have come from this practice. That is a 55kg package on a body that in many cases is probably not much more than the same weight herself. Some are also carrying babies on their backs. When we were there, it was in temperatures of 41 C. Many of these women have escaped things like child marriage in their rural communities, or they’ve come to Kantamanto to try and make money to send back to their families and their children who live many many miles away. They’re doing unfathomable work in the worst conditions, and getting paid very poorly for doing so.

• Less but better is central to the whole issue. I asked nearly everyone I spoke to - retailers, importers, upcyclers, market leaders, NGO representatives, and more - what would be the one thing they would want to change in the Global North to make their situation better, and they all said less overproduction and better quality product. They have seen quality nosedive since COVID-19, something I am sure is a product of the pandemic itself, but also the rise of ultra fast fashion (and others competing with ultra fast fashion) and the growth of online resale sites in that time. No one wants things to end up as waste, and no one wants this trade to end either - they just want better versions of it.

• The fact is, lots of the clothing imported and intended for reuse, currently does indeed end up as waste - however contested that word is in this context. What is and isn’t waste? How do we qualify it? Is it that it isn’t reusable as originally intended? Is it that it can’t sell for more than what was paid for it in the bale? What if it ends up being burnt on open fires as fuel to heat water - is it waste then? This is a big bone of contention between different players in the market, who all actually just want better products so there is less “waste” and better outcomes for everyone involved. However, there is no escaping the physical reality of the fact that significant amounts of what come in right now, do end up entering the waste stream. There are a lot of processes and programmes in place to try and reduce this however - a major repair community in the market, a thriving trade of upcycling and remanufacturing, and when things do end up as waste (literally on the floor of the market in the aisles between stalls) at the end of every day, whether cut offs, or whole items, there’s now a clean up team who come and pick it all up to dispose of it more responsibly.

• It’s important to note that there is a really huge problem of waste infrastructure in Ghana full stop; all of which presents a public health crisis. These programmes to deal with it are set up by NGOs like The Or Foundation who, with others, have made huge inroads at changing what happens in the market and how. But, there is historical waste that is incredibly significant, and still more being added to that in spite of best intentions. Right next to Kantamanto, for instance, is Old Fadama, an informal settlement that has been built on top of a dumpsite next to the lagoon. Huts are literally placed on top of banks that are wedged with textiles, while the landfill site itself towers over them. This is what waste colonialism looks like in practice; not as an abstraction, but as a landscape people are living in.

• The lagoon feeds into the sea, and the sea in turn spills onto the beaches where again, endless piles of clothes are stacked up. A beach clean-up happens every Saturday to try and shift it; an incredible undertaking with some 200 people participating on the day I was there. They have slowly but surely cleared one section of the beach from being utterly overrun with clothes, but have about three-quarters still to go. But even the section that is cleared, every week gets reloaded with more clothes that wash up directly from the water. No one yet knows how dense on the ocean floor these items are. During the cleanup, you can literally see the men pulling out tentacles of clothing from the waves; so called because some of the textiles are so disintegrated, they’ve all wrapped around one another, clogging them up, and making them almost impossible to pull apart. Yet, when we were there, we also found items washed up still completely fully formed - new enough they haven’t had time to disintegrate in such a way - a pair of sports trousers, a Royal Mail jacket, a checked shirt. These were very evidently newly in the waste stream. You can also see this from the clothing labels - some of them are missing or illegible, while others are fully intact and thus collected by the team to log. The Or Foundation has a running list of which brands have been found, the top three of which are Adidas, Nike and Marks & Spencer.

• The fact is, we actually have no idea how many items are produced per year. And the industry is reluctant to change that. If there’s one thing Kantamanto makes extremely clear is that this should be mandatory and it should be standard practice. If we want to see a true circular fashion industry, we need the volumes of production to be published by unit item, every single year, by every single brand. Meaningful change is incredibly difficult when we don’t actually know how much we are dealing with - from accurately calculating what EPR fees should be, to planning and funding the infrastructure that is needed for it all.

Everything that is happening in Ghana (in our industry full stop) comes down to “too much clothing, not enough justice”, to use The Or Foundation’s tagline. It’s an incredibly impactful experience to see that firsthand. But, solutions do exist, and people are fighting hard for them. The Or Foundation’s Stop Waste Colonialism and Speak Volumes campaigns are two places to start if you want to understand what meaningful change could look like. Kantamanto, meanwhile, will be open again for business tomorrow, with millions more items landing in the market.

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Thank you to those of you who attended in-person in Paris for our first true LIVE edition of the Sustainable Fashion Office Hours.

The biggest note of gratitude to the incredible Bella Webb of Vogue Business, Omoyemi Akerele of Lagos Fashion Week and Sophia Yang of Threading Change who helped me bring it all to life at ChangeNOW.

Over the course of the event, we talked about building fashion careers rooted in impact and purpose. With changemakers from around the world in attendance, we explored what helps us stay motivated while working on such complex, often slow-moving challenges; what skills will matter for sustainability in the fashion industry over the next five years; and how to maintain personal boundaries when doing this kind of work.

You can read more about my ChangeNOW experience here, and a full recap of the conference from Bella, here.

Meanwhile, the Sustainable Fashion Office Hours are ramping up to do lots more in-person events over the next little while, but for now, we’re returning to the routine virtual calls. The next one will take place with me on May 7 at 1pm BST and you can sign up for it here.

As always, this is a first come, first served situation with only eight places available. As a result, they are reserved for those who are students or in the first five years of their careers only please. Others will be invited to join future alternative options, so do follow me here on Substack for news. Similarly, if you have joined a small online session with me before, please let others have a chance this time.

I look forward to seeing many of you there.

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It’s not often I say that I genuinely left feeling inspired from a conference these days, but ChangeNOW truly achieved it in Paris this year. I spent three days on the ground with 40,000 other people, soaking up insights from experts across different fields, and perhaps what felt strongest about it given current global circumstances, was the feeling that the changes we need to make are indeed (irrespective of said currently global circumstances) actually indeed possible.

The largest takeaway for me focused on the idea that underpinning that optimism was a very real recognition of the need to drive change at a systemic level, and to move towards a post growth future to make any of it a reality.

This was a key message from economist Kate Raworth, of Doughnut Economics, in her various talks throughout the conference. In what was particularly resonant for its application to the fashion industry, she said we have to stop believing growth is the primary signifier of progress, and instead seek dynamic balance in all our endeavours. That we need to move from an economy that extracts to one that serves life.

This was echoed also by Olivier de Schutter, Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights to the United Nations. He talked about his work on creating a roadmap for eradicating poverty beyond growth, pointing out key barriers that keep us locked into the current system at all costs.

One such example - again highly relevant to fashion - was the idea that we are locked into the narrative of growth. Indeed, it is all we have known. And so we have a hard time imagining a world without it. Same as we have a hard time imagining a fashion industry without endless volumes of new products, or the idea of desire and aspiration tied to constant newness. And yet by moving beyond growth, he said, we can enable a world that is “desirable, fun and where balance in our lives will be restored”.

