Fashionable modern woman with shopping bags on landfill, consumerism versus pollution concept.
The fashion industry and excess have historically fit together hand-in-glove. But it seems that relationship may finally be beginning to come apart at the seams. While it’s true that the subject of sustainable fashion has garnered increasing amounts of attention over the last decade, much of the momentum has come from advocates for change – not the businesses nor the churning out damage to the environment and industry workers.
Today there are increasing signs of change. The number of passed, pending and proposed regulations governing the fashion industry across the EU and the United States now reaches into the double digits. Consumer sentiment around more sustainable clothing is on the rise, with secondhand fashion consumption growing a reported 31% year-over-year in 2023 alone. Companies such as BinStar, Arrive, Amplio (all Alpaca VC portfolio companies), Trashie and many others are entering the market seeking to build solutions in line with current times during what could very well be the fashion industry’s next inflection point for serious change.
When it comes to the fashion industry current state, the need for change and how these factors intersect with the complex business of fashion, there’s perhaps no better person to speak to than Maxine Bédat, Executive Director at New Standard Institute, a sponsor of the now-pending NY Fashion Act, frequent keynote speaker and author of Unraveled: The Life and Death of a Garment. Keep reading for her insight on the fashion industry’s impact on the world, how we got here and why increased regulation is where she’s focused.
Let’s dive right to the heart of it. Who should be responsible for changing fashion’s impact on the world? Corporations or consumers?
Governments, corporations and people are all responsible for changing fashion’s impact on the world. To put the entire onus on consumers negates the enormous marketing budgets that fashion companies use for the specific purpose of convincing us to buy more. But, people, we have a central role to play – whether we like it or not – to demand from our government officials that they set the rules of the game for corporations. While corporations have a moral responsibility to reduce their negative impact on our world, many of them are currently prioritizing the competitive marketplace, which only awards short term profits. So we as people have a central role, and our governments need to listen to that, and corporations can (and some do already!) show leadership by recognizing the marketplace in which they find themselves and speaking up about the role that the government needs to play in this sector to level the playing field for companies that are trying to do the right thing.
Your previous company, Zady, was named one of the world’s “Most Innovative Companies” in retail by Fast Company and dubbed “the Whole Foods of fashion.” Looking back, do you think operating a fashion brand with a sustainable supply chain at that time was ever truly feasible competitively or were the cards stacked against brands married to sustainable supply chains?
The cards were and continue to be stacked against companies trying to do the right thing. See, for example, the news of the beloved brand Mara Hoffman, which announced that it would be closing this month due to this dynamic. Or, just a couple of months ago, Renewcel, one of the few innovation companies that were ready to scale. They were ready, but their brand partners were not ready to make similar investments. Without a regulatory floor, there is no level playing field, and a company will be at a competitive disadvantage for trying to do the right thing.
How did your experience writing your 2021 book, Unraveled: The Life and Death of a Garment, lead to your current chapter?
Through the research and writing of Unraveled, I was able to have both on the record and many off the record conversations with people from across the fashion industry. Through those discussions, it became crystal clear that the voluntary initiatives created by industry would never be prioritized over a public company’s goal of maximizing short term profit. And because of that realization, it became clear that the government simply needed to step in and lift the floor so the whole industry can thrive, not just today but into the future. We have been raised in a generation to believe that regulation is per se bad. And, I would agree that ill-thought out regulation can have bad outcomes, but there is also good, and critically important regulation. It’s why we generally feel safe in planes, taking medication and following road signs. The job of the government is to set up the basic rules of the game for our economy to thrive today and tomorrow. The Fashion Act has been developed with stakeholder input for four years, and we would still take additional considered input. It sets up the basic rules of the system that ensure that costs are not just externalized to the rest of us.
You traveled the globe (China, Ghana, Sri Lanka) researching the fashion supply chain as part of your research for the book. What’s something you saw that you wish everyone reading this could witness in person for themselves?
It was not one thing, it was the totality of the whole journey that I wish I could bring people to see in person. Once you see something or learn it, one cannot unlearn these things. I tried to convey in the book to the very best of my ability just all the work and resources that go into just a single t-shirt: the pesticides vats, the equipment to grow the cotton, the people that dedicate their lives and the stress they take on from weather patterns outside of their control, the people that trade that cotton, and how that bale ends up in a manufacturing facility to be unpacked, spun together with perhaps synthetic fibers that came from an oil rig and chemical plant somewhere else. How that yarn is then shipped, the people that ensure it is woven, more chemical vats that dye the yarn, the design files that are sent, the production lines that are created, and the people – the people – that sit at sewing machines to make our clothes. Anyway, I can clearly go on, and I do in the book, but all of those steps are real people, real resources, real places that exist right now. To witness the totality of that and then to see how all of those resources quickly turn into literal burnishing trash piles, and how just silly that entire system is, that’s what I wish everyone could see. Each person I met had an entire life story to share, but it’s all the people and all the resources that I wish people could see.
The Fashion Act would require any apparel or footwear company doing business in New York that has annual global revenue of $100 million to meet new standards such as mapping and disclosing their supply chains, setting science-based climate impact reduction targets in accordance with the Paris Act and enforcing wage transparency among their suppliers. When we think about US brands doing over $100M disclosing their supply chains and agreeing to impact reduction targets, how do you see this fundamentally changing the way brands will have to operate?
Sustainability will move from either just a marketing or compliance exercise to a core business function. And the companies that have been taking a leadership role the whole time will benefit and not have to play catchup.
What kind of infrastructural, technological, and operational changes will they have to implement in order to meet those new requirements?
The technology and business models are all there. We have tools to trace materials and to create a chain of custody. I think the most interesting shift that will come from the implementation of the Fashion Act is both the injection of capital that will go into green innovations in the space and then, on the other end, the shifts in organizational structure as sustainability functions become integrated into sourcing, design, compliance, the C-Suite and at the board level.
If passed, the Fashion Act calls for a penalty of up to 2% of global revenue penalty for failure to comply. What do you think about incentives for consumers that would “reward” brands, like no sales tax on secondhand clothes?
I think all of those are good incentives, too. To make the system effective it’s good to have both sticks and carrots.
Why start with NY state vs. CA?
New York is America’s Fashion capital, so it makes sense to start there. But other states are very interested. So we’re working to ensure alignment, but the Fashion Act is coming.
What else can all of us do?
We need your voice. Head to thefashionact.org and join the coalition working to get common sense legislation passed. It really is as simple and direct as signing up and then getting involved in writing legislators. We provide guidance every step of the way. Being involved in citizenship is not rocket science. We are just a whole generation that was not taught how it all works. Even as a law school graduate, I had to learn how government functions and how laws get passed. And guess what the rules that get made are? Either the ones we all get involved in passing, or they default to powerful interests who ensure that their voices are heard. And the bonus in all of it: it feels deeply good to work in community with others to address fundamental issues and put them into law. In an era of feeling lost and lonely, it’s the most deeply satisfying side hustle.