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What fashion needs to do for the planet is clearer than ever. Making it happen is the hard part. This year’s sustainability innovators are the ones challenging the status quo, championing voices throughout the supply chain and working tirelessly to encourage the industry and the environment to coexist — and to uplift people within the ecosystem rather than leave some behind. Above all, these are the people offering hope, optimism and inspiration in an industry that has plenty of work to do.
Founder and executive director | Hot or Cool Institute
Ask any sustainability expert how to fix the fashion industry, and they will respond with a series of complex and amorphous concepts like degrowth and just transition. Research scientist and political economist Dr Lewis Akenji is one of the leading voices translating these concepts into concrete roadmaps, pushing the industry forward by quantifying the change it needs to implement.
His 2022 report ‘Unfit, Unfair, Unfashionable’ proposed a “sufficiency” wardrobe of 74 items for a country with two seasons (or 85 items for a country with four seasons), inspiring fashion editor Tiffanie Darke’s ‘Rule of Five’ challenge, which went viral on social media for inspiring consumers around the world to curb their clothing consumption to just five items per year. The European Parliament has since cited the report’s recommendations in the EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles, using them to overhaul fashion’s supply chains. Now, the Hot or Cool Institute is establishing a Sufficiency Approach to Fashion and the Environment (SAFE) panel to further engage with policymakers, businesses and scientific leaders, building on its groundbreaking 1.5-degree lifestyles programme, which connects sustainability with well-being, inequality and lifestyles.
Co-founder | Lawyers for Nature and Nature director | Faith in Nature
Giving rights to nature is a radical concept in today’s economic, legal and political structures. But considering how heavily dependent we are on nature and how quickly it is being degraded, it is hard to argue the notion that nature urgently needs not just protection but a mindset shift in what that protection should look like. Environmental laws, she explains, are written from a human-centric perspective — how much water or air pollution a community can live with, for example — but there’s no regard for what any non-human aspect of nature needs. This, despite the fact that companies really do depend on nature, whether it’s for raw materials, ecosystem services or even just human capital.
The need for nature to have legal representation is a principle that Lawyers for Nature co-founder Brontie Ansell has been advancing in courtrooms and, more recently, government bodies and corporate boardrooms around the world. Her work inspired hair and skincare brand Faith in Nature to call in 2022 and ask how nature could be involved in governing the company; that led to her bringing the voice of nature, for the first time, to a company’s board. Now, she sits on fashion and lifestyle brand House of Hackney’s board and is fielding regular outreach from others, in textiles and beyond, who are interested in the concept of giving legal rights to nature and incorporating the needs of nature into their businesses.
Co-founder and managing director | Sourcery
The cotton supply chain is broken, and farmers are the most vulnerable to its cracks and flaws. Amsterdam-based Sourcery, Crispin Argento’s brainchild, exists to connect brands interested in improving their supply chains directly with cotton farmers. Sourcery was formed after a string of other roles Argento played in fashion, including having led the development of the Organic Cotton Accelerator’s farm and seed programmes as executive director. This year, Sourcery launched a new initiative, the Impact and Assurance Programme, aimed at attaching the economics of cotton to how it is grown. It’s a revolutionary idea for its potential to upend how a commodity supply chain, which is built on anonymity, works.
In just the first six months, interest in the programme has been strong, and word is spreading among farmers. Even if the programme doesn’t succeed, however, the concept is so bold that Argento and his Sourcery colleagues deserve credit for trying it out — because when problems seem insurmountable, the solutions that address them must be ambitious.
Head of sustainability | Arvind
Change doesn’t happen at companies without the individuals who drive it, and Abhishek Bansal is one of those people at Arvind Limited, a major textile manufacturer in India. Since joining the company in 2014, he has established the company’s sustainability strategy and team and launched efforts to boost renewable energy, wastewater recycling and cotton agricultural initiatives — all areas in need of transformation and that brands depend on suppliers to deliver.