Imagination was in fact what united many of the speakers on this topic of growth. Futurist Rob Hopkins took the audience on a journey of imagining what 2036 looks like - from moving away from fossil fuels to designing cities for women and children, and making policy based on wellbeing.

But it was the call for greater creativity in the movement of change that brought the idea of imagination back to where the fashion industry has a role to play once more. Sustainable fashion today is deeply tied into the technical, operational and logistical elements of how we make circularity and regeneration a reality. And in doing so, we risk missing the creative element of making all of this possible; and yet this is something so inherent to our industry should we activate it, and the people within it, in this way.

A post growth version of fashion is a truly creative exercise. One that few of us have actually done.

Raworth used humour to demonstrate that creativity and joy can enable us to talk much more easily about such taboo topics. As pointed out by Vogue Business, she did so by delivering “an unexpected dose of high-octane silliness” when she turned the rinse-and-repeat conference format into a circus show. Seriously.

“[Sandrine] Dixson-Declève was plucked from the crowd to play the role of Finance, with an impressive mime-like commitment to the bit. While another audience member danced around the stage decorated in leaves to represent Mother Nature, Raworth guided Finance through a mock therapy session, unpacking the base emotions stopping Finance from reorganising itself in alignment with Nature (the crowd shouted out suggestions here, landing on greed, fear, and loneliness),” wrote Bella Webb.

Raworth explained at a later point that humour enables her to more easily demonstrate that it is possible to do all of this already today, and not in some distant future. “It’s like we’re waiting to be called up to action. And imagination and playfulness says that we can do it all right now.”

There were of course a myriad of other really valuable learnings from the three days for the fashion sector (see Bella’s Vogue Business piece for insights on relevant innovations on show also), but the focus on redefining growth and on re-tapping into our sense of creativity to feed a future we’re struggling to imagine are what landed the hardest for me. As the author of the Reimagining Growth Landscape Analysis report for Textile Exchange, and The Sustainable Fashion Communication Playbook - an exploration of the role of creative marketing and storytelling to enable narrative shift and scaleable change - for the UN Environment Programme, it’s arguably no wonder.

But ChangeNOW reminded me that these ideas don't live only on the page, they live in rooms full of people who are feeling their way towards the same future, trying to imagine it into existence together.

What I hope this industry can take away from these sorts of events then, is that the tools for change aren’t waiting to be invented. The creativity, the imagination, the capacity for joy and play that has always defined fashion at its best, are already here. The question then isn’t whether a post-growth future is possible, it’s whether we’re ready and willing to apply them to it.

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My Sustainable Fashion Office Hours series is going on tour, and the first stop is at ChangeNOW in Paris this week.

This in-person, interactive edition of my regular mentoring calls, will provide the opportunity to connect with three incredible industry experts: Bella Webb of Vogue Business, Omoyemi Akerele of Lagos Fashion Week and Sophia Yang of Threading Change.

The “Shaping Sustainable Fashion’s Future: Expert Advice and Career Mentoring” meet-up, as it’s called, will take place on Wednesday, April 1 at 1pm CET in the Friends Area. It is designed for anyone building (or aspiring to build) a fashion career rooted in impact and purpose.

We’ll start with a short discussion during which the experts will share candid reflections on their professional journeys, lessons learned and actionable tips for carving out meaningful work in a complex and evolving landscape. You’ll then be able to talk to them directly in a series of breakout discussions.

Expect an open, solutions-oriented conversation. Bring your questions about career pathways, leadership, skills development and systems change, and come ready to connect with over 100 other people committed to shaping a more sustainable future for fashion.

Use the code “UNEP30” for 30% off tickets to ChangeNOW across the full three days of March 30-April 1. Please also note however, that on the afternoon of Wednesday April 1, when my event will take place, ChangeNOW is also open to public access from 1pm. Tickets for this are only €12, or free if you are unemployed or a student.

On the same day, I am also hosting the fashion conference “Worn Out: Fashion’s Waste Problem” at 3pm CET on the Collective Stage. You can see the full agenda here.

I look forward to seeing lots of you there.

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Six years ago this week, we went into lockdown in the UK as the COVID-19 pandemic hit in a big way. I don’t need to tell any of you the detail as to what unfolded for this industry as a result. What it opened up for me, however, was opportunity to both write about and spend time working on the massive problem of unchecked production volumes and the need to question the growth imperative ever since.

A long-form version of one of these pieces was published by Eco-Age, back when the organisation was under its original leadership with founder Livia Firth. As that website no longer exists in its same form, neither sadly does this article, so I’m sharing it again with you here as I think it presents a lot of the foundational thinking for this topic, and has shaped much of the projects I continue to work on today. For the sake of preservation, I haven’t changed it to update it to present speak, so please note this is coming from a 2020 lens, and similarly some of those quoted are today in different roles.

What I think is particularly interesting to note, is the optimism and hope that existed off the back of the pandemic to work with a different future. The question really is whether we’re any further along? In our thinking, I believe so, yes. But in our actions and impacts, sadly not.

I hope you enjoy the piece and I really welcome any thoughts and feedback on how this is now playing out for you and your work in 2026 and beyond.

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Fashion’s existential crisis: Questioning the growth imperative

As published by Eco-Age, summer of 2020

As stores begin to reopen, manufacturing resumes and shopping is actively encouraged in order to bolster the economy off the back of the COVID-19 pandemic, environmentalists in the fashion sector are urging the industry not to return to business-as-usual.

“This system was so unsustainable and needed a big shock. And shocks are never gentle; they throw all the pieces everywhere. But that’s a huge opportunity to change,” says Livia Firth, founder of Eco-Age. Despite the magnitude of impact brought about by the crisis, the enforced pause it has created presents a moment to rethink priorities.

Let’s start with the basics: The winners in this industry have traditionally been those operating on high volume, low costs and in-built obsolescence. Fashion lives and breathes the expansionist model, shifting anywhere from 80-150 billion items of clothing every year. As we’ve seen from the pandemic, an overnight halt in production has left textile orders worth billions of dollars at a standstill and the subsequent livelihoods of those throughout the supply chain at risk.

Yet this crisis right now is nothing compared to what could come down the line with climate change. If we fail to reduce carbon emissions in order to hit the Paris Agreement goals to keep global warming below the critical 1.5° Celsius increase, catastrophic impact to people and planet is predicted.

To put it into context, at pre-pandemic pace, the fashion industry’s greenhouse gas emissions were estimated to surge more than 50% by 2030, per the United Nations Environment Programme and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. That sits alongside the fact the industry is expected to grow 81% in the same time period, according to the Global Fashion Agenda (GFA).

And therein lies the issue. Despite sustainability having become a key topic of conversation in the industry, solutions to date are not being implemented fast enough to counterbalance the harmful impact of the rapid growth we are otherwise seeing, according to the GFA’s Pulse of the Fashion Industry report in 2019.

Luxury group Kering is a prime example. A story in the Business of Fashion highlights that while it reduced its footprint by 12% in 2018 as a proportion of revenue compared to a year earlier, on an absolute basis that was fully offset by the company’s growth. Its progress is thus “limited by its success”.

