SUSTAINABILITY hen Stella McCartney launched her eponymous, Gucci-backed fashion label in Paris in 2001, she did something no serious luxury brand had tried before: banning leather, fur and skins altogether. At the time it was a revolutionary moment in high-end fashion that put ethics, transparency and responsibility ahead of pure profit.
Unsurprisingly, the move brought as much scepticism as it did interest, with many in the industry viewing McCartney’ s approach as naive or commercially suicidal. She even recalls being“ kind of ridiculed” and told she would never build an accessories business without leather.
Two decades later, the pace at which the rest of the luxury fashion industry is playing catch up makes that pioneering moment look less like idealism and more like a sustainable blueprint. And there is good reason for urgency.
Luxury’ s heavyweight impact Unlike top-tier fashion’ s catwalks, the numbers linked to the industry are far from glamorous. The fashion and textiles sector is estimated to account for between 2-8 % of global greenhouse gas emissions, alongside around 9 % of the microplastic pollution reaching oceans each year. McKinsey puts the industry’ s 2018 emissions at 2.1bn tonnes of CO2 equivalent, roughly 4 % of the global total, with most of that impact sitting upstream in fibre, fabric and finishing.
Luxury is a small slice of that volume but a heavyweight in terms of high-impact materials. Recent research led by New York and Cornell Universities calculates that animalderived materials such as leather, wool and cashmere – staples for most luxury fashion houses – make up only 3.8 % of apparel by volume yet generate around 75 % of fashion’ s methane emissions, equivalent to 8.3m tonnes a year, and nearly four times the annual methane footprint of France.
The good news is it’ s a corner of the market well positioned to respond. Luxury operates with high margins, low volumes and a consumer base that believes in‘ buying less, but buying better’. That gives room for investment in alternative materials, regenerative agriculture and supplychain traceability that budget fashion cannot always easily match.
It’ s also why industry bodies speak of an“ unprecedented opportunity” for luxury to set the pace on end-toend sustainability. businesschief. com
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