The Business of Fashion
Agenda-setting intelligence, analysis and advice for the global fashion community.
Agenda-setting intelligence, analysis and advice for the global fashion community.
LONDON, United Kingdom — The British Fashion Council will today announce the latest iteration of its Positive Fashion initiative, at the opening of London Fashion Week.
In partnership with Vivienne Westwood and backed by London mayor Sadiq Khan, the Fashion Switch programme will encourage brands to commit to switching to green energy providers by 2020. Other initiatives within the Positive Fashion campaign include sustainability, local manufacturing and craftsmanship.
"We started this project five years ago through a dialogue with Marks & Spencer," Caroline Rush, chief executive of the British Fashion Council, tells BoF. "It is our hope that the Fashion Switch campaign encourages brands and businesses to increase the demand for green energy, helping to accelerate investment and the rate and scale of renewables in the UK.
The project was spearheaded by Vivienne Westwood, who has long been an ambassador for sustainability. "We're at the point of no return, and if we go beyond it then there will be a chain reaction where everything accelerates, all the methane kicks in: life on earth faces mass extinction, and as the Pope has just announced, 'If we don't go back we will go down,'" Westwood tells BoF. "People are really interested in fashion and it's so important that we're working with the BFC, it's a fantastic place to start: the fashion industry. It's a stimulus to get everyone else involved!"
Fashion Switch is a long-term project: energy contracts for businesses means change cannot happen straight away. "If we can get half the country to switch as soon as possible, it would have a global effect," says Westwood, who has been lobbying other brands to commit to the cause.
Europe’s Parliament has signed off rules that will make brands more accountable for what happens in their supply chains, ban products made with forced labour and set new environmental standards for the design and disposal of products.
Fashion’s biggest sustainable cotton certifier said it found no evidence of non-compliance at farms covered by its standard, but acknowledged weaknesses in its monitoring approach.
As they move to protect their intellectual property, big brands are coming into conflict with a growing class of up-and-coming designers working with refashioned designer gear.
The industry needs to ditch its reliance on fossil-fuel-based materials like polyester in order to meet climate targets, according to a new report from Textile Exchange.