This is leading to somewhat of an existential crisis for those working towards sustainable progress, suggests Emma Foster-Geering, head of sustainability at footwear brand Vivobarefoot.

“How is overconsumption and overproduction of this thing, even if it’s slightly better than the thing before it, sustainable?” she asks, talking to her wide variety of experience across businesses including Burberry and Primark. “We’re the worst person in the company in many ways because we compromise constantly. It’s a little bit better than it was, so go ahead, put this sticker on it, tell this story... We’re allowing companies to get away with these things hundreds of times a day.”

Even Patagonia, a name known for leading in the sustainability space, frequently acknowledges the same issue. “No matter how many sustainability initiatives we implement, the trends are showing they are insufficient,” Rick Ridgeway, VP of environmental affairs at the company told The Atlantic back in 2015. “When you look at these long-term trends, you can’t help but conclude that somehow, some way, consumption is going to change—and it’s going to have to go down.”

Decoupling

At the root of the issue is a belief that decarbonisation can come about significantly enough on the one hand that we can keep pushing more and more volume on the other.

That isn’t unique to fashion. The ability to decouple economic growth from ecological impact is a topic of keen global debate and has led to what’s known as the post-growth or degrowth movement within economic theory.

This counters the so-called ‘green growth’ argument, which believes new technologies and efficiencies will enable us to reduce global emissions to hit those Paris Agreement goals. Instead, it contests net reduction can’t occur when business keeps expanding at such pace, calling for a fundamental rethink on levels of consumption and production.

“The speed at which resource and emission efficiencies have to improve if we are to meet carbon targets are at best heroic, if the economy is growing relentlessly,” writes economist Tim Jackson, professor at the University of Surrey, in his book, Prosperity Without Growth.

He says the only option then is to question growth itself. “Efficiency cannot outrun scale,” he told me, suggesting fashion has to think about producing less.

But talking about that to fashion is an anathema. “It’s the ultimate elephant in the room,” says Faith Robinson, a fashion consultant and the creator of the @post_growth Instagram account. “These brands deal in volume. It’s irrelevant to introduce scaling down to a business that defines success by scaling up. [They] aren’t interested in being smaller.”

One luxury business I spoke to, despite pushing extremely hard on the sustainability agenda, said they’d never had a conversation internally about rethinking growth; and that the intention right now amid the COVID-19 pandemic is rather focused on how to get back to it as soon as possible.

As per Jackson in his book: “Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries. But question it we must.”

The challenge here is that this conversation brings into question the very capitalist system we live by. Fashion, like all consumer categories, is part of a construct anchored in growth and driven by shareholder primacy. Could we ever consider any other way?

For many, there’s no choice but to. “Is it reasonable to ask the industry to produce less in order to survive?” asks Celine Semaan, founder of Slow Factory. “For us to be able to continue this existence here on this planet and provide value to future generations, we have to adapt to the situation. We can’t pretend it’s not happening. What’s unreasonable is to continue this exploitation of our resources.”

“There is no business to be done on a dead planet,” adds Kate Fletcher, professor at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, explaining that infinite growth within a finite system is fundamentally flawed. Every year, we are consuming the earth’s natural resources 1.75 times faster than it can regenerate them, according to the Global Footprint Network.

Complementing degrowth and post-growth theory, Fletcher is proposing we expunge growth logic, and instead consider ‘Earth Logic’; an action plan she authored with Mathilda Tham, professor at Linnaeus University, Sweden. This is a systemic reworking that puts the earth first. It recommends various routes to doing so, ranging from localism to governance, and notably, reducing production and consumption. You can read more about it in this piece by Eco-Age.

As Sally Uren, CEO of Forum for the Future, explains: “We’re currently operating in a model that needs growth at any cost. It’s a classic systemic challenge. If we’re going to shift from the extractive growth model - then the goals of the system need to change.”

Choosing not to grow

As highlighted in a story I wrote on this same subject for Vogue Business, a handful of small businesses with sustainability in mind are already thinking this way, reducing their output for the sake of the planet. Included are Vivienne Westwood, Teatum Jones and Mara Hoffman. Eileen Fisher is also referenced in a story for the Business of Fashion, saying her company was at its most profitable when it was half its current size.

One thing seemingly uniting these designers is thus reimagining what success looks like. As per Vivienne Westwood: “We can sell less, but sell better, and still be profitable.”

“We’re seeing some businesses choosing not to grow anymore. They see that they are scaled just right. It mirrors what we see in ecosystems – they grow to fulfil their niche, rather than growing beyond that to their peril,” says Fletcher.

But most of these businesses are not only small, they’re privately run, meaning they don’t have the pressure of shareholder returns that large, public corporations do. Can this idea of producing less then, ever be a reality at scale?

It’s worth recognising that reduction in fashion is a nuanced discussion. There’s the option for smaller collection sizes as demonstrated with some of the designers mentioned above, but so too are there significant other areas where the industry can improve. COVID-19 has only emphasised the volume of orders held up in the supply chain - the overproduction and waste that infers - and the deadstock sat in distribution centres and retail stores around the world. Rethinking growth therefore, also needs to be about removing some of this excess and the way it further feeds overconsumption and the rising landfill problem.

Arguably circular business models are a key conversation here, which is what the likes of Patagonia are particularly pushing. But Fletcher and Tham believe there isn’t enough time left for this to scale to the level of impact needed; that while circular innovations are increasingly interesting, they’re likewise being outpaced by cumulative growth in production. “It’s very easy to adopt within an existing system - layer it over existing consumption models, but this doesn’t support change otherwise,” says Fletcher.

For them, producing less, or “growing out of growth” needs to be a core consideration if we want fashion to contribute to the ecological transformation that’s needed within the next 10 years.

Intersectional environmentalism

As per Jackson’s reference to lunatics and revolutionaries, reducing growth – especially when we start talking about the big players in this industry – is immediately met with concern around slowing the economy. If we scale down, unemployment typically ensues. In the global south particularly, as we’re seeing through this pandemic, that has huge ramifications.

This was the line taken in late 2019 by Karl-Johan Persson, then H&M Group CEO, when he said reducing fast fashion would have dire social consequences. Referring instead to the green growth ideology, he called for “environmental innovation, renewable energy, improved materials” over a moratorium on consumption.

According to Jackson, this presents a challenge but shouldn’t be an excuse for sheer volume. “The [fashion] industry’s self-justification for mass consumerism is completely indefensible in light of the way the supply chain divides revenues between those who take profit and those who do the work.”

The H&M comments were immediately met with pushback by numerous groups, including Labour Behind the Label. “Persson’s claim that fast fashion supports the eradication of poverty is outrageous, considering not a single worker in H&M’s supplier factories earns a living wage,” read its statement.

The Union of Concerned Researchers in Fashion (of which Fletcher and Tham are two of four co-founders), also said: “This type of have-it-all environmentalism, achieved through market forces and satisfying growing consumer yearnings, is wholly incompatible with the reality of biophysical planetary limits. Persson suggests that workers would suffer under ‘de-growth’ or ‘don’t buy’ conditions. The reality is that the business model Persson promotes, which is utterly dependent upon extracting, processing and wasting natural resources at increasingly greater volumes, would suffer.”