A common industry paradox is that many suppliers struggle to implement such initiatives because they don’t have the financial support or incentives from brands. Some take the initiative, though — finding the right resources to tap into and lining up the right expertise — to be able to push things through and become leaders in their own right.
During his tenure, Bansal says Arvind has converted textile production to use only recycled water, launched cotton farming initiatives with more than 95,000 smallholder farmers in India, and helped spearhead Arvind’s collaborative efforts with key customers. For example, the company worked with H&M and Deven Supercriticals to deploy waterless dyeing for cotton and cotton blends and partnered with Gap Inc to launch the Global Water Innovation Centre for Action, a non-profit meant to help the industry move towards water efficiency and recycling, in January 2024. Outside of Arvind, Bansal has made it a priority to bring the supplier voice to venues where it’s often missing.
“Some of the organisations, like ZDHC, used to be comprised of only brand participants as board directors, which we lobbied to change successfully,” he says. He became the first manufacturer to sit on the board of ZDHC; his other roles include sitting on the board of the Social and Labor Convergence programme and on the governance committee of OCA.
Founder and CEO | Farfarm
Beto Bina grew up in the south of Brazil. After scoring his dream job in advertising in New York, he found himself disillusioned by his firm’s big clients. He quit, spent some time in the Amazon, and the pieces started to fall into place. He could see the danger that deforestation posed and how much potential a practice called agroforestry (planting crops among trees rather than in place of them) could offer as a solution.
From 2019 to 2022, he led Veja’s sourcing team, overseeing its supply chain for wild rubber, agroecological cotton and leather from “native pastures”. Now, he runs his own company, Farfarm, as a “consultancy specialised in supply chain with a mission to regenerate nature, promote social development and share stories”, and says its most notable work is having developed what he calls “textile agroforestry” — growing cotton in integration with trees and other crops. The company supplies cotton and natural rubber to Veja and Brazilian fashion label Renner, among others, while the scale and ambition of its work continues to grow. One of its latest projects was a collaboration with musicians and communities to plant agroforestry in deforested areas and to write songs about it — describing the three stages of planting, managing and harvesting, with music being a traditional method of storytelling and knowledge sharing — as a way to share the practices with other communities and with future generations.
Founder and chair | Redress and Founder and CEO | The R Collective
Dr Christina Dean’s credentials show she’s not afraid of a challenge. In 2007, she founded Redress, a Hong Kong-headquartered Asia-focused NGO that encourages the transition to a circular fashion system. Back then, sustainability was a niche topic, not only in Greater China but around the world. Yet Dean, named a Global Visionary by UBS, has remained undeterred in her mission to introduce circular fashion to C-suites and consumers alike.
In 2017, the advocate founded The R Collective — a social impact business that rescues, reuses and recycles luxury textile waste with active supply chains for recycling and sustainable production in Greater China, wider Asia and Europe. Dean has acted as a mentor for the Vogue China Fashion Fund and is increasing visibility of the charity in China. This year celebrates the 17th edition of the Redress Design Award. Its winner, to be announced in Hong Kong this September, will join strategic partner Tommy Hilfiger to work on a sustainable design project for retail.
Founder and creative director | ELV Denim
Denim is an enduring staple of many wardrobes, but it has a reputation as one of fashion’s dirtiest categories, which is why ELV Denim founder Anna Foster has a simple yet uncompromising mantra: if it’s not upcycled, it’s not sustainable. Since 2018, ELV Denim has been pioneering upcycling in the luxury denim space, splicing secondhand jeans together in a bid to curb waste and shift aspirations around newness. This zero-waste approach has earned the brand high-profile stockists, from Net-a-Porter to Neiman Marcus, and collaborations with a string of household names. This includes a denim capsule with Gabriela Hearst, customisable silk tops made from Liberty scarves and, in January 2024, a cross-category and cross-brand collection upcycling excess inventory from The Outnet.
