Here’s the ‘Sustainable Fashion’

 In 2009, the Danish Fashion Institute held one of the first sustainable fashion summits in Copenhagen, just around the time of the U.N.’s COP15. This was back when everyone thought it was funny to make jokes about green being the new black, and most people thought “eco” and “vegan” and “organic” all meant kind of the same thing, and if any major fashion companies even had chief sustainability officers, they were based in tiny rooms many floors and winding corridors away from the heart of the C-suite.

How things have changed.

Now pretty much all fashion brands, from the mass market to luxury, swear that they put sustainability at the heart of their strategic plans. On almost all of their websites are E.S.G. (environmental, social and governance) reports the size of small books. Chief executives are clamoring to talk about how they are evolving their businesses to combat climate change. Pledges to reach carbon neutrality abound.

In 2018, the U.N.F.C.C.C. (the U.N. climate change body) unveiled the Fashion Industry Charter for Climate action, with its science-based targets for the fashion industry, including reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Last year, at COP26 in Glasgow, the group updated it to reflect a need to halve emissions by 2030; currently, about 150 brands and supporting organizations have signed on