They also highlighted that it is those working in these conditions who often fall victim to the consequences of climate change the most, despite being the least responsible for it. Indeed, at a time when protests regarding Black Lives Matter are resonating on a global scale, inequalities have never been more pressing as a part of this conversation. As per another story in Vogue, written by environmentalist Leah Thomas, the ways in which injustices happen to marginalised communities and the earth are interconnected. She refers to the idea of “intersectional environmentalism” – an inclusive version of environmentalism that advocates for both the protection of people and the planet.

Thus these conversations have to go hand-in-hand. It’s not enough to say we need to protect jobs in order to justify the scale of damage being caused through volume of material throughput. Though neither is it as simple as just cutting volumes overnight. “As we’ve discovered with COVID-19’s sudden stop, it’s extraordinarily painful when it’s not planned,” says Fletcher. “A planned shift to a degrowth position, would be a purposeful selection of different activity, which would mean it makes more financial sense.”

Morten Lehmann, chief sustainability officer at the GFA, believes unpicking this conversation is crucial, which is why “reimagining value” is this year’s theme for the Copenhagen Fashion Summit it runs. “New business models ahead will need a very different labour and workforce. [With climate disruption] we will need to be prepared for this... Protecting old fashioned jobs just delays the pain.”

The Triple Bottom Line

Interestingly, H&M recently said it is “reimagining growth” in its latest sustainability report. While this doesn’t mean it believe it needs to produce less (as told to me by its press team), it says it is bullish on new circular business models and on the idea it must produce within planetary boundaries.

This is one way to get around the idea that foregoing growth is in direct conflict with a responsibility to provide increasing returns for shareholders. Proposed by the Stockholm Resilience Centre in 2009, the planetary boundaries cover nine quantitative levels we mustn’t cross in order for earth and life on it to continue to thrive. Included are climate change, chemical pollution, ocean acidification and land system change, all of which the business of fashion somehow directly or indirectly affects.

Such considerations play into B Corporations, an increasingly popular scheme that certifies businesses for their ability to balance their purpose around people, planet and profit combined. Within the fashion sector, examples of B Corps include Patagonia, Vivobarefoot, Eileen Fisher, MUD Jeans and Athleta.

“It’s about reframing business,” explains Chris Turner, executive director of B Lab UK. “[Being a B Corp means] you can’t just grow by making more stuff and selling it, you have to bring in more people to the business and you have to minimise any negative impact on the environment.”

The result is very much pro-business, he explains. Rather than stopping or inhibiting growth, he wants businesses to “think about growth in terms of positive impact”. He goes so far as to say that the challenge gaining B Corp certification presents (it is notoriously hard to get it) is exactly the challenge volume retailers should be addressing.

This focus on people, planet and profit, is otherwise known as the Triple Bottom Line, a management concept coined by author and sustainability advisor John Elkington in 1994. Yet Elkington himself has recently recalled the TBL term, suggesting it has been adopted in the main as an accounting tool with a trade-off mentality that often still sees the financial side winning out.

“Whereas CEOs, CFOs, and other corporate leaders move heaven and earth to ensure that they hit their profit targets, the same is very rarely true of their people and planet targets. Clearly, the Triple Bottom Line has failed to bury the single bottom line paradigm,” he wrote. He goes further again saying his intended goal was about system change, “pushing toward the transformation of capitalism” itself.

So how do we ensure the fashion industry, as such a contributor to the climate crisis, takes this seriously?

There are currently numerous suggestions being put forward by brands referencing a need to change the fashion system – rethinking fashion weeks, reconfiguring seasonality and aiming to reduce waste. While sustainability is noted, the moves at large feel largely like platitudes to this bigger conversation, tweaks designed to maintain business-as-usual, thus protecting the economic model we’re a part of rather than reimagining it, as is deemed necessary by many of the names interviewed here.

Ana Andjelic, strategist and author of “The Business of Aspiration”, believes state-sponsored frameworks geared around incentives will ultimately be necessary. “We can’t tell fashion to just produce less. But we can slow [businesses] down and make it more difficult for them to grow unchecked. If you’re polluting more, you should be taxed more.”

What COVID-19 has done is open our eyes to that reality further, Jackson notes: “We should be incentivising the right kind of recovery through this.” In the UK, 200 CEOs have called for the government to “build back better” and not support those without a climate plan. (The fashion industry is, however, notable by its absence.)

What we need is to get the players that matter to start thinking about this, including industry, government and civil society, says Uren. “[Fashion] can play an important role in sustainable development in economies around the world. But for any transformation to happen, for any systemic change, one of those features for change is mindset change.”

The pandemic presents us with the opportunity to begin that different future. Hoffman calls it a beta test: “Discomfort can be the greatest catalyst. It’s a gift to us.”

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What is the future of sustainable fashion if not the product of the people working in it?

Systemic change happens through the individuals making decisions every day, and across every role. Expanding how many of us are in this space, and building the knowledge, confidence and opportunity for us to actually influence the system is not therefore supplementary, but a precondition for true sustainability, for true change.

To that end, if you’re going to be in Paris for ChangeNOW, or would like to be (discounted tickets below), please join me for an in-person, interactive version of my sustainable fashion office hours - a live session designed for anyone building (or aspiring to build) a fashion career rooted in impact and purpose.

The “Shaping Sustainable Fashion’s Future: Expert Advice and Career Mentoring” meet-up will take place on Wednesday, April 1 at 1pm CET in the Friends Area.

Inspired by my monthly online mentoring calls for young professionals from all around the world, the session will explore what it really means to work in this space and how to build your career accordingly.

You’ll hear directly from experts working across the industry (names to be announced soon) as they share candid reflections on their professional journeys, lessons learned and actionable tips for carving out meaningful work in a complex and evolving landscape. You’ll then have the opportunity to talk to them directly in a series of breakout discussions.

Whether you’re just starting out, pivoting roles, or looking to deepen your influence, we’ll focus on practical career development, from navigating entry points into sustainable fashion, to positioning your skills for purpose-driven roles, building credibility, avoiding burnout and growing your impact over time.

Expect an open, solutions-oriented conversation. Bring your questions about career pathways, leadership, skills development and systems change, and come ready to connect with over 100 other people committed to shaping a more sustainable future for fashion.

What’s better yet, is that I am able to share a 30% discount code for access. Use the code “UNEP30” for tickets to ChangeNOW across the full three days of March 30-April 1. Please also note however, that on the afternoon of Wednesday April 1, when my event will take place, ChangeNOW is also open to public access from 1pm. Tickets for this are only €12, or free if you are unemployed or a student.

On the same day, I am also hosting the fashion conference “Worn Out: Fashion’s Waste Problem” at 3pm CET on the Collective Stage. You can see the full agenda here.

I look forward to seeing lots of you there.

ps. Interested in hosting a sustainable fashion office hours at your conference too? We have lots more live editions coming up and we’re actively exploring further opportunities for more. Please do get in touch.

