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What will it take for fashion to put all of its sustainability talk into action? For some brands, the answer lies in collaboration.
Across two conversations at Vogue Business’s Fashion Futures event in partnership with GXO on 26 September in New York, executives from J Crew and H&M sat down to discuss the responsibility that brands have to support and invest in the initiatives that will help them reach their climate and circularity goals.
In the first session, J Crew CEO Libby Wadle was joined by Eva von Alvensleben, executive director of The Fashion Pact, to discuss how they work together. In the second, H&M head of sustainability Leyla Ertur spoke alongside Dennis Nobelius, CEO of recycled polyester firm Syre, to shed light on how the fashion company played a key role in getting Syre up and running in order to reach its goal of using 50 per cent recycled materials.
Both conversations drew the same conclusion: fashion has no chance of meeting its climate goals or reducing its overall footprint without partnership.
“Fashion is a team sport. A garment is made by a team — the value chain. We need to collaborate and work together to overcome the challenges of risk, of cost, at the speed and the scale really needed,” von Alvensleben said. “We’re bringing the weight of the industry behind us so that individual wins turn into team wins.”
J Crew and the Fashion Pact: Power in numbers
The Fashion Pact is a non-profit that brings together fashion CEOs to have open conversations about sustainability challenges and drive forward the climate agenda by securing brand support for new initiatives. As von Alvensleben said, it’s about sharing risks and costs as well as knowledge that companies are often unable or unwilling to shoulder alone.
J Crew’s Wadle, who is on the Fashion Pact’s steering committee, said that fashion is working through the same challenges, but conversations about these problems typically happen in back channels and off the record, so work remains in silos. “We can sit at the table to figure them out [our challenges],” she said. “It’s refreshing to not be alone in that journey.”
Two specific areas of work that the Fashion Pact is helping brands navigate is regenerative cotton and Scope 3 emissions. To help scale regenerative cotton, the Fashion Pact last week announced its Unlock programme, a collective financing mechanism that supports carbon decarbonisation at scale, housed by the Future Earth Lab. After a pilot phase, the programme is rolling out to more farms to make regenerative cotton more available for fashion. Wadle said that transitioning from conventional to regenerative cotton is “so daunting that it’s paralysing, really, for companies and farmers to try to do it on their own”.
Scope 3 emissions, meanwhile, happen in parts of the supply chain that brands don’t directly own, which is where Wadle said partnership can have a great impact. “These aren’t only in our hands — and it’s more daunting,” she said. “That’s where partnership comes in.”
H&M and Syre: Creating the solutions you want to see
Syre’s founding story is different from most startups: it was born out of H&M’s realisation that there was no solution for recycled polyester at scale on the market, and therefore set out to partner on investing to get Syre off the ground. With $600 million promised over a seven-year period, Syre is now working to scale its polyester — which Nobelius said is “infinitely recyclable” — not just for H&M’s use, but for the fashion industry’s.
“We thought with this investment we could stand behind our circularity goals and do it at scale,” said Ertur. “Scale is the biggest bottleneck for any startup.”
In fact, a key part of H&M’s partnership with Syre was that the material be available across the market. H&M said its approach is to invest and support in startups to ensure that they can do the work, but also open up that work to other brands and make it a shared resource.
“There is no brand in the industry that can tackle this problem of material innovations at scale alone,” said Ertur. “You can only influence your own value chain. If you don’t team up with others you can never go all the way.”
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