Fashion Climate / Climate Fashion

A "hook" and a plea

Author

Anja Tyson
September 25, 2024

At the end of fashion week, I sat in on a panel by my friends at Tabayer to hear about their partnership with Fairmined, the alliance creating and managing standardization criteria and licensing around ethically mined gold (which is the only type of gold Tabayer uses in their fine jewelry). When I first started encountering fashion world sustainability (we can include apparel, shoes, jewelry, beauty!) in late the 2000s, material standards agencies were the least sexy thing I could have ever dreamed of - but now that nearly all brands have learned how to employ greenwashing in their public campaigns, I think material standards agencies are the sexiest thing in existence.

Anyway, on the panel , the value of a sustainability message was discussed, and one of the speakers mentioned that the press and editors are always looking for a hook, and sustainability is a great hook for a brand to use when pitching. I shuddered a little bit, because the intention behind this isn’t necessarily bad, but the press looking at sustainability as a hook without weighing the impact of spreading false messaging and false education to its reading public is not necessarily the origin of all of the consumer confusion we are living with now (for that I’ll blame the fossil fuel industry), but it’s definitely the amplifying factor, and spreading false information prevents a lot of consumer level action and progress. I would argue that viewing sustainability as a hook and not a core value is one of the pieces of gum mucking up the engine right now.

And truly, this fashion month, sustainability (even as a hook) has felt a bit…missing. At the beginning of the summer, BoF wrote a rather cruel piece about the “slow fashion recession” - their words, not mine - and how the closure of brands like Mara Hoffman might be “a signal that there is not space in the market for companies that place sustainability first” - again their words, not mine. I personally felt the article was rather irresponsible, firstly because smaller companies like Mara Hoffman have historically been the ones that have helped sustainable material solutions scale into the ability to work with larger brands with farther reach , and many of the materials and solutions that we see being used by brands like Lululemon or J.Crew or even Chloe were first piloted - often through a looooooot of pain - by smaller companies for whom the risk and impact to ROI was far higher. Big brands have quite a lot of thanks to give to smaller pioneers, for without them there would have been no testing grounds for this latest tranche of sustainable improvements to be made.

But it also reflects back on the “hook” I mentioned earlier - the media holds and incredible amount of power in the way they shape narratives for the general public and for internal stakeholders, and to casually pronounce that the market does not have room for sustainably-led brands, instead of perhaps questioning why there hasn’t been a broader industry effort to prop up these early pioneers at every available chance, is, in my humble opinion, irresponsible.

So instead of learning about innovation, we all got a bunch of newsletters and articles in our inbox last week asking “Is NYFW Dead??” (spoiler alert: almost everyone answered their own question with “no!”), and most designers are answering what the future holds by turning to the 90s. Earlier this week Cathy Horyn of The Cut wrote about MFW designers mostly turning to the past this season; an understandable tactic considering the 90s and 00s nostalgia that has gripped the world over the past few seasons. Nostalgia feels like a safe refuge in uncertain times. Paris is only just now underway, but so far the show sets mirroring the natural world, the sense of acknowledgement of a planet (and its contents) in crisis, they have all been mostly missing from the runways this month.

It’s Climate Week in New York, which means traffic is really bad on the east side, and also that there are a bevy of industry events meant to celebrate climate initiatives within the fashion world (using that worlds aforementioned definition). One of my favorite events to explore is the Emerson Climate Fair, which took place on the Highline over the weekend and into Monday, and honestly one of the reasons it is my favorite is that it is a solution fair that is open and accessible to the public. I love panels and industry events, but I’m really interested in how we break down the exclusivity barrier with sustainability and create more civilian literacy and interest, because most meaningful action is fueled by the participation of the people.

The two solutions I was most excited to see at the fair were Vivomer, creating plastic-free, vegan biodegradable packaging for the beauty industry, which is a huge struggle, and also Supercircle, a tech company providing reverse logistics for the fashion world to close the gap between garment recyclers and the garments they need to recycle.

Sky High Farm Universe just launched a new beauty product - All Purpose Tallow Balm, which works great by the way - in Vivomer’s packaging, and so when I mentioned the smaller volume brands that are doing the hard work of investing in sustainable material solutions before anyone big dives in, this is a great example. Sky High is earning less margin by packaging with a more expensive but more ethical and responsible solution, and one day soon maybe this solution will also be adopted by Estee Lauder at scale, but only after the kinks and shipping timing and other things that could go wrong do go wrong on a smaller audience.

SHFU’s Vivomer canister is certified home compostable, which means it will break down with nothing harmful left behind in a home compost environment, which is the hardest and longest bar to achieve because a home compost is slow and variable and usually not professionally managed. It’s actually very amazing, they even often customisable colors. My critique, however, is that nowhere on the cannister is it indicated that the package is home compostable, so if I were just a regular-degular consumer who had picked this up at the grocery store, I would probably end up recycling it like I would plastic, which is just a shame because it had the potential for a better end of life. This is something that will get worked out between the SHFU and the Estee Lauder stages though, just watch.

Supercircle fills a logistics gap in the industry with some fun tech. By creating a “turn key” or portable rewards logistics system for big brands (their partners include Reformation, J.Crew, and other large volume fashion brands), they are able to address a major gap in apparel circularity. By cataloguing and sorting the materials they receive from their partner brands, they are able to deliver sorted and categorized single-fiber items to their appropriate recyclers in bulk, who normally struggle with unsorted, multi-category and variegated volume intake, which slows down their system and makes their job more expensive. It also provides valuable data to the partner brand, who can measure it’s impact, buy more strategically, and downmanage its planetary impact - or, at least, they wouldn’t have an excuse not to. It’s a pretty impressive improvement to a system that deserves a lot more resources and attention. I’m excited to see if they do actually close the loop by feeding those same recycled fibers back into the brands that they were recycled from.

The value of these investments is huge. Twenty years ago, the time that everyone seems to be pining for most right now, most brands had little to no direct contact with their customer. But today, a brand’s to influence the education, direction, and empowerment of customers is beyond anything we’ve ever known before, and the expectation for communication is incredibly high. I hope - actually, I know that the market has tons of room for brands to manage this relationship and build this community equity, if it’s willing to rise to the occassion.

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