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As always, and I’m sure like everyone else, I have about 800 tabs open on each device with things I want to eventually get round to going through. Not to mention the ever-growing stack of books sat next to me on my desk, beside my bed and on my coffee table to read.

This series on sustainability “sips” is meant to cut through all of that and highlight just a few things I believe to not only be important, but that have given me a bit of renewed energy for this work.

This time round it’s a touch more serious than usual (and not totally brand new), but hopefully helpful all the same. Included is a paper from the French government on the role of advertising for sustainable consumption, two new policy toolboxes from UNEP for both production and consumption, and a discount code for ChangeNOW in Paris, where I’ll be late next month.

I hope you find them useful…

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In 2024, I wrote a report for Textile Exchange exploring the contentious but absolutely vital question of how we reimagine growth, or the way in which this industry (and system) measure and value success.

It’s a really deep dive into why this topic matters, how we define it, what it means, what pathways forward need to look like and the other considerations we need to have in mind along the way.

In essence, it shows how moving beyond incrementalism and sustainability-as-usual in the industry will be essential to reduce our reliance on growth fueled by the ever increasing sale of new materials and products each year.

But it’s the barriers I keep coming back to with some of my work recently. What is really fundamentally standing in the way and what do we need to be addressing in our work to change them.

I’m sharing them in full below. Please see the full report for the (extensive) references that should be throughout.

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Barriers and challenges for adoption of a regenerative economy and post-growth global future for fashion

(As taken from the Reimagining Growth Landscape Analysis published by Textile Exchange)

Implementing a future that moves beyond traditional growth models for the fashion, apparel, and textile industry will mean confronting significant barriers and challenges, from gaining top down buy-in, to the lack of enabling environment and the risk of significant trade-offs or unintended consequences.

• The systems challenge: As outlined [in the report], the scale of change required to move away from a system rooted in mass production and resource extraction represents a paradigm shift. This transition cannot be achieved by a single brand or the industry alone. It will be particularly challenging for publicly listed companies, which often prioritize short-term shareholder returns and fear loss of competitiveness, creating immediate barriers to the long-term thinking required.^, However, businesses should explore the roles they can play in driving and advocating for this shift—for example, by reducing dependency on new materials, decoupling growth from resource extraction, or lobbying policymakers accordingly—and then share best practices and learnings to help others follow suit.

• Poor enabling environment at the policy level: The shifts required are significantly inhibited by a lack of supportive regulatory frameworks and insufficient infrastructure to implement new business models.^, Current policy frameworks and regulations lag behind innovations in circular business models, which require incentives and public infrastructure that are not yet widely available. Additionally, there is little global policy alignment and few trade agreements supporting sustainable supply chains, creating a competitive disadvantage for leading companies while others continue to benefit from cheaper, faster, higher-volume, and higher-impact models. Addressing these gaps will be critical to ensuring that companies are not penalized for pursuing sustainability goals (see section 4.4 [of the report] for a deeper dive on this topic).

• Unintended negative consequences: Reimagining growth in the industry will inevitably impact people throughout the value chain, particularly marginalized communities and vulnerable populations, and there is insufficient experience and evidence on how to mitigate these concerns effectively. Efforts must account for potential negative impacts and unintended consequences in order to ensure a just transition, with workers’ voices integrated from the outset. See section 4.3 [of the report] for a deeper exploration of this topic.

• Resistance to change: Even if senior executives recognize the need for change, they are often operating within a system that doesn’t support it. Current business models, internal structures, and competitive practices are built around short-termism and maintaining the status quo, making it difficult to implement new approaches that challenge traditional growth paradigms. Fundamentally, the market punishes those who take on the cost of transformation while competitors profit from unsustainable practices. Executives accordingly face barriers such as shareholder pressure, short-term financial targets, and established processes that resist disruption, creating a situation in which sustainability managers understand the need for transformation but struggle to drive progress without the systemic changes that enable and support executive leadership in making long-term decisions.

• Incentive structures: Measures of success for stakeholders throughout the value chain—not just senior leadership—are tightly aligned with the current business-as-usual model, which prioritizes the continual production and sale of new items as quickly as possible over time. Competition and business success at every level of the market is based on who can sell the most, reinforcing this approach. Within this paradigm, expecting individual job roles to shift, such as asking a marketer to stop promoting overconsumption, directly conflicts with how they are evaluated and, in many cases, how they are remunerated. This misalignment between sustainability goals and performance incentives creates a significant barrier to change.

• Knowledge and skills gap: This type of systems shift requires new skills, knowledge, and ways of thinking that are not currently embedded in many organizations. For example, workers, managers, and designers in the fashion industry may lack the training or experience required to advocate for and execute new approaches to materials sourcing or production volumes. As detailed in section 4.3 [of the report] on a just transition, there is also a significant knowledge and skills gap with workers and communities throughout the value chain. The concept of reimagining growth in the textile industry is still fairly nascent, and education and training opportunities are minimal.

• Financing models: Transformative business models will require significant capital (e.g. USD $20 billion to $30 billion of financing is needed per year to develop and commercialize disruptive solutions and circular business models for textiles), yet companies may be unwilling to commit long-term investment that impacts immediate financial performance. To support this transition, there needs to be a shift toward impact-based financial metrics that integrate environmental and social impacts into company valuations. Policy support is necessary so that impact investors and financial institutions adopt triple bottom line considerations (profit, people, planet) to drive wider stakeholder buy-in and enable long-term value creation over short-term returns.

• Complexity of reduction: Companies must recognize that the current growth model—estimated at 4% for the industry collectively in 2024, though markedly higher for some individual companies—driven by extracting increasing amounts of new materials to sell more new products, is unsustainable and undermines the ability to meet global climate and nature goals. However, determining how businesses should adjust their production and consumption patterns is complex and requires a collective, industry-wide approach. To ensure fairness, strategies must account for the diverse markets in which companies operate, i.e. sustainable development in developing countries versus reductions in developed countries, all the while ensuring clothing also remains accessible for all parts of society in any given market. Establishing a clear framework around reduction, with targets and standards determined specifically for the textile industry aligned to existing methodologies and grounded in scientific and ethical processes, will be crucial to guide this transition.

• Non-disclosure: Currently, there is no comprehensive evidence base for the volume of units produced across the fashion and textile industry, despite growing calls for mandatory disclosure. Textile Exchange’s Materials Benchmark is one of the few existing platforms where companies voluntarily report material volumes, providing valuable insight into resource use; however, this reporting focuses on material volume rather than on the number of product units produced. To create a more accurate picture of the industry’s environmental impact, it is critical that companies not only continue reporting material volumes, but also start tracking and disclosing unit production volumes. This dual approach will be essential for setting baselines and developing effective strategies to manage overproduction and its related environmental impact. Further transparency around how much in the way of used textiles end up in landfill versus being recycled or repurposed would also be of benefit.

