What do you do when nearly two decades of effort to push the fashion industry in a more sustainable and equitable direction hasn’t had the large-scale impact you’d hoped for? You try to change the rules of the system, says Dilys Williams, founder and director of London College of Fashion’s Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF).
That’s the modus operandi for Governance for Tomorrow (GfT), CSF’s latest industry collaboration with luxury conglomerate Kering, which tackles the complex but potentially catalytic topic of governance (the ‘G’ in ESG — environmental, social, governance) and boardroom decision-making.
Governance is the often-overlooked mechanism that dictates “who makes decisions over what and why”, explains Hannah Parris, research associate at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Resilience and Sustainable Development, and member of the GfT stewardship board, assembled to lead the development of new governance models. It steers the day-to-day operations of an organisation, from strategic direction to decision-making processes, risk-management, power structures and financial decisions. The problem is that it’s baked into fashion’s business model, making it difficult to shift. But doing so could create a cascade of positive impact.
“Traditional governance structures prioritise short-term economic gains over long-term sustainability and earth system stability,” says Marie-Claire Daveu, chief sustainability and institutional affairs officer at Kering. “Embedding sustainability at the highest level of corporate governance is crucial to achieving meaningful and lasting sustainability objectives.”
Over the last 40 years, board-level decisions have increasingly skewed in favour of shareholder returns and the bottom line, placing crucial social and environmental goals on the back-burner and exacerbating harm in those areas by prioritising growth and profit at the expense of fair wages, social safety nets and nature. The three-year GfT programme will seek to unpick and reroute these priorities, says Williams, encouraging brands and their boards to expand their scope of duty to a far wider range of stakeholders, including nature and future generations.
Payouts to shareholders have spiked over the years, and some say sustainability efforts have been hamstrung in the process. What can change?
“Board members have been open about their pushes and pulls [with us]. They’ll say, ‘I have to do the top and bottom line, that’s all that’s expected of me, and I’ve got shareholders breathing down my neck.’ How do we create the principles of a board that looks at more than human voice, but at interspecies voice; past, present and future cultures and belief systems; and [factors] across race, gender and geographic location?” she says.
To answer that question, GfT aims to “research, apply, test and realise” new and alternative governance models in the luxury fashion sector to shift its priorities and motivations at a fundamental level. But whether the industry is ready to embrace such change remains to be seen.
Missing voices
One of the central complaints about governance in the fashion industry is that the consequences of high-level decisions cascade down to stakeholders who have had no say in the matter. GfT’s approach is based on the concept of “3I Justice”, coined by sustainability scientists Johan Rockström, Joyeeta Gupta, Dahe Qin and peers in a 2023 paper published in science journal Nature. It is designed to be more inclusive and future-facing than other forms of governance, taking into account interspecies, intergenerational and intragenerational (meaning between countries, communities and individuals) justice. The end goal is to avoid crossing dangerous climate tipping points and to minimise harm to humans, animals and nature.
“Our focus is to be able to have a good [governance system] that flows across the whole supply chain, where everybody is involved, where everybody is being taken into consideration, from the decision to the action,” says Yayra Agbofah, founder of The Revival, a circular, community-driven fashion initiative based in Ghana’s Kantamanto secondhand market and member of the GfT stewardship board.
A fire at West Africa’s largest secondhand clothing market leaves thousands of retailers displaced and shops destroyed, while textile waste handling hangs in the balance.
This is a stark departure from fashion’s current approach. “Almost everything we do in the name of sustainability is based on a very coercive theory of change,” says Kim Van der Weerd, CEO and co-founder of the Fashion Producer Collective (FPC), a producer-led sustainability think tank. Formerly a garment factory manager in Cambodia, Van der Weerd recounts being “subjected to” numerous certification processes and sustainability programmes, which either didn’t make sense in the local context or simply didn’t produce any tangible change. “The reason these things seemed to not have the impact they were supposed to is because they were dreamed up without the stakeholders who were ultimately going to bear the responsibility for delivering [them],” she says.
This system upholds the power imbalances in fashion supply chains and undermines the efforts to decolonise the industry, adds Vidhura Ralapanawe, executive VP of innovation and sustainability at global textile manufacturing company Epic Group, a founder member of FPC. He points to the industry’s laser focus on decarbonisation as a prime example of centralised decision-makers imposing strategies that are not aligned with the needs of people on the ground. “That’s their priority. But the value chain priority is increasingly becoming adaptation, because of heat stress, because of the floods,” Ralapanawe explains.
Heat stress lays bare the tension between climate mitigation and adaptation. Workers are caught in the middle.
Finding a common language
Highlighting missing voices is one thing, but actually integrating them into decision-making is another challenge entirely.
GfT is hoping to do this by diversifying boardrooms. “We’re calling to mandate that there is representation of different voices, and they’re actually empowered — authentically — to make change,” says Kaye Carmichael, stewardship board member and freelance sustainability marketing consultant. “You can have one person in the room, but if they aren’t actually able to influence any decisions, then it’s just tokenistic.”
In order to do this, brands need to address power imbalances in their supply chains, adds Ralapanawe. “Representation doesn’t guarantee voice, because there is a very strong power differential between brands and manufacturers,” he explains. “So even if you’re sitting in the same room, what can and cannot be said is policed through commercial relationships and power dynamics.”
Achieving parity at a board level starts with engagement and building frameworks that facilitate open and receptive discussions, Ralapanawe continues. Here, another barrier emerges. Procedurally complex and peppered with jargon, a board meeting isn’t a familiar setting for most cotton farmers or sewing machinists. Without training to help them navigate this, the important context-based knowledge they impart could be overlooked or undervalued.
