COP28 is Over. What’s Next for Fashion?
“We keep burning fossil fuels,” María Mendiluce, CEO of the We Mean Business coalition, said at a UN Fashion Charter for Climate Action event during the climate change talks known as COP28 in Dubai earlier this month. “I haven’t heard anyone saying, ‘yes, we are committed to phasing down and phasing out fossil fuels.’”
Fashion’s presence at the annual conference has been getting progressively stronger, a recognition, many in the industry say, of clothing and footwear production’s unequivocal reliance on oil, gas and coal to keep things chugging along. But progress to transition to renewables has been slow and scattershot, weighed by what Hakan Karaosman, an assistant professor at Cardiff University, recently told Vogue Business was a “mismatch” between many companies’ sales growth and decarbonization targets.
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“Many (fast) fashion giants promote and endorse technology and innovation as the ultimate solution. But these tools cannot bring any change if we do not talk about the real problem: production volumes,” said Karaosman, who also chairs the Union of Concerned Researchers in Fashion. “Climate goals are impossible to meet if fashion giants keep increasing their sales.”
Part of the reason why fashion has been able to “shimmy along the back wall when it comes to climate impact,” according to Samata Pattinson, founder and CEO of the “cultural sustainability” organization Black Pearl, is that so many people see it as a frivolous business.
“I have a very academic family and it always mildly irritates me when I’m in these gatherings and I get asked what I do and where I work and I say, ‘I work in the apparel industry’…and I immediately see this kind of light go out in people’s eyes because they deem that there is no heavy substantial or academic conversation to be had with me,” Pattinson said at the same event. Fashion “hasn’t been recognized for the slightly lethal contributions it has and plays in this climate change conversation,” she added.
Just before the close of COP28 on Wednesday, negotiators from 196 countries struck an unprecedented deal to phase out fossil fuels, signaling what United Nations Climate dubbed the “beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era.” But the final agreement is still riddled with loopholes and half measures, revealing the influence of powerful petrostates, critics say. And while governments agreed to establish a fund to help vulnerable developing countries address loss and damage arising from climate change, the deal does not commit rich nations to finance the transition away from fossil fuels.
“Beyond a promising early-stage announcement from H&M and Bestseller to invest in an offshore wind farm in Bangladesh, commitments and investments from brands to transition their supply chains over to renewable energy were notably absent,” Rachel Kitchin, corporate campaigner at Stand.earth, wrote in a blog post. “Unfortunately, investment in the energy transition and money for the global South manufacturers that are making those brands’ clothes is essential if the sector is going to phase out fossil fuels and cut its emissions.”
The environmental advocacy group, together with Oxfam Bangladesh, has launched a call to the 100 UN Fashion Charter for Climate Action signatories, which include tentpole names such as Adidas, H&M Group, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton and The North Face owner VF Corp., to phase out fossil fuels in their supply chains “fairly and transparently.” As part of their participation in the charter, the companies have committed to net-zero emissions by 2050.
Phasing out fossil fuels includes protecting the people who work upstream, Kitchin said. This means “taking into account the impact on workers and manufacturers in the countries that make the world’s clothes and shoes by committing money to climate adaptation programs,” such as supporting workers during dangerous heatwaves, footing the bill for energy efficiency programs and committing to pay fair prices for their products. It also requires swerving away from “potentially dangerous distractions” like biomass, which can generate higher emissions than coal, jeopardize air quality and health, and result in deforestation, she added.
Campaigners recently discovered an unlikely ally: K-pop fans. Throughout COP28, a group known as Kpop4Planet urged luxury houses that have signed on K-pop idols to appeal to younger customers, to move from fossil fuels to renewables like wind and solar.
“Luxury fashion and K-pop are so closely mixed as K-pop idols’ ambassadorship has increased brand sales due to this effect, especially in Asia—for example the ‘Jimin effect,’ which influences his fans to buy from luxury fashion brand Dior,” Dayeon Lee, a representative from the group, told Sourcing Journal. “However, after researching their disclosures, we found that luxury fashion houses such as Dior, Celine, Chanel and Saint Laurent, which also work closely with K-pop idols like Blackpink, have their carbon emissions rise each year despite making promises to cut down.”
Kpop4Planet wants three things from the high-end houses, Lee said: to be transparent about where and how their products are made; to set targets to transition to 100 percent renewable energy; and reduce absolute emissions in their supply chain by at least 43 percent by 2030 while sharing a “credible” decarbonization strategy for achieving that target.