• Supply chain transformation: The complexity of globalized supply chains presents a significant barrier to a regenerative economy. Many fashion, apparel, and textile brands do not have full visibility of their supply chains, particularly at the lower tiers where raw materials are sourced. Reimagining growth will require transparent, collaborative supply chains, but existing logistical, technical, and financial challenges make this transition difficult.

• The rebound effect: With circular business models believed to be a significant part of the solution, how do such offerings ensure they don’t otherwise just feed further consumption growth (see the Jevons Paradox in section 1.3 [of the report])? Further, given the additional resources required for quality and longevity, it is crucial to ensure that broader efforts toward circularity don’t inadvertently lead to higher environmental impacts if the model continues to focus on overproduction.

• Narrow focus on recycling: While mainstreaming fiber-to-fiber recycling and phasing out waste plastic bottles as inputs to recycled synthetics is a pivotal part of what is required, it should not be viewed as the only solution. Significant investment will be needed in collection, sorting, and technology to facilitate recycling, but equally important is the need to support the transformation required for the sourcing of new natural materials, helping producers transition to regenerative farming, ranching, and forestry systems. Both approaches must work in tandem, alongside a focus on addressing the overall challenges of overproduction and overconsumption, to drive meaningful, systemic change.

• Lack of case studies: Having examples of businesses doing this successfully was one of the biggest requests in the consultation for this landscape analysis report, yet there are very few case studies available to date. We have found that businesses are generally wary of allocating resources toward this sort of transformation without clear evidence of success, and those who are experimenting with it are hesitant to share their approaches and learnings in a public forum.

• Consumer behavior: Just as there is resistance to change within senior leadership, consumers also resist shifting away from mass consumption and throwaway culture. While the responsibility shouldn’t fall solely on individuals, large-scale consumer awareness, education, and adoption are necessary. Promotional activities must be adjusted to champion positive alternatives alongside the implementation of meaningful business model innovation, with price sensitivity considered as another layer of complexity. Global and regional insights into consumer attitudes toward sustainability, along with behavior change research, are essential.

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I don’t know many people that bounce from working with NGOs like Greenpeace to supporting major fashion brands across the industry, but Liana Weatherhead is one of the best of them. The early part of her career was within PR agencies, then like many of us in sustainability, she had a turning point moment that made her transition to purpose-led work.

I wanted to profile someone in this series that I not only admire, but who is doing really important work as an independent. She runs her own communication consultancy today supporting the charity sector, major industry events and responsible luxury brands.

Here I chat to her about how she got to where she is, what she focuses on now and how she would like to see the industry change…

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I am really excited for what 2026 holds when it comes to my sustainable fashion office hours under this Owning It umbrella. Last year was fun, rewarding and I hope really valuable for everyone involved.

I’m still shaping things up amid a new year reset for myself (read more here), and I’ll share more on some bigger plans soon. But in the meantime, my monthly office hours will restart as of February regardless.

If you’re not already in the loop, these are online group sessions for anyone to join to come and talk to me about working in the field of sustainable fashion. I regularly host small closed hours for students and those in the first five years of their careers, as well as larger ones for anyone to attend. February will have both.

Details here:

• Thursday February 5, 1pm GMT - for students and young professionals in the first five years of their careers only; capped at 8 attendees, first come, first served. Sign up here.

• Tuesday February 17, 1pm GMT - for anyone to join, no limit on numbers. Sign up here.

I look forward to seeing lots of you there.

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My January start is less get-up-and-go, and more slowdown and think, how about you? I’m not talking pure hibernation (though it’s appealing!), but rather taking stock and contemplating which direction actually deserves, and needs, momentum.

On that note, I wanted to post a brief note this week to not only say Happy New Year, but to pose a simple thought starter...

I kicked off my first day back from the break by rewatching the high-level event the UN Environment Programme’s textiles team held during the UN Environment Assembly in Nairobi, Kenya, in December.

“Enabling the shift to sustainability and circularity in the textile value chain” brought together government ministers and private sector representatives to discuss policy action in the sector. You can see more about the event here and indeed watch it back via the YouTube video I’ve embedded below.

One moment in particular stuck with me. It wasn’t a technical point, but rather a philosophical one, as delivered by Rolph Payet, Executive Secretary of the Basel Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions (BRS), during the first panel:

“We should be in a position today with the level of civilisation we have and technological advancement that we have, to design clothes and be able to recover them in a circular manner. There is no excuse. And I’m sure if we were to question [e.g. the] cotton plant or the silkworm, they’ll be laughing at us and saying: ‘With your level of intelligence how [can you not take this jacket] which is machine made… and recover it, recover the threads and reuse it again?’”

As we enter 2026, I find myself wondering how much of the work ahead is really about increased intelligence at all. The fact is, we already know how to do this. The question is no longer whether we are capable, but whether we have the collective will — politically, economically, and culturally — to act at the pace, and in the direction, the moment demands.

Perhaps January is exactly the right moment to sit with that distinction.

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Before we close out 2025, I wanted to share another batch of Sustainability Sips - things I’ve read, watched, listened to or visited that have given me a nudge of forward momentum in this work we do.

Perhaps they may serve as a mini reading list for you over the break, or for January when we all hit the ground running again.

I’ve been heartened by how many of you have reached out to share your own sips since the last time I wrote - the podcasts keeping you company on commutes, the projects giving you hope, the small wins reminding you why this work matters. It’s proof, I think, that we all need these little refuelling moments more than we might admit. And never more so than as we reflect on the year that has been, and prepare for what is to come.

So here are a handful more I have been inspired by recently. Wishing you all a wonderful break ahead…

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“Shopping has become the national pastime, and nobody has written about it,” said Sophie Kinsella on the publication of her first book in the Shopaholic series in 2001.

I for one, was hooked. At the tender age of 18, I was in my peak shopping era. This wasn’t just a national pastime, it was my pastime.

It was what led me to working in this industry, to spending all of my student loan on buying clothes while studying at London College of Fashion, and to then helping to facilitate that compulsive desire for retail therapy in everyone else for so many years of my career.

Let’s not forget that in 2001, there was no such thing as Facebook, there was no Instagram. E-commerce was in its infancy. Net-a-Porter and ASOS might have both launched in 2000, but I wasn’t yet shopping there, I was on the high street. It was fast fashion and department stores. And even though I had no real money, it was high volume.

As is hopefully evident now, realising the impacts of all this is what ultimately served as my wake-up call and brought me over to sustainability. But that was many moons later.

The underlying theme in the Shopaholic series is about consumerism and debt. Protagonist Becky Bloomwood loves shopping but is terrible with money. Like writer Kinsella, she starts, rather ironically, as a financial journalist. The various tales are told in a funny (romantic comedy) way, but they serve as a very real reflection on the pressures of consumer culture. Even more so, given it was 2001, they were prescient of the race to the bottom that we continue to see today - the industry’s relentless push for overconsumption and all of the negative ramifications it brings.

Kinsella, whose real name was Madeleine Wickham, captured all of this beautifully in her bestselling series. She passed away yesterday at just 55.

I wanted to mark that she chronicled something essential about the early 2000s and onwards—that moment when shopping shifted from necessity to identity, from pastime to obsession. And with it, of course, to normality.

