Talk, talk, talk at the Global Fashion Summit

The limitations of the industry’s big sustainability conference

My first time at the Global Fashion Summit was in 2016, back when it was called the Copenhagen Fashion Summit. The GFS is the industry’s biggest sustainability conference, and for someone who was writing about streetwear and sneakers at the time, it was an eye-opening experience. In the halls of the Copenhagen opera house, you’ll run into all sorts of smart, interesting people who spend their lives trying to figure out solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems. Bigwigs from the Danish fashion scene invite guests over for dinner at home, so you might end up hanging out with Ganni founders Nicolaj and Ditte Reffstrup, eating mushrooms grown on the roof of the brand’s headquarters. Like everything else in Denmark, the conference runs smoothly and everyone’s very nice.

The summit’s main event is two days of back-to-back keynotes and panel talks, where CEOs, CSOs and C-whatever-Os talk about their companies’ commitment to a sustainable future. The Summit’s organizers, Global Fashion Agenda, bring other perspectives into the mix — like indigenous community leaders, government ministers and NGOs — but the overall vibe is corporate, very corporate.

This year was the Summit’s 15th anniversary — the 15th year of all those talks. Vogue’s headline from this year’s report was 6 Key Takeaways From The 2024 Global Fashion Summit, Which Proved Urgent Action Is Still Needed, which could have been written every single year the Summit has been running, because, well, urgent action was needed 15 years ago. The world is supposed to be cutting its emissions in half by 2030, but fashion’s emissions are going to grow by 40% in that time, according to a recent report by the Apparel Impact Institute.

“It wasn’t the idea that we would still be talking about the same things 15 years in,” said Eva Kruse, the former head of the Summit who’s now at Pangaia. “I’ll be brutally honest, I’m quite disappointed in all of us that we haven’t been able to push things forward.”

Why not? Why hasn’t a conference been able to solve the industry’s problems?