Can Fashion Decouple Profits from Production?

Can brands make money without making new clothes? That’s the question that a new Ellen MacArthur Foundation initiative hopes to answer.

Unveiled at the Global Fashion Summit: Copenhagen Summit in the Danish capital on Tuesday, The Fashion ReModel brings together Arc’teryx, Primark, Reformation, Zalando and H&M Group’s Arket, Cos and Weekday brands to suss out opportunities to decouple revenue from new garment production.

So-called “circular” business models such as rental, repair, resale and remaking have the potential to grow from 3.5 percent of the global fashion market today to 23 percent by 2030, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation said, creating a $700 billion opportunity that could slash one-third of climate emissions reductions necessary to align the industry with the 1.5-degree Celsius pathway. The issue, however, is scale. The fashion industry is built on a system of overproduction and overconsumption. Changing that won’t be easy.

That many of the first companies to sign up are from the high street is notable. With the razor-thin margins that underpin their low prices, fast fashion retailers rely on churning out vast quantities of new garments—100 billion every year, according to one estimate—to make the calculus work. H&M and Primark, in particular, have been panned for promoting overconsumption in the name of “democratizing fashion.”

But the industry is “rooted in reinvention,” Jules Lennon, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s fashion lead, said at a press conference at the Danish Architecture Center. “It has the power to shape desire, to shape trends, to shape culture. And so we’re looking to harness this creative and innovative potential, and ultimately make circular business models the norm.”

One thing that informs The Fashion ReModel is the organization’s recently concluded Jeans Redesign project, a multi-stakeholder effort to make denim production less wasteful and polluting through design and production tweaks such as doing away with metal rivets and requiring a certain proportion of recycled cotton. Many of those requirements may be table stakes today but they weren’t in 2019, when there was no agreement on what the minimum bar would be, Lennon said.

“Fast forward to 2023: we had 100 organizations, fabric mills, garment manufacturers, brands, retailers from 25 countries, and they proved it was possible,” she said. Not only did it result in business action, Lennon said, but national governments and European Union institutes are citing Jeans Redesign’s “common guidelines with common definitions” as a best practice for proposals such as the EU’s ecodesign for sustainable products regulation, or ESPR.

Disincentivizing overproduction is one of the goals of the ESPR, which plans to ban the destruction of returned and unsold goods, the proportion of which has increased with the growth of online shopping and fast fashion’s ever-quickening pace. So far, the scale and impact of clothing’s destruction are big unknowns. So are brands’ specific production volumes, which Ghana-based environmental group The Or Foundation has been trying to peg through its ”Speak Volumes” campaign, though few companies have picked up its gauntlet.

“The ecodesign directive, which puts requirements for the quality of textiles, repairability and everything is a way to move away from fast fashion, which is the vision of the [EU] textiles strategy,” Lars Fogh Mortensen, consumption, products and plastic expert at the European Environmental Agency and a candidate for the upcoming European Parliament elections, said at a Global Fashion Agenda global policy masterclass on Tuesday. “And that advice is [to look] at [production] volumes as well.”

Like Jeans Redesign, The Fashion ReModel doesn’t claim to have all the answers. Rather, it’s about “providing an entry point” and “learning by doing,” Lennon said. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation has identified priority topics that are currently preventing circular business models from becoming mainstream practice, such as financial metrics and evidence of impact. The initiative also has a built-in accountability mechanism, so “we will actually, over time, be able to talk publicly about the progress that’s being made,” Lennon said.

Leyla Ertur, head of sustainability at the H&M Group, said it’s looking forward to working with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation again.

“The Jeans Redesign pushed us to explore what circular design could mean for our product assortment and now The Fashion ReModel is set to do the same with circular business models,” she said in a statement. “The opportunity presented by decoupling the fashion industry’s growth from resource use is huge and this project can help us better understand how to further scale these models.”