She even shared in her latter novels the idea of Bloomwood believing that buying something ‘ethical’ could offset her other purchases (haha).

Two decades on from her first book, and as we reckon with the environmental and social costs of our consumption habits, her work is more poignant than ever.

It will live on, but perhaps one day, we’ll look back at this series in disbelief that this was ever our reality.

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After a busy post-summer period, I’m really pleased to be bringing back this career interview series to complement my Sustainable Fashion Office Hours programme just before we close out for the holidays.

Even more so because the person profiled is both a long-time friend and an expert in a side of fashion that I don’t think we have featured here before, yet is crucial for a sustainable future.

Kaye Carmichael is a luxury and fashion marketing consultant with over 20 years experience working for brands including NET-A-PORTER, Mulberry and Michael Kors. She now focuses on driving positive change, using her skills as a marketer to do so through strategy, innovation, and customer and internal engagement.

In 2025, she was selected as a Stewardship Board member for the Centre for Sustainable Fashion’s Governance for Tomorrow programme.

Here, she talks through how she transitioned to sustainability, what her day-to-day looks like, and shares more about that workstream on governance.

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In all honestly, I started the week at BoF VOICES - The Business of Fashion’s annual summit held in the English countryside last week - feeling completely disillusioned.

While I took to the stage to talk about waste colonialism and production volumes with Liz Ricketts, co-founder and executive director of The Or Foundation, Bobby Kolade, founder and creative director of Ugandan brand Buzigahill, and Javier Goyeneche, founder and president of sustainably-focused Spanish fashion brand, Ecoalf, sustainability as a topic was otherwise almost entirely absent.

The State of Fashion report for 2026, published by BoF and McKinsey & Co, equally reflected this fact. Based in part on a survey with business executives, it shows just how dramatically sustainability has been deprioritised this year.

This, of course, we already know.

But what caught me off guard during VOICES was not only that this wasn’t addressed on stage regardless, but how much business-as-usual content dominated instead.

Tariffs and AI might be top of the bill, but let’s not forget they sit against a backdrop of escalating climate disasters around the world - fires, floods, heatwaves, storms - that are only becoming more frequent and more devastating. The fact this is an emergency hasn’t diminished, just political and business will to address it. (The irony of VOICES taking place at the same time as COP30 wasn’t lost on me either).

Kolade on my panel summed it up perfectly: “All of the conversations [at the conference] are about acceleration. We don’t need acceleration... We need to slow the process down; we need to reduce.”

In the State of Fashion report, the word ‘growth’ is written 219 times. It covers both the ‘low single-digit growth’ forecasted across market segments, as well as the broader ambition to return to increased growth. Other similar phrases include acceleration, momentum, expansion.

By comparison, sustainability appears only 21 times, circularity just 7, and waste once. More to the point, they tend to be a reference to past themes than a forward-looking commitment for 2026.

When we took to the stage with a tentacle of clothing Ricketts had brought with her from the beach in Accra, Ghana, there was an audible gasp. As pictured below, these are garments that have become twisted together as they’ve worked their way through the sewer systems and eventually ended up entering the sea. A visceral reminder of the consequences of our current system. The one Liz tried to bring through the airport weighed 65kg.

And yet, when we asked the room of 150 business leaders whether they’d heard of Extended Producer Responsibility - an upcoming coming policy that will require them to pay for their waste - only a small number raised their hands. A lot of this was new information to those in the room, which was a worthy reminder of how much of a bubble we can all be in while doing this work.

What was interesting and reassuring for me however, was how many people approached us thereafter and throughout the rest of the conference to talk about it, and to talk about what they’re doing that relates to it. Sustainability may not be top of the corporate agenda, but it is still in the hearts and minds of many people in the industry nonetheless.

What this made me think about then is how crucially our approach needs to shift. We’ve been trying to advance sustainability through marketing and moral arguments, and we’ve pigeonholed it in specialist panels designed to inform and educate people. That worked for some time, but it no longer aligns with today’s geopolitical and economic climate.

Sustainability now needs to be integrated into everything; every discussion, every business priority, every strategic theme shaping the future of fashion, so it doesn’t slip by the wayside altogether.

It’s relevant to the discussion with Prada CEO Andrea Guerra, with those CEOs talking about retail from J.Crew, Lane Crawford and JD Sports, and with influencers from Susie Bubble to Bryan Boy focusing on brand deals and content creation today.

All of them were on the VOICES stage. None mentioned it.

But this isn’t about BoF recognising this and adding it to their line of questioning (though it would help), this is now about us recognising everywhere sustainability intersects with where the industry is moving, and showing up there ourselves.

If we’re operating in a market environment where the industry can gather to discuss its future without critically acknowledging the planetary emergency already here, then the work ahead requires a different kind of strategy.

Let me explain through the lens of some of the themes from the State of Fashion report:

The Wellbeing Era

Wellbeing is arguably all about sustainability, it’s just sustainability of self rather than the planet or other people. In economic times like we’re in, that’s not surprising. Note this incredible stat as a case in point: “51 percent of consumers would spend the same or more on health and wellness if their discretionary income decreased.”

So we need to tell the story of sustainability then through the lens of how it impacts the individual. What we haven’t been doing enough is talking about it as health - from plastics on the skin, to microplastics in the water, chemicals and beyond.

Luxury Recalibrated

Sustainability lives inside the notion of recalibrating luxury beautifully. It’s about brands “reducing their reliance on price-led growth and refocusing on creativity and craftsmanship to rebuild client trust”. Where better to build brand value than in showing the quality and care that has gone into every item for the individual, the community and the planet? Luxury recalibrated has sustainability quietly at its core, if it’s done right.

Efficiency Unlocked

It’s questionable whether becoming more efficient helps drive sustainability over the long-term (search Jevons Paradox in this report I wrote for Textile Exchange for a deep dive on why), but there’s almost certainly short-term business value in it. Reducing production offcuts, unsold items, volumes of returns, can all help both the economics and the environment. We need to embed the idea that this is not a shortcut to more volume, but a bridge to less waste. Which feeds in well to the next topic...

Workforce Rewired AND The AI Shopper

I’ve merged two themes here because underpinning both are of course artificial intelligence. If there was one thing everyone was buzzing about the most during VOICES, it was this. How generative AI is going to automate 30% of employee time across industries by 2030. And in the second theme, how autonomous AI shopping agents are shaping both discovery and purchasing of fashion. (See my previous post about agentic commerce and all that I think that means for sustainability here).

AI has to be centred in our sustainability work or we risk being left behind. The pace of change ahead is being compared to “the disruption created by computers and the internet in their early stages of adoption”. So if that’s the case, how can we redirect it so it’s for good and not just about more production and consumption? How can we ensure sustainability is embedded into AI from the start, not as a contender for business value, but an intrinsic part of it? And how do we ensure suppliers and garment workers are part of this process and not absent from even the discussions about it, as was the case at VOICES this year?

And finally...