ELV Denim has been shortlisted for the BFC/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund twice (in 2021 and 2022) and received the BFC Fashion Trust Fund both years. For her part, Foster won Innovate UK’s 2022 Women in Innovation Award for her blue-sky thinking, having proposed to create a viable textile-sorting infrastructure and transform Britain’s textile waste problem into an upcycling and regeneration economy.
Founder | The Footwear Collective
Dr Yuly Fuentes-Medel is a major player you have likely never heard of, working tirelessly behind the scenes at both product and system levels. In 2023, she founded The Footwear Collective (TFC), creating an agenda-setting space for pre-competitive collaboration among footwear brands (founding labels include On Running, New Balance, Brooks, Vibram, Ecco, Crocs, Target and Reformation).
Since then, TFC has produced a circular road map for footwear, leveraging experts across behavioural science, storytelling and psychology to maximise the adoption of circular consumer practices, as well as building data-driven tools to curb waste and drive efficiency. Despite having spent most of her career in academia, Fuentes-Medel is laser-focused on action. TFC isn’t her first rodeo in building collectives for change. In 2013, she founded Descience, connecting designers, scientists and technologists to solve human challenges. She also acts as a venture partner at circular economy fund Closed Loop Partners and, among advisory and board positions too numerous to name, serves as programme director of the Materials Research Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Co-founders | Living Ink
When Scott Fulbright starts a conversation with a brand, he often kicks off by asking how much black pigment they use. Most of the time, the answer is that they have no idea. That dialogue encapsulates why Living Ink was founded and is growing so quickly: pigments may sound like a niche and insignificant focus for a company when it comes to sustainability, but they are both ubiquitous and resource-intensive to make. “If you look around the room and see something that’s black or colourful, all of that colour comes from petroleum,” Fulbright told Vogue Business in 2023.
He and his co-founder Stevan Albers met at Colorado State University, where they were studying algae in the molecular biology PhD programme. Albers had taught high school science and had carried out research into sustainability innovations; Fulbright was an avid sailor interested in marine biology and was set on combating environmental degradation. They began thinking about the use of fossil fuels to make ink and realised that the very thing they studied, algae, had the potential to change that. Today, their startup Living Ink turns waste from an algae farm in California into a black powder that can be used as pigment in textiles and other industrial applications — and they’ve caught the eye of, and landed partnerships with, major brands in apparel, footwear and beyond. Their ink has turned up in products from brands including Nike and Kathmandu, hang tags for the likes of Patagonia and Quiksilver, and the list is still growing.
Founder and CEO | Ecocitex
The Atacama Desert in Chile has become one of fashion’s many dumping grounds in the Global South. Mounds of discarded clothing litter the landscape, polluting the area. Rosario Hevia has been at the forefront of Chile’s sustainability and fashion sectors. With a background in industrial engineering, finance and NGO work, she is best known for founding Ecocitex in 2020, a social enterprise based in Chile that is pioneering the region’s circular economy by tackling textile waste through reuse, upcycling and recycling. Prior to that, Rosario founded Travieso in 2018, a children’s clothing exchange initiative.
Ecocitex, a portmanteau of ‘Economía Circular Textil’ (Textile Circular Economy), turns textile waste into yarn, processing it to specific colours without using water or dyes. Old clothes are separated by colour, then cut, shredded and processed into a fleece-like material that is twisted into thread or yarn.
Ecocitex also hires women who have formerly been incarcerated, are elderly or have never been formally employed and trains them to select, classify and strip the clothing to prepare for the recycling process. The company donates clothing to people in need and regularly hosts mega-sales for those who don’t require donations but are low-income.
Founder and designer
The sustainable fashion community was dealt a massive blow in May when beloved New York designer Mara Hoffman announced she was shutting her brand down — proof, it seemed, of just how hard it is to operate in fashion with sustainability at the forefront. Her decision, though, delivered a much-needed message for the industry: the system is still broken. And it sparked a conversation among designers and advocates alike about where to go from here.
