Sustainable fashion might not get much airtime over fashion month, but that doesn’t mean it’s not present. Each fashion capital plays host to a growing number of designers prioritising sustainability through their supply chains, design processes and business models. In the past, designers and brands leaned heavily on upcycling, but approaches to sustainability are becoming increasingly nuanced. Many of the designers Vogue Business interviewed for this story have their sights set firmly on their supply chains, promoting local crafts, generating job opportunities in their home towns and reworking their balance sheets to build in more equity for suppliers.
Here are the ones to watch.
Milan: Federico Cina
Italy is known for its craftsmanship, but many of its fractured supply chains are struggling to cope with the burden of compliance and to engage the next generation of workers. Former LVMH Prize finalist Federico Cina is looking to change that. His eponymous label, founded in 2019, is a celebration of not just Italian craft, but specifically his home region of Romagna. One of the brand’s signatures is a grape design inspired by the traditional Romagnola patterns often featured on tablecloths. The artisanal printing technique is only available at three boutique suppliers in Italy. “This kind of printing is used in almost all of our garments and it can only be done on natural fibres, so we are forced to use natural fibres,” says Stefano Buldrini, Cino’s childhood friend and business partner. “As you grow, the ecosystem around you grows. It’s a win-win for everybody.”
While sustainability isn’t used as a selling point, the brand is transparent about its production volumes — something activists have been calling on more established brands to disclose. And it is determined to be transparent in its production processes, too, says Buldrini. “We produce close to 2,000 garments each season, plus the prototypes that we make in-house. We are very precise with payments to suppliers as well. We have heard that big brands agree to 30 to 60-day payment terms, then don’t pay them for 120 or even 180 days. That is not sustainable. We pay on time and in some cases we advance payment to help them fund production.”
Buldrini extols the virtues of close supply relationships, but says the brand isn’t afraid to push back if suppliers try to undermine the brand values. “We had some suppliers who asked if they could outsource our work to Albania when our production volumes went up, but still say it was ‘Made in Italy’. We see those things a lot — it’s an industry norm — but we’re willing to pay more to produce locally,” he says. “Because we are close to our suppliers, we can visit them often, which means we have more control over the production. Even if we started to work with a supplier further north [Romagna is in northern Italy] or in Puglia in the south, this would be impossible.”
Some of its suppliers even modelled the latest collection, which was significantly scaled back compared to previous seasons, with half as many pieces. “When you see a huge collection every time, it just encourages waste,” says Buldrini. “It’s not needed at this point in time.”
Paris via New Delhi: Kartik Research
New Delhi-based designer Kartik Kumra is in the business of creating “Indian future vintage”. Through his namesake brand, Kartik Research (formerly known as Karu Research), he aims to recontextualise heritage Indian crafts for the modern luxury customer, with longevity in mind. “I want to create clothing that is considered well made, but still has a perspective,” he says. “The kind of clothing that people will want to wear and keep, which could be found in a great vintage store in 20 years.”
The Autumn/Winter 2025 collection, which Kumra presented at Paris Fashion Week Men’s earlier this month, was made from entirely natural fibres and dyes. It featured custom linen and wool handloom textiles, and woollen fabrics made in collaboration with traditional weavers based in the regions of Uttarakhand and Himachal. Suits inspired by early ’90s Yohji Yamamoto and early noughties Comme des Garçons were adorned with intricate embroidery that took weeks to complete.
The industry is taking note: the former LVMH Prize semi-finalist is stocked at Ssense, Selfridges and Dover Street Market, among more than 50 others. Perhaps more importantly to Kumra, his peers are too. When Kumra first showed in Paris last year, he became the first Indian menswear brand to do so. “The larger cultural mission of the brand is to build something that is really resonant for South Asians,” he says. “We haven’t had many aspirational touchstones in the past. Showing in Paris helps us reach that goal.”
With a delicate supply chain made up of small scale “craft clusters”, Kartik Research is a lesson in slow fashion. This isn’t always easy to balance with the mainstream wholesale system, which is only speeding up. “One garment can go to four different artisan groups around the country before reaching the tailoring unit. One yarn might be dyed, woven and then embroidered by different people. There are a lot of steps in the process and sometimes communication breaks down, which makes it difficult to meet timelines,” says Kumra. “With craftspeople, you have to speak the language and have access to them on Whatsapp. You also have to understand their challenges and priorities — if there’s a wedding in the family or a festival in the area, you have to build your production timeline around that, and not the other way around. You can’t just send a tech pack to a factory. We’re getting better at figuring that out.”
The brand is about to open a store in New York — its first outside of India — which Kumra hopes will help the label grow. “There’s a responsibility that comes with growth. When we started, the craftspeople were supporting us, not the other way around. Now, we’re supporting 200 craftspeople throughout the year. If our knitwear production went down and I didn’t have enough work to give to the people who have scaled their businesses to accommodate our growth, I don’t want to have to break that news to them. So we have to keep making exciting products and shooting nice photos and hopefully we can keep growing with them.”
Copenhagen: Aiayu
Danish lifestyle brand Aiayu is not a newcomer to the fashion industry — it’s approaching its 20th anniversary — but it only joined the official Copenhagen Fashion Week schedule in August, marking a new era for the brand.
Back in 2005, founder and creative director Maria Høgh Heilmann met a yarn manufacturer in Bolivia who had developed a dehairing technology for llama wool. She was captivated by the process, but Bolivia lacked the infrastructure to support large-scale knitwear production. They quickly rallied the Danish International Development Agency to invest and created Bolivia’s first knitwear factory. That yarn manufacturer is now Aiayu’s longest-standing partner, and became the blueprint for its supply chains in other countries, which span from cotton and denim to cashmere and yak, sourced from India and Nepal to Mongolia and Europe.
