Our chance to make fashion truly sustainable

The Fashion Act is a transformative moment for the industry

Welcome back! Paris Fashion Week has just wrapped up, but I’m in Berlin, working on a bunch of projects I’m very excited about (including this newsletter). 

Heads up: next week will be my first story for paid subscribers. The following week will be free, then back to paid again, etc. etc. Thanks to everyone who’s started a paid subscription already, you’re the best! 

In the courtyard of the Palais De Tokyo, rose petals are fired over the crowd at the Rick Owens show. Kim Kardashian and Demna’s mum walk at Balenciaga. Critics muse on Jonathan Anderson’s massive cardigans at Loewe. 

Those are just a few notable moments from Paris fashion week, the biggest event on the industry calendar, where celebrities and the ultra-rich rub shoulders with aspiring influencers and exhausted industry professionals.

Fashion week feels like a parallel universe at the best of times, but the cognitive dissonance is starting to get really dystopian. That’s because while editors and buyers were racing around Paris in Ubers and gossiping about Phoebe Philo, parts of New York City were submerged by record-breaking rains, just a few months after the city was choking in a haze of wildfire smoke. The Big Apple’s environmental commissioner said that the city is starting to get the sort of intense rainfall that you’d normally find in tropical cities like Miami and Singapore. And this is just a taste of things to come — extreme weather will soon be commonplace everywhere, in Paris and New York, but also Jakarta and Luanda.

Fashion has been talking about sustainability for decades now, but as we all know, none of that talk has gone anywhere. No pact has kept carbon footprints from rising, no pledge has stopped human rights abuses in the supply chain.

It’s deeply depressing. You can’t feel good about the future when you compare what’s going on in the world (rising sea levels, catastrophic weather) with the headlines in Vogue and BoF (more new clothes, more problems we can’t solve). Everyone in the sustainability space knows that we need to fundamentally reimagine the way the industry works, so that respect for the environment and human rights are built into the system. But that’s such a huge and abstract task that it’s impossible to imagine how ordinary people like you and me can do anything about it.

The Fashion Act could change all of that. 

The Fashion Act is an ambitious piece of legislation that’s being proposed in the New York State Assembly. The bill would regulate fashion so that sustainability, transparency and fair working conditions are a requirement for any major brand wanting to sell in the state of New York (aka all of them). Not to be confused with The Fashion Pact (President Macron’s voluntary initiative that was supposed to push for change, but doesn’t seem to have done anything), the Act would apply to any apparel and footwear brand with more than $100m in global revenue, and it would be enforced by the state’s Attorney General. The bill was conceived by Maxine Bédat, one of the smartest and most driven people in the industry — she’s written a book about sustainability and appeared in the BOF 500, and she’s got a background in law.

The Act is thorough, wide-ranging and ambitious. Brands would be required to trace their entire supply chains, all the way back to the raw material. They’d have to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris agreement, but in absolute terms — so no “emissions intensity” bullshit, no dodgy offsetting schemes and no ignoring Scope 3 emissions. Chemicals would be managed in line with the ZDHC’s most up-to-date Wastewater Guidelines. Companies would be responsible for human rights abuses in the supply chain, and workers would have a legal mechanism for recovering any lost or stolen wages.

This is a really, really big deal. Any major player wanting to access the highly lucrative New York market would be required by law to be responsible for their supply chains, and anyone on the wrong side of the regulations would find themselves facing the state’s top lawyer — the Attorney General could fine a company up to 2% of their global revenue. This is what systemic change looks like!

The act is being introduced in the New York State Senate, rather than Congress, because the federal government is in gridlock, making it impossible to pass big legislation in Washington DC. But the state of New York has a huge footprint, both culturally and financially — if it were a country, it would be world’s tenth biggest economy — so the idea is that any law passed there would have such huge ramifications that the rest of the world would have to catch up.

Supporters of the act so far include brands, celebrities and NGOs — there’s Patagonia and Stella McCartney, but also Leonardo Dicaprio, Cameron Diaz, the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defence Council. I’m an ambassador for the act, along with friends and peers like Aditi Mayer, Sophia Li and the guys at Future Earth. Basically, I’ll be making noise about the bill online and sending a lot of emails to people who I think should be making noise about it as well.

I’ll be talking more about how people can get behind The Fashion Act in the coming weeks and months (this activism stuff is new to me, too) but what I will say for now is that this is an opportunity for anyone who feels conflicted about their role in the industry to do something about it. I meet so many people who feel like a cog in a machine that spits out pollution, exploitation and billions of throwaway garments. Now is the chance for us to come together, from the CEOs to the interns to the activists, and demand a better future for the industry we all share.

For more info on how you can support the bill, head over to The Fashion Act’s website.

Everything Else

I recently wrote a piece for the D&AD Awards, looking at the pitfalls of quote-unquote “sustainable” advertising and how marketers are responding to consumers’ climate anxiety.
— D&AD

New obsession: Joe McCoy, a sub-line from The Real McCoys, who produce gorgeous Japanese recreations of classic American garments (not to be confused with the British crisps).
— The Real McCoys

I’ll be speaking at the BFES summit in Warsaw next week, which is run by Vogue Poland. I’m looking forward to a) going to a milk bar and b) taking the train there.
— Vogue PL

I’m amazed at how PETA still manages to sneak protestors into major shows. Wish we had this for climate!
— GQ

This really smart op-ed in BoF by Beth Esponnette makes the point that overproduction needs to be factored into brands’ sustainability reporting — for example, if you only sell 50% of your t-shirts, the impact of each one sold is effectively doubled.
— Business of Fashion