The fact that Hoffman was willing and able to speak about the decision so publicly and took the decision to close altogether rather than sell her name or take on a partnership are what reinforces her leadership role in the industry. She has been outspoken about social and environmental struggles since pivoting her brand to operate sustainability-first a decade ago and has since pushed the envelope in overhauling her supply chain and working with next-gen materials. With her SS23 collection, she launched a swimsuit made with a bio-based fabric, a major leap for a category developed almost entirely from synthetic materials, and last year debuted a dress made with Circ’s textile-to-textile recycled fibre.
It was all too much, though — not the difficulty of the work, as she doesn’t shy away from challenges, but the pace it demanded of her. “We are stuck in the paradigm that more, more, more equals some example of success — when everything around us is pointing, or at least asking us, for less right now,” she told Vogue Business. Hoffman hopes that her choice to step away from the grind rather than force success within it, can be the example that others take inspiration from. “I feel it’s important that I role model not jumping into that illusion that if I stay unplugged for more than three minutes, I’ll become irrelevant,” she added. “If a creative is never given a moment to pause in their output, it’s almost impossible to advance in what you’re actually contributing.”
She’s not going anywhere, however: “I deeply love my job of creating, and particularly creating for women. It’s the core of who I am. I’m not looking to run away from fashion… I just want to realign my contribution.”
Co-founders | Veja
To transform a supply chain, you have to know it first. Or, you can avoid industry norms and build your own from scratch, developing relationships with farmers, manufacturers and the surrounding communities along the way. This is how cult-favourite footwear brand Veja has chosen to operate since 2004, when the co-founders first did a field visit to Brazil, eventually learning Portuguese and spending maybe half of every year there since.
They began sourcing organic, regenerative cotton in 2004 and natural rubber later that year; next came vegetable-tanned leather in 2008, followed by organic dyes in 2011. That’s remarkable for the sneaker category, which is notoriously difficult to innovate in: a handful of major players control the majority of the market, and the construction of each shoe — relying heavily on synthetic materials — is so complicated that sustainability has proved elusive. It has done so successfully while innovating in the retail landscape at the same time: as of this year, the brand has sold over 14 million pairs of sneakers in 112 countries and has repaired 25,000 sneakers since launching its ‘Clean, Repair, and Collect’ project in 2020.
Equally notable is that mainstream success hasn’t reduced, or even propelled, the brand’s support of a range of bold initiatives. For example, a partnership with Sea Shepherd, an ocean conservation non-profit that is viewed as controversial for its direct-action tactics, as well as its work with organisations such as Farfarm, which works to promote community-based agroecological farming systems in Brazil. The project didn’t deliver the hoped-for yields immediately — but that’s how agriculture works, often unpredictably — and unlike many companies that want guarantees, Veja was OK with the uncertainty and waited it out. And when there was enough of a cotton harvest to purchase for its supply chain, the company did just that.
Founder | The Bear Scouts
Dio Kurazawa has been a long-time advocate for sustainable fashion and supply chain innovation, working behind the scenes since founding his consultancy, The Bear Scouts, in 2013. Today, Kurazawa has an outsized impact, having mentored notable emerging designers through the Zalando Visionary Award — including 2024 winner Sinéad O’Dwyer, who he is supporting with supplier relationships and new materials in Portugal — and Copenhagen Fashion Week, including Stem, Rolf Ekroth, Berner Kühl and Alectra Rothschild.
In the past two years, Kurazawa has expanded his ambitions, partnering with London-based fashion publication 1 Granary on a pioneering incubation scheme for emerging designers, supporting brands including Paolina Russo, Chopova Lowena and Charlie Constantinou, with building robust and responsible supply chains. The programme has seen participating brands expand into new product categories and increase sales, but crucially, it also closes the gap between designers and their production lines, filling the gaps in fashion education by teaching them how to forge long-term partnerships and combine creativity with business savvy. Kurazawa also serves on the advisory board of fashion manufacturing innovator Unspun and contributes advisory to the BNV Foundation, Copenhagen Fashion Week and Pizarro SA.