“Currently, only the Kering group, among the luxury brands, [has] declared that they will use 100 percent renewable energy in the supply chain by 2030, while LVMH and Chanel have not made a [similar] commitment,” she said. “It is disappointing to see all these brands keep using fossil fuels even though they claim to care about sustainability by promoting it through marketing.”
Luxury staked its claim at COP28, nevertheless. LVMH, for instance, used the conference to announce a “redoubling” of its biodiversity and climate initiatives, inking an agreement with the Foundation For Amazon Sustainability to combat deforestation and embarking on a partnership with real estate developers in the United Arab Emirates and Miami to improve the environmental footprint of its stores. Stella McCartney, one of LVMH’s stable of brands, erected a sustainable innovation exhibit, called “Stella’s Sustainable Market,” that showcased more than 15 “next-generation pioneers” in regenerative agriculture and bio- and plant-based alternatives to plastic. A panel organized by the Fashion Task Force, part of King Charles III’s Sustainable Market Initiative, brought together Brunello Cucinelli, Stella McCartney and Yoox Net-a-Porter.
At the start of COP28, Iranian-American climate activist Sophia Kianni covered herself in fake oil to call attention to the urgency of tackling fossil fuels’ hold on fashion. The “We Wear Oil” social media activation, a partnership with the Stand.earth-backed Fossil Fuel Fashion campaign and Vogue Arabia, was designed to spotlight the “intrinsic link between the growth of synthetic fibers and fast fashion.”
“One of the biggest problems today is that we consume so much and so fast—and fast fashion is killing our planet,” Kianni said in a statement. “The fast fashion industry has become part of the fossil fuel industry. We are all literally wearing oil.”
Synthetics, the campaign said, are just another term for fossil fuels, and cheap, petrochemical-derived fibers like polyester allow the industry to overproduce. To put it another way, the more unsustainable clothing we buy, the more coal, oil and gas we consume, “We Wear Oil” said.
“We can make young people understand that they are part of the solution by giving them the tools they need to understand what difference they specifically can make,” Kianni added. “Every time we choose to re-wear an outfit, every moment we decide to buy mindfully, we’re casting a vote for the world we want to live in. Choosing quality over quantity, secondhand over new—these aren’t just fashion choices, they’re declarations of our commitment to the planet.”
Speaking to Pattinson in a one-on-one conversation on stage, Dame Ellen MacArthur, the former sailor who founded the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, underscored the need to redesign the entire take-make-dispose economy—literally.
“In today’s world where we can do anything with a phone, why would we ever create waste or pollution?” she asked “You know, we’re better than that. We can be more creative and innovative than that. If you’re designing the best item you can as a designer of stuff, why would you not ask that first question of where do I source my materials? What is it made of and what happens at the end of its life?”
That conversation is happening is a good thing, Maxine Bédat, executive director of the “think and do” tank the New Standard Institute, said at the same event. But what’s also needed is robust regulation, like the New York Fashion Sustainability and Social Accountability Act that she’s been promoting, so it isn’t always the same companies that are doing the talking.
“We have an emergency out there,” she said. “And we need to have accountability and know that having that accountability is going to [bring] all the voices that are staying silent and staying on the sidelines to the table. It’ll be everybody’s space because there will be accountability across the board, and that’s what we really need to see.”
Outside of the charter, the industry is “moving in the wrong direction…it’s moving toward the equivalent of gas-guzzling cars,” Bédat added.
At a different session entitled “How to Clothe 10 Billion People Sustainably,” Nicolaj Reffstrup, founder of Ganni, agreed—investing in sustainability simply isn’t a “profitable business,” he said. “From an operational perspective, we at Ganni welcome any type of policies or regulations, ideally also some sort of financial incentives, anything that will help level the playing field and incentivize more people to invest in the green transition.”
Where fashion goes from here is TBD. The supply chain is long, convoluted and nebulous in parts. Brands also typically don’t own their own factories, instead sharing production lines and therefore responsibility. All of which to say, the foundational question of “who pays” is almost always answered with “someone else.” According to a 2021 analysis by the Apparel Impact Institute and Fashion for Good, the industry needs an estimated $1 trillion to hit net-zero emissions by 2050.
But Mendiluce’s message to the audience had as much hope as exasperation. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you use the brand power that you have to…remove the barriers that you need to achieve your goals?” she asked.