Resale Sprint

There was one word I missed out of my word count analysis of the State of Fashion report this year, as outlined at the beginning of this post, and that was “resale”. This is mainly because the report doesn’t pitch it as being about sustainability - in fact on the chart mapping 10 years of the report’s themes, it doesn’t come from the track about sustainability at all, but ‘Critical Consumers’.

And yet, resale is arguably the most tangible example in the entire report of what successful, business-aligned sustainability can look like at scale. It’s not about products and materials, but about business models. The main message from the report is how brands now embrace it so as to truly capitalise on the opportunity that it presents - that’s growth rates two to three times faster than the first-hand market through to 2027, by the way.

It’s thus the perfect example of shifting the narrative on sustainability. Once again, this isn’t about doing better by the planet or people, it’s about increased business value, better shopping opportunities, access to unique product, cheaper prices, et al.

What remains missing for me, however, is connecting this theme back to the one we spoke about on stage - not just in terms of waste reduction, but in recognising, learning from, and platforming the resellers in places like Ghana and Uganda who have been doing this work long before the industry in the Global North positioned it as innovation.

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Don’t get me wrong, reframing our approach to sustainability through the lens of business value isn’t a new idea, nor is it going to singlehandedly lead to systems change (by its very nature, nothing individually is). We still need big policy moves, citizen action and everything in between to get us towards transformation, but there are lots of things we can and should be doing in the meantime to make sure this doesn’t disappear from the corporate agenda entirely.

These are examples of the levers business leaders are currently paying attention to. So they must become our entry points.

Sustainability cannot keep being delivered as a sideline discussion before the conversation pivots back to acceleration. We need to get smarter so we redirect and re-anchor the agenda right at the heart of where the energy already is.

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I’ve realised recently that I love an anecdotal experience of sustainable fashion. Given I spend most of my days in technical documents and policy conversations, by this I particularly mean a real consumer-facing version of trying to make more responsible choices. It’s incredibly eye-opening because what it exposes when you’re literally trying to put things into action, is all of the holes that exist in doing so.

If you follow me on Linkedin, you’ll know I’ve been particularly going on about school uniforms as one example - all of which stems from the experience of trying to manage a shed full of pre-loved items at my kid’s school, and attempts to recirculate them with parents who are used to shopping via supermarkets and fast fashion stores instead. At one point, my husband and I quite literally had a mound of grey trousers, skirts and pinafore dresses waist-high in our living room to sort through. In of itself, it was quite the learning experience.

More recently, however, I’ve been particularly thinking about repair.

Now, I do basic repairs at home myself on a not infrequent basis. Darning, hemming, button sewing etc. I can manage a few trickier items on my sewing machine, and for anything else, I use a local tailor or indeed go via services like Sojo to make it happen.

But I have two pieces that I know come with a repair service from the brand they’re a part of, and so I recently set about trying to send them off to sort them out. One is a Barbour jacket with rips across the waxed fabric itself as well as in the lining, and the other is a pair of Birkenstocks that are so worn down on the sole that they completely need replacing. Neither can I do myself because of the technicalities of what’s involved, not to mention the materials required.

In both instances, they are truly well-loved pieces. The Barbour is my husband’s, but I wear it more than him. It was originally second-hand - bought from a man on the side of the road with a stall outside the Hay Literary Festival about six years ago. It’s been properly beaten since, and looks utterly scruffy, but isn’t unwearable by any means.

The Birkenstocks I would say I wear every day for a solid four-five months of the year - they owe me nothing but continue to be a favourite. Unfortunately they really are unwearable now.

Here’s the thing, to fix the Barbour jacket is going to cost about £120 to both repair (various holes on the front and sleeves, and a torn lining) and re-wax. The Birkenstocks are going to cost £45 to resole, or £69 to fit with a new footbed as well. In both instances, I need to send them away and wait several weeks until I get them back again. I also have to pay postage in both directions, which in the examples of the Birkenstocks adds £7.95 for the return (which you pay upfront) plus whatever it costs at the post office to send in the first instance.

And herein lies the challenge I think both consumers and thus businesses in this sector are facing with circular business models: the economics just don’t add up.

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As many of you will have already seen, under the umbrella of this Owning It newsletter, a different sustainable fashion expert hosted their own office hours mentoring call nearly every day during the month of October.

I am honestly blown away by the response this got. Not only by those experts who all so willingly said yes to me to be a part of it (thank you, thank you and thank you again!) but by how quickly all of the spaces got snapped up by the students and young people in the industry looking for guidance and mentoring in this space.

We had 37 sessions (or hours!) in total, and over 300 people signed up to attend.

What’s more, while I knew from my previous experience of running my own office hours over the past two years that we would get participants from around the world, I didn’t begin to imagine just how many different countries would be represented. In total, we had 36 nationalities on the calls, 41% of which were from the Global South.

I have renewed hope for sustainable fashion’s future and how truly global it will be. Not least from the amount of feedback I got from the experts as to how much they learned from the young people in attendance on the calls too. Mentoring that works both ways! It’s an understatement to say how phenomenally rewarding this all was, as a result.

The other thing that has happened, is that I’ve been inundated by further experts in the industry offering up their time too. We hit a nerve it seems, which is incredible. So, I’m working out — with some help from those who already hosted with me in October — what next steps for this could look like.

If you have ideas of what you’d want from ongoing mentoring sessions, or what you’d like to offer yourself as a mentor, please do post them in the comments here, or feel free to get in touch with me. I would absolutely love to hear to help me work out how to grow this in as useful a way as possible.

Before then, it’s time for me to host again my own office hours for November. As always, this will be an opportunity to ask me anything you want about working in the world of sustainable fashion. But, in a bid to also use it as an information gathering session to inform this series over the long-term, I am making it an open call for as many people as would like to join. I will take questions as always, but also ask all of you attending what more you’d like to see in my plans for 2026.

As a result, you can join this session no matter the stage you’re at on your sustainability journey (usually I restrict them to students and those in the first five years of their careers), and with no limit on the total number of attendees. As with previous occasions I’ve done these larger sessions, this does mean that not everyone will get to speak during the allocated time, but I hope it will still serve to be informative and interesting for all to listen nonetheless.

This session will take place on Monday, November 24 at 1pm GMT, and you can sign up to join it here.

I look forward to seeing lots of you then. Again, thank you to everyone involved throughout October.

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During the month of October, I’ve welcomed 37 different experts in sustainable fashion to host an hour-long mentoring call each, between them welcoming over 300 people wanting to make a difference in this sector.

Some insights and learnings from that to come, but managing all of this and preparing the speakers for what to expect from the calls, has made me reflect a lot on what sort of thing I have been asked in my two years of doing my open office hours sessions.

I’m resharing this post I wrote a year ago as a result. What it focuses on is that in all of my calls, one of the most interesting things I’ve realised is just how many of the questions that come up each month are so very similar.

There are of course variations, and there are thematic discussions relative to what particular topic within the industry individuals are interested in exploring at any given time (lots on circularity, innovation, post growth theory and beyond). But, when it comes to talking about careers in this space, there are some key points I can bank on in nearly every call.

So here are eight of the highlights, with my notes and thoughts against each...

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