Founder and CEO | Suay Sew Shop
Before she opened a sewing shop in Los Angeles, Lindsay Rose Medoff worked the land. She loves manual labour, she says, but had been working in fashion for years and was feeling conflicted and unsure of her purpose in the industry. She ran some organic farms for a stretch, but fashion never left her, and she eventually began talking with Patagonia about finding ways to repair clothes efficiently and at scale.
She founded Suay Sew Shop in late 2017 with her mentor and collaborator Tina Dosewell (who named Suay, which means “beautiful” in her native Thai). Medoff wanted to prove that a repair and upcycling business model can both exist and be successful — and can do so by uplifting the people responsible for doing the repair work rather than reducing their labour to the lowest cost possible.
Today, in addition to upcycling clothes for retailers and consumers regionally, Suay offers take-back bags — Suay it Forward bags — for people to mail in old clothes. While take-back and mail-in programmes are increasingly common, few, if any, take full responsibility for every garment that comes their way. It’s Suay’s raison d’etre. “You can move all these clothes to every corner of the globe, but they still are a physical object that has to be dealt with,” says Medoff.
Clothes passing through Suay end up in one of four channels: thrift, repair, reworked or redyed in the community dye bath. Suay’s growth indicates that there’s a hunger for what it’s offering. Global brands and retailers are reaching out to Medoff almost weekly, she says (she can’t reveal names publicly yet), and they launched their Center for Reuse and Repair in June.
Founder | Banofi Leather
Jinali Mody is the visionary founder of Banofi Leather, a material science startup that upcycles crop waste into plant-based leather. This innovative approach not only provides a sustainable alternative to traditional leather, but offers additional income to Indian farmers in rural Kolkata. With an MA in environmental management from Yale University, Mody has previously served as chief strategy officer for an Indian startup focused on plastic recycling, alongside working with McKinsey for three years. Coming from a family of entrepreneurs and being passionate about environmental conservation (she has been a scuba diver since the age of 12 and has witnessed the effects of climate change on oceans first-hand), Mody aims to merge profit, purpose and planet.
The fashion industry has long grappled with the environmental impact of leather and the significant environmental damage it creates, with traditional tannery processes releasing toxins and faux leather often being made from plastic materials. Banofi Leather addresses these issues by achieving a 95 per cent reduction in water use, an over 90 per cent reduction in carbon emissions and a 100 per cent reduction in toxic waste compared to animal leather. Remarkably, Banofi’s leather looks and feels just like the real thing. Currently, Banofi is in the early stages of bringing this material to life and is piloting with over 50 global brands; Mody hopes to disrupt the leather industry while reducing environmental pollution and supporting local farmers.
Co-founders | The Now Work
Burnout is rife in the fashion industry. Even more so at the nexus of fashion and sustainability, where professionals care — and give — a lot. It’s not unusual for them to be overworked and underpaid, tasked with systemic change on minuscule budgets. But burnout doesn’t help them progress, and it definitely doesn’t help fashion businesses achieve their sustainability goals. Hannah Phang and Laura Hunter were among the first to call this out, co-founding The Now Work to reframe the conversation around sustainable work practices and redesign sustainability work in a way that allows the individuals delivering it to thrive.
Since its founding in 2022, The Now Work has connected clients, including On Running, Positive Luxury and Lenzing, with its network of over a thousand highly skilled sustainability professionals, enabling them to achieve ambitious targets in a more adaptive way. Early signs show it’s working: The Now Work’s revenues grew 48 per cent in its second year of operation, and its network of sustainability professionals now stands at over a thousand people. Meanwhile, Phang and Hunter continue to challenge the status quo on their new podcast, ‘The Future of Impact Work’.