Expecting stakeholders to learn and adhere to the formalities of the boardroom upholds existing colonial power dynamics, says Namrata Tiwari, stewardship board member and founder of grassroots design studio Its All Folk, which works directly with local craft communities, including Indigenous semi-nomadic yak herders in the Eastern Himalayas. Instead, training and consistent engagement are needed on both sides. “If you just parachute someone in from a different country altogether, people rarely understand,” says Tiwari. “It’s taken me three or four years of consistently living with the [yak herding] community to understand how they think and to build a relationship. I feel brands today are not willing to put that kind of effort into understanding who is at the end of the value chain beyond compliances and certifications. The core aspect of relationship-building is rarely there.”
Outside of the fashion industry, there is precedent for a mutual approach. Alan Blighe, another GfT stewardship board member, is the innovation lead for the Innovation, Research and Life Sciences Group at NHS England (the national health service). His team have brought non-corporate voices into the boardroom, including patients and families, who Blighe refers to as “experts by experience”. The goal is to address biases in decision-making and governance. “You need to provide really robust training and support […] to enable them to function in these environments, let alone make a meaningful contribution,” he says. “[And] you need to provide training to board members to function as humans and actually listen to the people in front of them, to work with people from other contexts and to view their contributions as meaningful.”
Similarly, Williams says CSF has had to carefully navigate its role as an intermediary body based in the Global North, committing to a participatory process that means it adjusts to — and learns from — its board members as the programme progresses.
Making the business case
Blighe’s is not an isolated case study. When Paul Polman took up his post as CEO of consumer goods multinational Unilever in 2009, he completely overhauled how the board operated. He populated it with environmentalists, activists and experts, including Christiana Figueres, then executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and William McDonough, a pioneer of the cradle-to-cradle model. Polman moved board meetings out of the boardroom, instead taking field trips to places such as India, Vietnam and Indonesia, where supply chain stakeholders were located. He also introduced learning sessions the day before board meetings, to educate members on topics spanning from AI to ESG.
Keen to reconnect fashion professionals with the people growing and making their clothes, more industry organisations, producers and brands are offering immersive field trips and studio tours.
These were among other big changes to Unilever’s governance structure, including scrapping quarterly reporting and earnings guidance in favour of longer term thinking. “Shareholder returns are a result of what you do with all the other stakeholders. They’re an outcome, not a mission,” Polman says. Stakeholder-focused actions during his tenure included training as many female smallholder farmers as male to increase supply chain gender equality, working with global partners to increase toothbrushing as dental issues are a major cause of school absenteeism, and building a tea plantation in Rwanda to economically benefit 80,000 people.
The initial decision to move away from quarterly reporting sparked a negative market reaction, Polman says, and the company’s share price dropped. But the results soon started to speak for themselves. “The shareholder return was nearly 300 per cent over the 10 years [I was CEO], well outperforming the market and competitors,” he tells Vogue Business. “We showed that a different corporate governance model can also be very good for the shareholders, but as a result of what you do, not [of] myopic focus on shareholders.”
Critics argue that financial returns for brands in the Global North shouldn’t be at the centre of discussions around ecosystems and livelihoods, but success stories that add to the business case don’t hurt, says Ruan Opie-Meres, senior campaign officer at UK-based non-profit Share Action, especially considering some retailers and fashion brands are resistant to moral arguments. (Among its initiatives, Share Action trains underrepresented stakeholders such as retail workers to attend annual general meetings, ask questions and introduce shareholder resolutions.)
Perhaps the most tangible, governance-based movement is B Corp. Despite criticism of its standards — which are now being rewritten and raised — the initiative has managed to get over 10,000 certified companies to commit to a stakeholder governance model, because B Corps are legally bound to consider the impact of their decisions on all stakeholders.
B Corp has come under fire for certifying large multinationals and, now, a fast fashion brand. Soon, companies will have to meet more stringent standards to achieve the kitemark — but the implications of this remain unclear.
Another, more nascent approach is putting nature on the board. First pioneered by UK personal care brand Faith in Nature in 2022, it involves a non-executive director sitting on the board as a representative of nature’s interests. The Better Business Network (BBN), a UK-based membership organisation for purpose-led businesses, followed suit in 2024. “We were determined to lead by example and see how asking, ‘What would nature say?’ would affect our financial, operational and strategic decisions,” says BBN founder Hannah Cox. To date, it has meant including biodiversity impacts in client deliverables and reports, and creating a business travel plan that moves away from fossil fuels.
Despite some premature signs of success, it’s still early days for fashion’s governance overhaul. GfT convened with industry leaders and stakeholders for the first time at the Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen in June. Ticket fees for stewardship board members were waived, and GfT covered travel and accommodation to avoid financially excluding stakeholders, which has been a criticism of the conference in the past. Attendees of the roundtable were receptive, the stewardship board says, but members are now tasked with integrating feedback, building toolkits and techniques for creating the alternative governance models they are proposing, demonstrating the value of 3I Justice to boards, and building pilot programmes based on their principles of representation, stakeholder benefits, and mutual training and knowledge exchange.
While GfT board members are optimistic that brands will eventually sit up and listen, some are frustrated at how slow progress seems, and lament the fact that fashion is only just realising the importance of governance. As Tiwari says: “How long will it take for us to reach that point wherein it pivots from just talk to action?”
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