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Happy Friday. It’s going to be the last working one for me for a little while; this is my final dispatch before heading out on maternity leave for the next few months.
For regular readers, that means a brief break in our usual programming. But fear not, The Frayed Edge will be back in your inboxes every other week from December. In my absence, I’m handing over to our talented team of BoF reporters to keep you up to date and in the know on all the progress and all the pitfalls affecting the industry’s sustainability efforts.
With that housekeeping out of the way, to business.
It’s climate summit season, with the UN’s annual COP climate confab currently underway in Brazil. It should be a big moment to take stock of all the developments that have taken place since the world agreed to cap global warming a decade ago. Instead, temperatures are still rising and fashion businesses that have been sleeping on their sustainability targets are having to confront a new challenge: how to survive in an age of climate crisis.
Addressing these topics isn’t getting any easier either, amid a cultural and political backlash against so-called “woke” capitalism ushered in by the Trump administration in the US. Late last week, I sat down with Patagonia’s CEO Ryan Gellert and its chief impact officer Corley Kenna to talk about how the outerwear brand that helped pioneer the idea of businesses operating for good is meeting the current moment.
Read on for more on that conversation and a look at how the wider industry is moving. Spoiler alert: I am underwhelmed by the initiatives announced this week.
As always, send me thoughts, feedback, tips and questions.
Fashion’s Next Big Climate Challenge: Survival
It’s COP month, which means a flood of reports, soundbites and think pieces weighing in on the state of the climate.
As a reminder, things are not looking good. Ten years after world leaders reached a landmark agreement in Paris to cap global warming and stave off catastrophic climate change, planet-warming emissions are still on the rise and temperatures are still projected to blow past internationally agreed targets — albeit not as badly as they might have done.
The Trump of it all isn’t making things any easier, either. The US isn’t actually sending a delegation to the UN’s annual climate summit this year; it’s in the process of pulling out of the decade-old Paris deal; and the President has called climate change a “con job.”
Amid the politics and the data dumps, it’s easy to get lost in abstract, technical details. But there is nothing abstract or technical about the way the climate crisis is already playing out and affecting livelihoods and businesses.
This COP and this moment matter because this decade is critical to keep warming below catastrophic levels. That leaves five years to bend the curve.
Where’s fashion at?
If you want a primer on where fashion stands, read this great overview on the state of play by BoF reporter Shayeza Walid from earlier in the week.
Just want a snapshot? These two charts have you covered:
As you can see, the industry’s overall emissions are trending quite significantly in the wrong direction. The picture’s more mixed at a brand level, but across the board companies face a stiff challenge to deliver on climate targets heading into 2030.
What’s at Stake?
Political and corporate climate inaction are long-standing sticky issues at UN climate summits. A newer discussion is the price of failure.
The reality is that there is no longer any escaping the climate crisis. The last ten years have been the hottest on record, bringing with them deadly and disruptive weather extremes. Searing temperatures in fashion’s manufacturing hubs are denting productivity, harming machinery and threatening a health crisis that has yet to be fully understood or documented.
There are subtler points of disruption too, with more unpredictable weather shifting consumer spending patterns, ratcheting up the cost of cooling retail stores and disrupting delivery systems.
That means fashion companies need to start thinking not only about how to reduce their environmental footprint, but how to adapt their operations and supply chains to remain resilient on a heating planet.
“Climate change is already disrupting the textile and apparel sector, and the cost of inaction might prove higher than investments required to address climate adaptation,” the UN Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action, a collection of industry stakeholders committed to climate action, wrote in a somewhat understated communiqué published earlier this month. “These challenges are expected to rapidly escalate in both the short- and medium-term, with increased intensity and frequency of floods, extreme heat events, and cyclones/typhoons. Immediate and decisive action on adaptation is essential to protect workers and infrastructure; safeguard resources and ensure the long-term resilience of both the industry and the local communities it depends on.”
To falter whilst megadroughts wreck national harvests, sending food prices soaring, makes zero sense economically and politically. To squabble while famines take hold, forcing millions to flee their homelands, this will never be forgotten, as conflicts spread. While climate disasters decimate the lives of millions, when we already have the solutions, this will never, ever be forgiven.
— UN Climate Change executive secretary, Simon Stiell
What’s Next for Patagonia?
Earlier this week, Patagonia released its first ever progress report — a breakdown on how the outerwear brand, whose biggest shareholder is the Earth, is delivering on its mission of being “in business to save our home planet.”
Part stocktake and part playbook, it offers a fascinating insight into the complexity and trade offs involved in trying to model a kinder form of capitalism. Especially in the current political climate.
It starts with a disclaimer: “Nothing we do is sustainable.”
Ahead of publication, I spoke with CEO Ryan Gellert and chief impact and communications officer Corley Kenna about where the company stands today and whether there’s still hope for efforts to make businesses balance profits, people and planet.
Below is a condensed and edited extract from our conversation:
Sarah Kent: This is Patagonia’s first progress report. Why now?
Corley Kenna: Patagonia long held transparency as one of our core values. We tried to share in as transparent a way as we knew possible where our factories were and what we were doing to improve the conditions, either for the people in them or for the planet, because we knew we were creating a pretty bad imprint on the planet. And so this was just taking all of that to the next level and putting it all in one place. It’s an important way to just try to capture what we feel like is going well, where we have room to improve and all the spaces in between.
Kent: When you pulled this together, how did you feel about the company’s scorecard?
Kenna: This is nuanced and it’s complicated and people who are saying they’re nailing it and getting A pluses, they’re probably not trying hard enough.
