Earlier this year, two months into the second Trump administration, federal agencies in the US circulated an internal list of nearly 200 words that would be limited or avoided in the government’s clampdown on so-called “woke initiatives”, according to documents seen by The New York Times.
Among those words were: climate crisis, climate science, clean energy and pollution. Among the even more concerning broad sweeps: inequality, diversity, race and ethnicity, gender, women, men, disability, victim, bias, activists, and political.
While the words were not banned outright, the list sent shockwaves through the US. It also sent a message: for fashion brands with a sustainability focus, communicating their efforts across the political divide was about to get a whole lot harder.
In the time since, many have retreated; not just in fashion, but across industries. Major banks pulled out of the Net Zero Banking Alliance after Trump’s re-election, causing the programme to close down. In May, the US Plastics Pact also saw a mass exodus of its members: 25% of those from food and beverage businesses and 12.5% from consumer retail, per Harvard Business Review. And the sweeping cuts to USAID mean that non-profit initiatives from garment worker trade unions to refugee support and life-saving food programmes have also been forced to pull back.
At the Textile Exchange conference in Lisbon earlier this month, Jonathan Hall, managing partner of the Sustainable Transformation Practice at marketing data and analytics company Kantar, estimated that 12% of companies have deprioritized climate action in the past 12 months, while 73% remained neutral and 12% doubled down.
New York womenswear designer Maria McManus says she has noticed a shift in “more cynical” circles, where she is more likely to be met with “a lack of interest or a glazed eye” now. It’s made her more committed. “It’s a shame the current administration is not on board, but the sustainability movement is moving ahead with or without them,” she says.
Erin Allweiss, who worked for the co-chair of the global warming committee under President Barack Obama before co-founding PR and brand consultancy No.29, agrees. “This administration, and the broader political landscape, is giving the people who didn’t actually care about sustainability permission to defect quite quickly, but the ones who are still doing it are really doing it.” Her client list reads like a who’s who of sustainable fashion, from Veja and Baserange to Asket. “I like to hope that this is just a sad part of the cycle, but it’s going to weed out the people who were greenwashing and lift up the people who are really committed,” she adds.
Perhaps, more than a crackdown on sustainability, this is a normalization, which could pave the way for more authentic, specific and impactful communications from brands. For those staying true to sustainability, what are the new rules of engagement?
Different routes to the same destination
The political backlash against sustainability — and the ensuing corporate retreat from sustainability communications — was a major topic of debate at New York Climate Week in September. One attendee summed up its implications by arguing that, rather than relying on sustainability to sell products and falling foul of the “say-do” gap, brands should reposition sustainability as a “gift with purchase”.
Some say the wheels were already in motion, before President Trump took office for the second time, pointing to the EU’s Green Claims Directive, designed to curb greenwashing. While the European Commission is currently working to water down the regulation and limit its scope, it is still expected to pass eventually, and consumer watchdogs are issuing greenwashing fines in the meantime (most recently, Italy’s competition authority AGCM fined ultra-fast fashion retailer Shein €1 million). The crossroads sustainable fashion now finds itself at could rebalance trust in green claims, giving companies with less genuine impact investment an easy way out, Allweiss says, and making space for the truly committed to step up and be properly acknowledged.
“Over the last 10 years, since the fashion industry began engaging with sustainability, the landscape has undergone drastic changes,” explains Carrie Ellen Phillips, co-founder of sustainability-oriented communications agency BPCM. “Most brands started from the place of wanting to do the right thing and making small, ad-hoc shifts. This resulted in a dearth of micro-collections of organic cotton T-shirts or one-off collections that didn’t address the company’s larger goals, while general consumption and production were on a steep rise. Journalists, customers and the rest of the industry began to call this behavior out. Now, the brands that get it right are leading with clothes that their customers want and then touting the sustainable aspects as a knock-on benefit that is an extra driver to purchase.”
This is the case for both Maria McManus and fellow New York-based womenswear label Eileen Fisher, which worked on sustainability for 15 years before communicating its efforts to consumers, and tends to use sustainability to support product stories, as opposed to vice versa. “We really have not changed our day-to-day work [in light of the new administration]. Most of our messaging is driven by the product, and sustainability is in support of that,” says Kristi Cameron, creative director of brand content at Eileen Fisher. “We’re not always the loudest about what we’re doing, but we’re persistent.”
It’s time to get specific
Whether a brand is trying to avoid greenwashing accusations or sidestep political scrutiny, one solution is to get specific when making claims. “We’ve learned that audiences respond best to communications rooted in integrity and specificity,” says Citizens of Humanity Group CEO Amy Williams, adding that science and craft-rooted language like “regeneratively grown cotton”, “petroleum-free dye”, “plant-based lycra” and “US or vertical manufacturing” resonates over buzzwords such as “sustainability” or “green”.
Finding words with mass awareness and appeal — which don’t succumb to greenwashing by erring on the vague side — can be difficult, adds Elizabeth Richman, who leads the sustainability strategy at Eileen Fisher in her role as general counsel. “We are very careful about the words we use and there’s certainly been a natural evolution in the way the world talks about sustainability. We try to use words that resonate with the broadest group of people and concerns about greenwashing. We have to walk the line between being truthful and informative, without going overboard or using terms that have been watered down by overuse.”
Cameron points to the positioning of Eileen Fisher denim. “There are regulations discouraging the term ‘organic jeans’, so we don’t want to appear next to it, even if it’s going to get the best performance results,” she explains. “Instead, we would go for something more technical and specific like ‘organic cotton jeans’ or ‘organic cotton denim’. We are constantly making those choices, sometimes to a slight detriment.” The brand is able to make these decisions because Eileen Fisher herself is still the majority shareholder, so it isn’t beholden to shareholders who might stall sustainability progress.
Finding new ways to communicate
In previous years, many brands used sustainability as a foothold for activism, and their communications became proudly political in the process. This might not be the most effective route in Trump’s America. “Sustainability is not a political issue for us,” says Cameron. “We don’t do it to be provocative or to get attention, which might be our saving grace.”
“People are less inclined to get political now,” concedes No.29’s Allweiss. “In the first Trump administration, people were out in the streets and fashion designers were making clothes about politics. All of that has stopped now. We look after a lot of brands that don’t even talk about sustainability practices. They know their farms and their manufacturers, so they talk about where things come from. Ultimately, we’re going to protect them and make sure they’re using language that is representative of them and which is not going to be problematic for them.”
The challenge is that, while brands may not see sustainability as a political play, the political climate is making it a more inflammatory subject, among investors, politicians and consumers. Earlier this year, Allweiss says one of her clients was readying to make a big announcement pegged to sustainability, but the political climate briefly paused plans. “We had this moment of questioning: is this going to put a target on our backs with this administration?” she says. “We still went ahead in the end, but it was really terrifying to think that there could be retribution simply for making something with care.”
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