Founder | Driftless Goods
Performance wear and synthetics are almost synonymous. Fleece jackets, the core staple of any outdoor collection, are made almost entirely from petroleum. Whatever their sustainability commitment, brands say they can’t beat the functionality that synthetic fibres offer.
Designer, consultant and advisor Caroline Priebe wants to dispel that myth, at least for the vast majority of customers who wear their fleece to, say, walk the dog or run out for a coffee, or even hike or climb. None of these activities or clothing uses justify the profoundly harmful impacts that synthetic fibres, and the chemicals they are treated with, are having on the planet, experts argue.
The ethos for Driftless Goods, the brand Priebe launched earlier this year, is to offer plastic-free outerwear: “Farm-to-closet fleece for people who prefer not to wrap themselves in plastic.”
Co-owners | Veshin Factory
Alternatives to bovine leather are among the most contentious next-gen materials, sparking pushback from heritage leather houses and consumers alike. At the centre of this debate — and hoping to find a resolution — is luxury leather goods manufacturer Veshin Factory. Originally founded as K-Shin Factory in 2013 by entrepreneur Hongliang Yu, Veshin Factory is transitioning its existing supply chain to work exclusively with next-gen materials, providing a crucial stepping stone to scale for innovators in the space, including PVH Corp partner Ecovative and Allbirds supplier Natural Fiber Welding. This way, material startups can work out the kinks in their production processes and finesse their research and development before onboarding brand partners — which in turn can increase appeal to brands because they can avoid some of the added cost, risk, or perceived risk, involved in working with a new material.
In 2019, Joey Pringle came on board as co-founder alongside COO Xiao Wei. This year, the company expanded to Colombia and Brazil with the aim of localising supply chains and lowering clients’ carbon footprints in the process. Veshin Factory donates a percentage of its revenues to plastic clean-up non-profit Mare Blu, as well as the Orphan Education Society Guangdong.
Head of content | Global Fashion Agenda
Storytelling is a crucial tool in fashion’s sustainability movement, and Faith Robinson is one of the pioneers in telling those stories and how. As head of content at Copenhagen-based non-profit Global Fashion Agenda, Robinson programmes its annual Global Fashion Summit, challenging colonial notions of expertise and unpacking complex sustainability dialogues in emotive viral moments.
She has pushed for waste handlers to be platformed as circularity experts, manufacturers as just-transition visionaries and youth advocates as new-wave leadership. Sustainability summits often face backlash, as attendees project their frustration at the industry’s lack of action onto the programme, but they are ultimately a space for storytelling and convening. Robinson works tirelessly behind the scenes to make sure Indigenous peoples and local communities are given just as much space and power at summits as well-known profiles while consistently pushing for more inclusive sustainability spaces outside of her role, too. Robinson founded the Instagram-based platform Entry Level Activist in 2019 to empower consumers to create positive change despite activism often feeling extreme or inaccessible. The same year, she also created the @Post_Growth account to debunk one of fashion’s most vital — but misunderstood — concepts: degrowth (Robinson is currently completing an MA in the subject).
Founder and CEO | Sustainable Fashion Forum and Podcast host | ‘Green Behaviour’
Brittany Sierra is a realistic voice piercing through fashion’s sustainability movement. Rather than focusing on a utopian future, the conversations she curates are rooted in identifying and transforming human behaviours. This year, Sierra launched the ‘Green Behaviour’ podcast, offering critical insight into consumer behaviour and the psychology behind overconsumption. Bringing together nuanced takes from neuroscientists, researchers and industry experts, Sierra adeptly unpacks the role of fashion in society, the barriers to sustainable buying habits, and why people still gravitate towards fast fashion despite knowing its negative impacts.