Ryan Gellert: I’m left with a tremendous gratitude for the people that show up and do this work each and every day and a real sense of urgency for us to continue to attack all the parts that are not as we need them to be. And then, an unrelenting desire to figure out how we can scale at an industry level and beyond some of the pieces of this.
If we put a tremendous amount of time, a tremendous amount of money behind decarbonising our business in our supply chain and doing things at a rigorous standard that we feel we can be really proud of, and 10 years down the road, nobody else has done anything like it, we have completely failed on that.
That would have been $30 million, or whatever it may be, better spent on protecting a river, or doing something else, because it will have us being completely unique, and who fucking cares? The world will be exactly in the shape that it’s in today. So that’s failure. And so when I read the report, I think about those things. That’s what goes through my mind: I’m really proud, we’ve got a lot of work to do, and how do we really drive systemic change through some of the things that we’re focused on.
Kent: As I was reading through the report, it seemed to me that what was coming through was that this idea that a company should be in business for profit and for the planet, Patagonia has proven that it can work. But in the current global context, that model perhaps needs to evolve and change to continue to be impactful and meaningful. Can you elaborate a bit more?
Gellert: For 52 years [Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard] has been committed to using Patagonia as an experiment and doing business differently,
We’re at a bit of a fork in the road right now. But proving that a business can be successful with a really clearly codified commitment to being as responsible as we know how to be and finding solutions and opening them up, that’s been kind of the 52-year history.
I think we understand that the state of the world today is radically different, and in many ways worse, than we had feared.
We get asked a lot, ‘do you think any of it makes a difference?’ These natural systems are collapsing, our planetary boundaries are being met or exceeded. Does it make a difference? And I very respectfully think it’s a little bit of a false question. Are we winning? No. Does it make a difference? Absolutely.
Kent: This philosophy is not winning right now, and the global environment is making it more difficult to bring others along with you. Does the game plan need to change? Is there a different strategy to deploy here?
Gellert: We’ve got to continue to innovate and we’ve got to continue to experiment. The new ownership model is as big an example of that as any. I don’t know what’s next, but there will need to be a what’s next.
I think part of the impetus behind this work in progress report is really trying to pull together something that’s more holistic and saying this is a whole of business approach, and that’s what’s needed. That’s how we think about it. And if other companies look at it and choose pieces to be inspired by or orient to or probe on, great. That’s progress. It may not be enough progress, but that’s progress.
If you want to go deeper, read our full story here.
The climate and nature crisis is worsening, and the truth is being lost in a sea of lies and misinformation. I feel an even deeper responsibility to help the company succeed and provide a counter to the prevailing extractive model of capitalism. It has never felt more difficult.
— Patagonia founder, Yvon Chouinard
Do You Get Déjà Vu, Huh?
With apologies to everyone I catfished into thinking this was going to be about Olivia Rodrigo, back to COP.
The weeks around the UN summit are always heavy on corporate climate announcements. Over the years, they’ve tended to become lamer, with breathless commitments to slash emissions giving way to potentially more prosaic announcements about new initiatives and pilot programmes. These days, it can feel like we’re just watching reruns.
Take this week’s announcement from the Fashion Pact, an initiative set up with great fanfare at the behest of French President Emmanuel Macron back in 2019. Under its aegis, five of the world’s biggest luxury houses, including Chanel, Kering and Prada, are now uniting to accelerate supply-chain decarbonisation, it said Monday.
In practice, they are launching an “optional and non-exhaustive” environmental data questionnaire for suppliers in Italy. Down the line, the accelerator will look at capacity building and financing options to help manufacturers cut emissions.
When I shared this on the editorial slack channel where we discuss ideas (always a fun place to hang out), this was the response I got: “that’s how you create change, an optional and non-exhaustive questionnaire.” That’s sarcasm, in case there was any doubt.
Don’t get me wrong, these are real challenges for the industry to address. Suppliers have complained for years about the time-sucking and confusing array of bespoke sustainability reports brands demand of them. Identifying and funding decarbonisation initiatives are even trickier challenges. But literally dozens of initiatives already exist across the industry and beyond to try and address such problems.
For instance, the decade-old suite of Higg tools created by Cascale — the industry initiative previously known as the Sustainable Apparel Coalition — were designed to create exactly the kind of harmonised reporting luxury brands say they are now trying to develop.
The Fashion Pact said its goal is to build on existing tools, taking into account the specific characteristics of Italy’s luxury supply chain, with a long-term plan to integrate the questionnaire it’s developed into broader industry reporting systems. It also pointed to other programmes it has spearheaded in recent years, including a financing initiative for manufacturers that launched last year and a pilot renewable energy purchasing agreement it coordinated between several major brands.
“Quick wins are important, but this is also about the deep, and difficult, work of systems-level change,” it said in a statement.
The organisation was established with the USP that it would operate at the CEO level, engaging the people with real authority to drive change. If this is the best they can come up with six years into the undertaking, you have to wonder, is this a structural challenge that highlights just how deep the hurdles to collaborative action in the industry run, or a clear message from the CEOs that they just don’t really care?
What Else You Need to Know This Week:
- Fashion’s Deregulation Era: The EU’s parliament is pushing forward moves to water down landmark sustainability regulations that would make big brands more accountable for their environmental and social impacts. [The Business of Fashion]
- Nike’s Recycling Bet: The sportswear giant signed long-term offtake agreements with textile-to-textile recyclers Syre and Loop this week. [The Business of Fashion]
- The New CSO: Chief sustainability officers and their teams are having to adapt fast to survive the age of Trump. [The Financial Times]
