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Hello from a hectic few days in New York. I’m sorry if we didn’t get to connect; my calendar is a hellscape and my stepcount off the charts.
I arrived for Climate Week expecting a slog of downbeat, depressive conversations. Instead, the mood in many quarters was surprisingly buoyant. There were a record number of events going on around town, money was sloshing about and plenty of people I spoke to said the important, impactful work was pressing ahead, despite headline-grabbing headwinds, like the president of the United States calling climate change “a con job.” Deluded or determined? We’ll get into it.
For sure, not everyone had a good week. Gorpcore brand Arc’teryx pulled a big announcement after a marketing stunt that involved setting off fireworks in the foothills of the Himalayas sparked a furious backlash. On the one hand, this is just the latest in a laundry list of recent marketing snafus, on the other, it’s interesting to see a brand hit for environmental, rather than cultural complaints.
I’m also taking a look at big fashion’s big plans to finally get textile recycling off the ground in Europe (for more on this check out our new sustainability reporter Shayeza Walid’s great explainer from earlier in the week — expect to see her byline cropping up a lot more around here).
As always, send me thoughts, feedback, tips and questions.
Things Aren’t as Bad as They Seem (But They Really Aren’t Good Either)
There was a lot going on at New York Climate Week this year.
The annual confab, which coincides with the UN Global Assembly and kicks off the countdown for the intergovernmental organisation’s COP climate summit, attracted more than 1,000 events across the city — a record number, despite the prevailing narrative that economic headwinds, trade war distractions and an increasingly chaotic regulatory landscape mean sustainability efforts are waning.
Fashion was out in force, with a busier roster than I’ve ever seen. Proceedings kicked off with the Nat Gala, a star-studded event that is aiming to do for nature what the Met Gala has done for the Metropolitan Museum. It has a long, long way to go to reach such a lofty goal, but signals one way insiders are looking to inject fresh momentum into lagging climate action.
At the usual circus of panels and roundtables, brands, trade groups and innovators had a simple message: we’re still here and work is still happening. While regulatory momentum has slowed, incoming policies in Europe and state-level legislation are still driving action, they said. There were signs new money was looking at opportunities in the industry, too — the extremely well-funded Bezos Earth Fund said it was directing more attention to fashion at a panel I attended at Columbia at the start of the week.
“People think everything is going backwards,” business leader, philanthropist and Fashion Pact co-founder and co-chair Paul Polman told an audience of industry insiders. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Yes, but
Things are still really quite bad. (For those not familiar with the classic English tendency towards understatement, this means we’re in a dire mess).
As one person put it in a sideline conversation (where all the real talk happens anyway), the week felt kind of “schizophrenic.”
Yes, there were a record number of events, but anecdotally, attendance was low. Plenty of people who normally travel for the week, this year decided not to. Lots of the industry’s efforts are still stuck in pilot mode or even earlier in the planning phase. Manufacturers, who will need to play a key role in any effort to curb the industry’s climate impact were even more notably absent than usual. Important topics like labour, equity and climate justice got limited airtime. And at a time when budgets are tight and financing for climate initiatives particularly uncertain, it was striking to see so much being spent on talking shop in New York.
Meanwhile, even if climate work hasn’t been totally derailed, fashion — like pretty much every other industry — is well off track to meet its targets. The world’s planet-warming emissions are still rising and the consequences are already hitting hard.
The politics of climate only look likely to get more complicated, too. During remarks to the UN this week, Trump called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” Under his leadership, the US has pulled out of a global agreement to curb planet-warming emissions for a second time, undone a host of green policies and research and used trade negotiations to pressure other countries into similar rollbacks.
The Bottom Line: Whatever silver lining exists is razor thin. Yes, reports of the climate movement’s demise have been greatly exaggerated, but progress that was already too slow is now facing fresh political and economic roadblocks.
We are going to win this struggle, we are going to be successful. The remaining question is whether or not we will win it in time to avoid the terrible negative tipping points that are out there.
— Former US vice president Al Gore
How to Lose Climate Week and Other Stories
There are a few other pieces of string — that’s journalese for odds and ends of notable information — that I found interesting this week:
Arcteryx’s Climate Week Cock Up
The gorpcore brand was meant to kick off the week with a big announcement about its plans to become more circular. Instead it’s been firefighting after a major marketing mess up. Last weekend, the Canadian-headquartered, Chinese-owned brand set off a massive fireworks display in the Himalayan foothills, sparking a major online backlash over its environmental carelessness. The brand apologised and postponed its launch announcement. “The team just wanted to get the timing right,” a spokesperson said.