Her track record in shaping the sustainability conversation is proven: as founder and CEO of Sustainable Fashion Forum, Sierra programmes an annual conference on the subject, attracting both high-profile speakers from Vestiaire Collective, Ebay and Neiman Marcus Group, as well as often-undervalued grassroots voices. One of the only Black-owned organisations operating in this space, Sustainable Fashion Forum has become a beacon of inclusivity, not just delivering conference content but expanding into a jobs board and networking community to connect sustainability advocates across silos. Sierra also served on Rothy’s Sustainability Council, providing insights that shaped the brand’s recycling programme.
Founding member and country head | Fashion Revolution India
As extreme weather events become more frequent and intense, the fashion industry will be forced to reckon with the impact of climate change on its supply chains. One of the leading voices spotlighting these impacts — which are already well underway — is Shruti Singh, author of Fashion Revolution India’s 2023 report ‘Craft in the age of climate crisis’, which was presented at COP28 in Dubai.
Singh is a seasoned advocate for sustainable fashion, transparency and climate justice with a background in public policy, research and education. She currently serves as CIC board member of Fashion Revolution and is the founding member and country head of Fashion Revolution India. She is also the India Hub strategist at Canopy, a non-profit dedicated to protecting the forest and scaling next-gen materials. Her insights into the craft economy post-Covid — and amid climate change — centre Indigenous wisdom, craft heritage and craftspeople themselves, something the fashion industry often fails to do when talking about transforming supply chains. Alongside her policy report, speaking and advisory, Singh is the founder of Designing Future Earth, a grassroots organisation dedicated to nurturing climate storytelling and negotiation skills among young aspiring changemakers.
Responsible business projects lead | Artistic Milliners
Sustainability in fashion relies on suppliers operating sustainably. Brands set the public-facing goals but depend on suppliers to be able to meet them, and that can be a tough hill to climb given suppliers already operate on extremely thin margins. Saqib Sohail is making it happen at the largest denim manufacturer in Pakistan. He’s a driving force behind Artistic Milliners’s supply chain traceability work, lifecycle assessments, recycled materials and biomaterial efforts, as well as expanding the company’s organic cotton farming project, which is helping farmers in Pakistan transition their land into organic practices.
One company can only do so much on its own, though. Sohail knows the industry needs to hear more from suppliers, and he consistently shows up in spaces, brand-led conferences for example, where they are often under-represented or not present at all. He understands that brands aren’t always seeking the supplier voice — but that they need action from suppliers in order to get anything done relating to sustainability.
Co-founders and CEO, COO and CTO | SuperCircle
Co-founders Chloe Songer, Stuart Ahlum and Phong Nguyen work in an aspect of the supply chain typically known as reverse logistics, handling product returns. But the speciality of their two-year-old startup SuperCircle is allocating products to their highest and best uses — and elevating what the opportunities for those highest and best uses can look like. So much of textile ‘recycling’ is little more than downcycling, but SuperCircle is partnering with textile recycling platforms to develop capacity and scale so they change the game of reverse logistics rather than just play it.
SuperCircle, which the trio describe as a “full-stack textile recycling platform powering front-end and back-end recycling programmes” for brands and retailers, is on track to enable brands including Reformation, J Crew and Uniqlo to recycle their clothes into new clothes — a step towards circularity that has remained elusive for an industry where take-back programmes are usually a one-way ticket to exporting waste overseas. They’ve done it by combining their shared experience from across the industry — Songer, having worked with Alexander Wang Group and Gap Inc prior to circular footwear platform Thousand Fell, Nguyen having pioneered the online ‘flash sale’ and Ahlum, having worked in footwear material innovation as well as retail marketing tech in Shanghai.
Founder and creative director | CFCL
If the iconic Issey Miyake were to have an heir apparent, it would be Yusuke Takahashi, the creative director and founder of Japanese fashion house CFCL. In fact, prior to launching his label in 2020, Takahashi had been serving as lead designer for Issey Miyake Men since 2013. Now, out on his own, with a specialisation in knitwear and a focus on environmental consciousness, Takahashi is breaking ground in his home base of Tokyo and beyond.
