Textile Exchange, Tapestry Talk Systemic Shifts at Climate Week
Sustainability savants are seeking systemic shifts.
Textile Exchange and Tapestry joined forces in New York City during Climate Week to get candid about the need for growth in environmental impact initiatives.
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Held at Tapestry’s global headquarters in Manhattan on Wednesday afternoon, the “Systemic Shifts for a More Resilient Fashion Future” event kicked off with a clear definition of how the sustainability trade group defines climate action.
Greenhouse gas emissions as well as soil health, biodiversity and animal welfare as well as circularity, human rights and water are all relevant to maintaining a “holistic view on what has to happen in together, in harmony, to achieve these very ambitious goals that we have,” as articulated by Claire Bergkamp, Textile Exchange’s CEO.
“We’re running out of time; that ambition starts to feel heavier and harder every year,” she said in her opening remarks. “But we’re not an organization that shies away from a hard problem.”
Joe Murphy, executive lead of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation Network; Beth Jensen, director of Climate+ impact at Textile Exchange; thought leader Rachel Arthur and Sandrine Dixson-Declève, president of the Club of Rome convened for a conversations on the “often-untalked-about issues” in inherent in pursuing ambitious goals.
“Material substitution will not be enough for us to achieve our greenhouse gas emissions targets related to raw materials and fibers,” Jensen said, referencing the nonprofit’s Material Pathways report from last March. “If we expect to achieve our climate targets . . . Innovation alone will not save us.”
For the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, convincing industry players to come on board is a work in progress.
“When we first launched the idea of [the] circular economy, it was led by an economic narrative first and foremost. The earlier reports we put out, you could do a control-find on ‘sustainability’ as a word and you wouldn’t find that word in any of the reports—it was really important for us to be leading with a new form of growth [and] new ideas,” Murphy said. “I think that was picked up strongly by business leaders across sectors because it was a vision, and it was something they could see themselves and the future viability of their businesses in that vision.”
Yet talk is cheap.
“Obviously, doing it is really, really complicated,” Murphy said. “It’s a fundamental transformation of everything you know in terms of how the business model works today.”
The tenor of those talks has transformed, too.
“There’s risk associated with innovation,” he continued. “I think there’s maybe a bit of a lack of imagination in thinking beyond resale and repair as we know them today, what could be the new, creative business models that exist? This mindset of playing to win rather than playing not to lose, you can really tell the different brands that are coming in to play to win in this space.”
On the topic of the imagination gap, Arthur discussed the sustainable fashion communication playbook the United Nations Environment Program released at the Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen last summer.
“The real heart of the report is talking about the fact that this industry is, in many ways, if I’m really crude about it, made up of nothing much more than the marketing that supports it and pushes it,” Arthur said. “How could we possible change it if we don’t address that side as well? There isn’t a world in which any of these things that we’re asking the industry to do can be done by one single job, role or stakeholder. It has to be [a] systems change approach.”
Dixson-Declève went a step further, touching on building narratives and being clever when calling companies out.
“What’s happening right now in terms of shareholder value and exponential profits is immoral; $2.8 billion oil and gas profits per day on the back of energy, poverty, is immoral,” she said. The Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership senior associate noted she herself previously spent a decade working within the oil and gas industry, and now is the time to call them out.
“You need scientists, engineers—people who have been inside—to call them out, and then you need to kind of get to their emotional strengths. We’ve done some of the ethics, working with CEOs across the oil and gas companies, and they do a very good job of blocking it out,” Dixson-Declève continued. “But I think we need to be very clear, both in terms of the statistics and data—which is there and they’re not listening to—and then second, find a way to call them out on that immorality piece and get to their heart and soul, if they still have one.”
Ultimately, a coalition of the “willing governments” who won’t enable that immorality, “where shareholder value is no longer just the only value,” is necessary, she concluded.
On the topic of gas and oil, moderator Sarah Kent of Business of Fashion acknowledged that “supermajor” gas company BP abandoned its strategy on the Beyond Petroleum rebrand attempt because it lost “loads of money” by pushing solar. “It couldn’t make a profit,” she said. Perhaps fashion isn’t so far off from a similar fate. So, how do you get the C-suite to bet on losing dogs?
“The fiduciary duty of CEOs today is to grow,” Jensen said. “That’s a huge barrier for any of the companies that are represented in this room.”
Dixson-Declève agreed, suggesting a revolution from the “social tension perspective” is nigh.
“The economy does not function for people. The economy functions for shareholders,” she said. “We have to debunk the conception that our CFO is not a person.”
Getting this message across to executives—answerable to shareholders—and trying to give them a path forward is hard. Couple that with cancel culture and the claustrophobic spaces still open for innovation and experimentation, and the limitations (very clearly) exist. And this is not lost on the industry; Textile Exchange has, “time and time again,” per Arthur, explored what levers will pull an executive’s ear.
“The fashion industry loves to think that it’s an industry of leaders and it’s not. It’s an industry of sheep,” Arthur said. “The whole system is really a story that we’ve been telling ourselves, year over year.”
On that note, Dixson-Declève shared an anecdote from a dinner she had with a certain European official who recently came under fire for scorched-earth antics around blocking out forest products from the global south in Europe.
“I said to her, ‘Listen, you can’t just block out the commodities’ and then not say, ‘I’m going to place a value on your forest.’ Not only am I going to place a value on your forest—which you could put in your accounting and your budget—but I’m going to start to talk about the fiscal space to actually protect your fucking forest,” Dixson-Declève said. “That is the reality. That is the level we need to be at.”
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