LVMH Is Ready to Play Nice With the Other Kids
On Monday, industry advocacy group Global Fashion Agenda announced that LVMH is (finally) joining the organisation as a strategic partner. After years of hearing big brands talk about how important collaboration is to get things moving on climate action, this should not be remarkable. But it is, because the French luxury giant has largely remained aloof from such cross-industry initiatives. It has even trolled its rivals for their participation in the past. The one-time company line: “we prefer acts to pacts.”
Still, the thaw in LVMH’s stance — which comes without any concrete commitments or action-oriented goals — does as much to highlight how far the industry still has to go as signal progress.
Don’t be a Sustainability Snowflake
Sometimes events at Climate Week feel somewhat like a group therapy session, where beleaguered sustainability executives and advocates unleash about how hard the work is. But this year, there was a bit of “get a grip” energy going around. Sure, the job was more fun a few years ago when it held the dual cachet of fashion cool and right on energy. It’s much more of a slog today, when executives need to be persuaded of its business relevance, there’s a lot more compliance involved and the cultural conversation has shifted from enthusiasm to cynicism. But we’re talking about systems change — nobody said it would be easy.
Driving in the Dark With No Headlights
Dedicated readers of this newsletter may remember that a few weeks ago I mentioned that a coalition of big fashion, big manufacturers and innovators had announced a plan to launch a plan to finally make a circular system of textile-to-textile recycling in Europe a real thing with industrial scale.
Uncharitably, this kind of thing always puts me in mind of Baldrick, the hapless sidekick in the ‘80s British sitcom Blackadder, whose catchphrase “I have a cunning plan” usually foreshadowed quite the opposite.
Still, I was interested to see what Rehubs — the industry coalition whose members include Zara-owner Inditex, France’s Decathlon and German chemicals giant BASF — would come up with.
So does the industry, in fact, have a cunning plan?
It at least has clear ambitions. Rehubs’ goal is to unlock €5 to €6 billion ($6 to $7.5 billion) in investment — the amount the organisation estimates will be needed to hit a target of recycling 2.5 million tonnes of textile waste in Europe by 2032.
The strategy is two-pronged.
Part one is creating some kind coherent system to collect, sort and process all the unwanted old clothes and footwear pouring into Europe’s waste stream. At the moment, things are a fragmented, inefficient mess. The idea is to couple this with demand-side commitments from brands so that a functioning market for waste textiles and recycled raw materials can develop.
Part two is the money. The billions Rehubs is aiming to funnel into industrialising Europe’s recycling sector are expected to come from a blend of public and private finance, facilitated by clearer signals that there will be an actual market for this stuff once it’s built (see part one). The coalition is already in talks with institutions like the European Investment Bank and International Finance Corporation.
Will it work?
A plan is only as good as its execution and this one has a lot of external hurdles to overcome.
The exact shape of incoming regulations intended to make big brands pay to clean up clothing waste is still unclear, and the amount and kind of public funding that could be available is still uncertain. Most startups have yet to break ground on the industrial plants that will be needed to actually deliver the millions of tonnes of recycled material Rehubs is aiming for by 2032.
An initial goal to hit its 2.5 million tonne target by 2030 has already been pushed back. And even if successful, this volume still only represents about a third of all the old clothes, footwear and fabrics thrown out by Europeans each year.
We still do not have the full picture, and we’re still driving in the dark and have no headlights. But what we’re doing is addressing the systemic change that is required, and coordinating it so that everyone is on the same page.
— Rehubs CEO Robert van de Kerkhof
PSA and a reminder:
Recycling is not a panacea climate solution. Most of the fashion industry’s carbon emissions are given off when fabrics are dyed and finished, a process that is the same whether the fibres are recycled or virgin. Getting recycling to scale is a piece of the puzzle and important to address growing volumes of fashion waste, but it shouldn’t be treated as a holy grail fix.
WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW THIS WEEK:
- Luxury Denial: As Milan Fashion Week kicked off, Italy’s big brands sought to downplay a series of supply-chain scandals that have dogged the sector over the last year. The issues are limited to a few, isolated cases and solutions are on the way, they said. [The Business of Fashion]
- Brunello Cucinelli’s Russia Problems: The luxury Italian cashmere brand’s share price tumbled 15 percent on Thursday, after a short seller alleged the company is misleading investors about its Russian business and engaging in aggressive discounting. [The Business of Fashion]
- Deforestation Delay: The European Union will delay its anti-deforestation law, which will ban imports of commodities like leather and palm oil if they are linked to deforestation. [The Business of Fashion]
- Flood Zone: Massive floods in Pakistan have damaged around 60 percent of the country’s cotton crop, risking shortfalls that are expected to ripple across the country’s textile sector. [Reuters]
Disclosure: LVMH is part of a group of investors who, together, hold a minority interest in The Business of Fashion. All investors have signed shareholders’ documentation guaranteeing BoF’s complete editorial independence.