This year, CFCL made its runway debut in Paris, showing its eighth collection in February with an official runway slot on the Paris Fashion Week calendar. The show was well received, with all eyes on Takahashi’s ability to twist and manipulate the humble knit. That month, CFCL launched the CFCL Knitting Lab in Tokyo to train artisans on new techniques. It’s not only Takahashi’s designs but their conception that makes him stand out as a designer: all of his pieces are configured on a computer to eliminate waste, and he uses recycled materials throughout his collections. The Knitting Lab is designated for experimenting with new-age materials, and the company shares its journey in sustainability on its website.
CEO | Copenhagen Fashion Week
When Cecilie Thorsmark took the helm at Copenhagen Fashion Week in 2018, she was tasked with a difficult mandate: take the largely local event and turn it into a major pioneer on the global stage. How exactly? By overhauling the fashion week infrastructure and bringing it in line with global sustainability goals. In 2020, Thorsmark laid out her three-year action plan, proposing that all brands participating in Copenhagen Fashion Week meet mandatory minimum standards on sustainability, spanning six key areas from smart material choices and working conditions to design and consumer engagement. The new system came into effect in 2023 and will be updated this year to reflect Thorsmark’s increasing ambitions.
Parallel to her work at Copenhagen Fashion Week, she acts as deputy chair of the European Fashion Alliance, a membership-based coalition founded in 2022 with the aim of connecting the fashion industry with the policymakers shaping its future. The alliance has been a vocal proponent of safeguarding creativity in sustainability legislation and has lobbied for policymakers to consult with brands and designers as proposals take shape.
Founder and CEO | TômTex
Moving to New York from her native Vietnam was initially a shock for Uyen Tran, not because of cultural differences but because of societal ones. She grew up with her mother’s ethos of purchasing secondhand and repairing clothes for further wear, and when she arrived in New York, she encountered a fashion culture of disposability — and then, after studying at Parsons School of Design and working for fashion brands, she witnessed the wasteful industrial practices that occur behind the scenes as well.
That put her on a track to innovate and collaborate, leading to what became the technology behind TômTex, a company that transforms seafood waste and mushrooms into materials it says are fully bio-based, non-toxic alternatives to leather. Mushrooms have become big in fashion and other sectors, but the seafood waste is of particular importance for her: climate change has impacted shrimp farming in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta, where quantities of shell waste have increased. Tran realised the potential of chitosan — a biopolymer found in shrimp shells, as well as mushrooms — to create a material that biodegrades in months rather than centuries and developed the technology at the Parsons Lab.
TômTex has since partnered with independent brands such as Peter Do and has four collaborations coming up with Collina Strada, Kim Shui, Luar and Allina Liu — including plans to move forward with production after their next shows and its first commercial product set to launch spring 2025. The startup plans to continue building on those collaborations, eventually expanding beyond fashion into automotive, furniture, hospitality and more.
Co-founders | Colechi
Colechi’s Clean Fashion manifesto lays out a plan for fashion to reach transparency across four pillars: sourcing, making, media and afterlife. The manifesto is the backbone of the education and research platform, founded in 2018 by sisters Tina and Piarvé Wetshi to spotlight community and collaboration through education.
Collectivism is at the centre of what Colechi does. It offers workshops, exhibition curations and campaigns to encourage people to positively engage with the manifesto. The platform also offers an award-winning knit club named You Can Knit With Us, the Clean Fashion Summit and a print journal that acts as a dialogue between the fashion industry and its supply chain, incorporating the voices of designers, manufacturers, scientists and more. Colechi has partnered with Raeburn, Tate, Saatchi Gallery and Barbican on projects.
Tina previously held PR roles at Bottega Veneta, Karla Otto and Exposure and also worked as a curator, centring on the intersection of politics, culture and identity, using fashion as a mechanism for social criticism. Piarvé has a background in digital marketing and also co-runs Last Yarn, a platform for designers, creatives and students to buy and resell surplus fabric.
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