New York Fashion Week Sustainability Charter

This week kicks of the month-long seasonal tradition of fashion month in New York, London, Milan and Paris. The “fashion week” was conceptualized midcentury after after an outcry by journalists and buyers to put an end to the tyranny of disorganized and dis-united designers presenting their next season’s collections on their own schedule, leaving media coverage and buying unpredictable. The organization of a fashion week was a strategic one: to allow buyers and journalists to make a single trip to New York, a single week of appointments, allowing more designers the chance to be seen by more journalists and buyers on an agreed-upon group schedule in a mostly centralized area of the city.

Since then, and since the advent of social media marketing and its subsequent creation of the Content Creator, fashion week’s role has drastically changed as much as a runway presentation’s role has. Journalists and buyers still attend, but equally as important are the hoards of digital content creators invited to the show, dressed by the brand, and (sometimes) paid to document the show as more of an #event then a display of clothes. 

This evolution has left many asking what the purpose of a fashion show really is at this point, and whether the concept of a fashion week more than just a series of events might be at this point a little… outmoded. 

However, while New York, London, Milan and Paris have remained the dominating forces in the fashion calendar–both due to eurocentricity and also because their market dominance has led them to dictate production and delivery schedules–smaller venues like Seoul, Tokyo and Copenhagen each year gain ground in using their local fashion weeks to support and elevate designers presenting off the typical fashion month schedule.

Copenhagen in particular has done a great job of using the elements of their zany January/August fashion weeks to support local designers and unify under a single agenda. January and August are typically when most of the fashion press and buying world is on vacation in anticipation of the overwork that comes with February and September, and their show schedule is so early compared to the production schedule that they could be considered more of a late “pre-collection” than a standard runway. But the vehicle they created that allowed a lot of these brands to come to prominence is their Sustainability Requirements: a “minimum set of standards that all CPHFW shows must conform to by 2023”. 

The requirements are in fact quite minimal, and encompass six values; strategy, design, material, working conditions, marketing, and the actual show itself across issues like waste, education, diversity, and progressive materials. Since their “week” is only four days and there are only a little more than 30 shows (NYFW, by comparison, schedules ~18 shows per day), the control set is smaller than most other fashion weeks, which means that Copenhagen in the past few years has been the perfect small scale test model to roll out this kind of baseline ambition. This year was the conforming year, meaning that brands presenting from next season and beyond will not be allowed to show during CPHFW without meeting these standards.

What has this done? First, it has set a local standard for designers to not only aspire to but to be held accountable to. Is it a high standard? No. But the second net benefit of these requirements is that sustainability has become a semi-fluent conversation alongside all of these events. Designers are given the chance to speak about material collaborations and investments, and the audience is largely expected to understand, because this is relative to the expectations of the week. Brands are held to account for their waste promises, and this visible commitment means that they are vulnerable to exposure if they lie. Shows are evaluated equally for their beauty and commercial value as they are for their ability to incorporate sustainable strategies into their production and management.

In all, it has empowered the audience for these brands to feel a sense of involvement and excitement in engaging in the practices that can reduce the enormous and ever-expanding horrific environmental footprint of the fashion industry.

So, after this program has been piloted with success in Copenhagen, why hasn’t this happened yet  in New York? It surely could. We have always been a scrappy city, answering the exclusivity of Europe’s Alaias and YSLs with accessible and classic American sportswear brands like Ralph Lauren and Clavin Klein. Perhaps in a race to keep up with what we have always treated as our more established big brothers and sisters in the other fashion capitals, we have forgotten this scrap?

I want to hear about my local brands’ sustainability efforts. I want to hear about their investments in sustainable materials, their strategy and practices around waste, the way they treat their workers. I want them to feel accountable to reporting their behavior to an organizing body, with consequences. 

And more, I want customers and buyers and journalists and content creators to be a part of this conversation and to feel involved in it, become fluent in it, and look at it as a point of pride to be aware of a brand’s practices, be they developing, standard, or advanced. I think we owe it to ourselves in New York to lead the way toward normalizing this conversation alongside all other elements of business. 

Anything less leaves an incredible amount of influencing power on the table, and an unanswered, system-stressing level of irresponsibility as the status quo. 

Let me know in the comments if you’d like to see the launch of NYFW Sustainability Standards.