Høgh Heilmann takes her design cues from the natural materials available, rather than forcing material producers to retrofit their materials into her creative vision. “We try to use natural materials as close to nature as possible, so we don’t waste resources on blending or dyeing when it’s not necessary,” she says. “Some people might see this as a challenge, because you can’t guarantee the same tone each season — this depends on the sun, the moon, the humidity and what the animals eat — but I think it’s nice to have limitations in the design world. I work with what I have to get the most beautiful things out of it.”
Speed is never prioritised over longevity — something Høgh Heilmann learnt from her first suppliers in Bolivia. “They would say: ‘Why are you so stressed about when the sweater is ready? You will have it for 25 years, so it doesn’t really matter if it’s ready in one month or three.’” This philosophy informs the brand’s sales policy as well as its approach to production. “Out of respect for the customer and the money they spend on our products, our pieces should last and be relevant for as long as possible. That’s also why we never do sales — it’s about finding the right thing and keeping it. The llama wool we started with and the cotton we found 10 years ago are the same materials we use today.”
In 2022, Aiayu added repair workshops to its roster, teaching consumers how to mend and personalise their clothes. When the brand has surplus or damaged stock from previous seasons, it repairs and adapts them, selling them in-store and (since 2024) on its e-commerce site. “A few seasons ago, we had some sweaters produced in Nepal, but the linking was too tight in the neckline, so it broke when you pulled the sweater off. We replaced all the necks and mended them, so each one was different,” Høgh Heilmann says. The brand declined to share sales figures but says most of its one-of-a-kind drops have sold out. “What could have been waste has become hugely popular.”
New York via Mexico City: Campillo
Like Kartik Research, Mexico-based brand Campillo is leveraging the skill in its home country. For eponymous founder Patricio Campillo — who presented his first New York Fashion Week show in September — sustainability is about using natural materials and fortifying local supply chains.
Campillo only uses natural materials, the majority of which he sources from Mexico. Only silk and linen are unavailable locally and have to be sourced elsewhere (from Korea and Japan, respectively). The sourcing process is rife with contradictions and trade-offs, he says. “You can get recycled or certified organic materials, but if they are coming from the other side of the world, the carbon footprint will get messed up. And I’ve tried so many synthetic leather alternatives — including cactus and pineapple leather — but they tend to wear out much faster. What’s most sustainable? You never know if you’re making the right decision.” To try and make the materials he has available go further, Campillo is developing a tool box of techniques to manipulate them, including oxidation, vegetable dyeing and screen-printing.
“I’m a big believer that price should reflect value,” says Campillo. The brand has created a network of small, mostly family-owned suppliers across Mexico, most of whom haven’t made luxury fashion products before. “Many of them have inherited their artisanship, whether it’s embroidery, hand-carved bone buttons, or metal appliqués. There is so much skill, but a lot of them slowly became manufacturers of items commercialised as souvenirs. How do we pay them enough to redirect their skills?”
When Campillo signs a new manufacturing partner, he invites them into his studio for a week and trains them to make specific products, which they then take responsibility for. One workshop does denim, another does silk shirts and another does linen shirts. Everything is specialised and siloed. “We’re not working with huge factories. It’s two or three family members who all have to live off the work we give them. If I want a specialist product, I have to pay them good wages.”
London: Tolu Coker
Tolu Coker has become a firm favourite on the London Fashion Week schedule, not least for her joyful and transportive shows (the last one was inspired by the significance of the living room as a gathering space for immigrant communities). Her shows often feature pieces from previous collections, and buyers have been known to order these older pieces — even if they passed on them the first time. “We’re building a wardrobe to last, made up of clothing that we see as heirlooms,” she explains. “I want to create clothing people have a connection to and pass down through generations because that’s my personal relationship with clothing.”
The brand’s finished garment manufacturing, sampling and development all happen within a five-mile radius, although its total supply chain casts a much wider net. Coker primarily works with deadstock material, sourced from global deadstock wholesale warehouses, direct from brands with surplus material, and even other industries (she’s been known to use materials intended for car interiors). Increasingly, Coker also sources artisanal fabric and custom handcrafted materials from Ghana and Nigeria, where she has family ties.
Her shows may be joyful, but behind the scenes, Coker is wrestling with heavy themes. “Often brands just talk about sustainable fashion from the environmental point of view, but it’s also about the stories we’re amplifying and the equity we’re building. A lot of the regions that are celebrated for their craft and skill don’t equitably profit from it,” she says. “The Global North tends to monopolise the conversation around sustainability, but the Global South is the most impacted by fashion’s lack of sustainable practices, so they’re best positioned to share solutions. That cross-cultural and cross-continental collaboration is really important to me.”
Working with deadstock naturally limits how much the brand can produce, but there are ways around this if a style proves popular, says Coker. “Sometimes we will reproduce a style in different materials, or we use textile applications on other deadstock materials to get a similar effect, which might involve embroidering or batch-dyeing.” As a result of these labour-intensive processes, the brand sits at the nexus of luxury and craft, which is reflected in its price point. “As a young designer, you often have significantly lower margins than bigger brands, especially if you work with wholesale retailers, so you’re trying to produce at a cost that isn’t feasible for the progression of everyone in your supply chain. We try to work backwards: if we have to sell at a particular price, how do we design pieces that deliver some benefit to our supply chain? For us, it’s about trying to keep things as simple and local as possible.”
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