To receive the Vogue Business newsletter, sign up here.
“This is more pressure than COP. And you know why? Because this is truly where changes happen. COP is amazing, but you could lose a little bit of hope. Here I have a little more hope,” said Stella McCartney, as she took to the stage alongside Antoine Arnault during a gathering of LVMH leaders and partners on Thursday.
The group brought together 500 people —including McCartney, in whose namesake brand LVMH has a stake — at the Paris headquarters of United Nations agency Unesco to announce the first results of its Life 360 sustainability plan, launched in May 2021. “We have taken our sustainability policy to another level in less than three years,” said Arnault, who is LVMH’s head of image and environment. “This strategy sets out quantified targets for 2023, 2026 and 2030 in order to address our key challenges in the areas of creative circularity, biodiversity, traceability and climate…2023 is the first milestone in this programme, and an opportunity for an initial review.”
The company claimed achievements in each of those four areas, including having met its 2023 target to offer new circular services by establishing a “repair-and-care task force” in several of the group’s maisons; reducing its Scopes 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions; helping to regenerate 1.37 million hectares to support its biodiversity targets; and for traceability, knowing the countries of origin for key raw materials diamonds, wool and leather in upwards of 95 per cent of products. Details are relatively scarce, though, making it difficult to evaluate the true benefits and impact of these initiatives.
Arnault noted new alliances with external partners, addressing issues like regenerative agriculture and the “successful” launch of Nona Source, a platform that repurposes high end fabrics. “Hundreds of thousands of products are now being repaired, upcycled, and refurbished,” he added.
On LVMH’s carbon footprint, he said emissions are dropping “even as our sales figures rise”, but this is referring to emissions intensity — how efficiently individual products are made, essentially — rather than absolute, or total, emissions, which in terms of climate impacts is the number that matters most. (LVMH clarified that Scopes 1 and 2 emissions are reducing in absolute terms, but these represent a fraction of a company’s total footprint. The rest is Scope 3, which refers to emissions from the supply chain not directly owned by the company.)
Arnault recognised the climate crisis has only become more dire, and spoke about remaining ambitions. “We must continue to do our part and to adapt. Experts are beginning to project that we’re headed for a global warming increase of 3 degrees by the end of the century and not the targeted 1.5 degrees.”
Good intentions do not equal progress, however, and it’s hard to fully assess LVMH’s efforts based on the information the company has shared thus far. When it first laid out its Life 360 plan, it included initiatives in areas such as regenerative agriculture that other fashion companies were already pursuing, but it also addressed issues the company had the potential to lead on in the fashion industry, such as its 2030 goal for 25 per cent of profits to be generated by circular services instead of new products.
That’s where product repairability fits in, and LVMH said Thursday that Louis Vuitton repairs 600,000 products per year and that 79 per cent of Berluti’s leather products are repairable. The Louis Vuitton repairs are not a source of income, and the company wouldn’t share total figures — 600,000 out of how many products are repaired? — but did say that the price of repairs varies by situation and depends on the “specific know-how” needed, which it is working to expand over time. With Berluti, shoes with leather soles are resoleable, but they don’t yet know how to resole their running-style sneakers.
On its biodiversity efforts, which have included some unique and potentially game-changing initiatives such as investing in cosmetopoeia and agroforestry, the group’s update was more vague. It did not specify what qualifies the 1.37 million hectares as being “regenerated” by the end of 2022 or who is validating it; it is working towards a target of regenerating 5 million hectares by the end of 2030, saying only that will be done through conservation, reforestation or regenerative agriculture programmes. Those will include agriculture programmes in Türkiye for cotton, Australia for merino wool, South Africa for mohair, Indonesia for palm oil and France for Moët Hennessy vineyards “and certain key perfume ingredients”, but the company did not say how much is LVMH investing in them or how large these initiatives will be, either in acreage or in terms of the volume of materials that will be produced.
LVMH unveiled a new water target, which is significant given water is an area that fashion tends to overlook: the group aims to reduce its overall water consumption footprint by 30 per cent by 2030, although again provided no detail on what that means in practice — how much water does that translate to in actual volumes, and how it will achieve that target.
The group also announced the new Life 360 Business Partners platform, “[a] new guiding compass for supporting its suppliers”, particularly in the areas of raw materials, transport and reducing scope 3 emissions, which account for 95 per cent of the group’s carbon footprint. It involves the creation of a “sustainability partners day”, where — from 2024 — it will seek feedback from and offer training for suppliers.
The end of the day at Unesco’s HQ included an upcycled fashion show by Swiss fashion designer Kevin Germanier; a conversation on environmental advocacy between Natalie Portman and Antoine Arnault; and speeches by Virginijus Sinkevičius, European commissioner for the environment, oceans and fisheries and Georgina Grenon, director of environmental excellence of Paris 2024 and by LVMH chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault.
The luxury titan shared some of his convictions including the fact that the “environmental challenge redefines the usual rules of competition within the luxury goods industry.”
“When issues as important as the supply of raw materials or even the habitability of the Earth are at stake, I believe it is our duty to rise above the usual pattern. That's why we've chosen to invite some competitors here today, as well as representatives from other industrial sectors, whom I'd like to thank for coming,” he said, referring to a virtual appearance by Chanel’s Bruno Pavlovsky and a panel featuring Chanel’s supply chain and ecological transition director Eric Dupont.
LVMH didn’t join the Fashion Pact, the cross-industry coalition launched in 2019 by French president Emmanuel Macron and helmed by Kering chairman and CEO François-Henri Pinault. “We were criticized a lot at the time. I had tried to explain why we weren’t going. Today even without creating formal alliances with our competitors, we speak more and more and things are moving fast. It’s very encouraging,” Antoine Arnault told reporters at a press briefing on Thursday evening.
“We’re introducing a new luxury at the confluence of performance and commitment,” Bernard Arnault concluded.
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
More from on this topic:
Inside LVMH’s biggest sustainability plan yet
As COP kicks off, Gulf fashion faces a sustainability reckoning
Water is ‘a resource under stress’ says LVMH, as it vows to cut usage
