There was also a lot going on in the area of sustainability in September: from trade fairs, prizes, brand initiatives and partnerships, there was a wide range of sustainability efforts.
Two individual efforts particularly stood out: Alex Dabagh, founder of the New York bag label Anybag, who wants to revolutionize textile production by reusing single-use plastic, and entrepreneur Thomas Hebenstreit. He wants to transform the shirt market in India with his shirt label The Shirt Dandy with European know-how and Indian tailoring.
Collaborations
Amsterdam-based fashion outlet platform Otrium is continuing garment refurbishment and repair after a successful pilot project, together with Dutch supply chain management specialist for fashion and lifestyle brands Bleckmann. This offers the repair and re-commerce service known as The Renewal Workshop. Together with Bleckmann’s circular fashion experts from the Renewal Workshop, Otrium wants to repair 25,000 items of clothing and make them wearable again by the end of the year.
The Finnish textile manufacturer Spinnova and the Swedish recycling specialist Renewcell are working together to produce sustainable materials. The aim of the collaboration is to “develop and advance a concept for the commercial use and greater distribution of fibers produced from textile waste,” the two companies explained in the middle of the month.
As part of the partnership, Spinnova has developed a particularly environmentally friendly process to process the raw material Circulose, developed by Renewcell and based on recycled textile waste, into new fibers. The first fiber and fabric prototypes made from Circulose and cotton are now available. The first consumer goods made from the new materials are expected to come onto the market at the end of 2024.
Prices
The 2023 Sustainable Fashion Awards of the Italian Fashion Confederation (CNMI), held on the last weekend of Milan Fashion Week, recognized a number of luxury fashion houses and notable industry representatives in ten categories for their work in sustainability, including Gucci with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation Award for Circular Economy , Kering with the Biodiversity and Water Award, Manteco with the Climate Action Award and Candiani with the Groundbreaker Award.
German designer Nils Hauser has been awarded the Redress Design Award 2023, the world’s largest competition for sustainable fashion design. Hauser impressed the jury with his “Ex Voto” collection, which consists of multifunctional clothing items. For all creations, Hauser used upcycled materials such as sofa cover fabrics and nylon from an old family tent. By using water-based printing inks, he relied on environmentally friendly materials and processes.
Events
The Hamburg and Amsterdam-based IT service provider Fashion Cloud has teamed up with partners such as Zalando, De Bijenkorf, Boozt, Wehkamp, Breuninger and EK Fashion to launch a new event: The Fashion Transparency Summit is scheduled to take place on June 22nd. November at the Eye film museum in Amsterdam. His goal: to build a strong network so that topics such as transparency through sustainability data come into focus and a basis for collaboration can be built.
At the BTE Congress on September 28th in Cologne, sustainability was identified not only as the topic of the year, but of the decade. However, the problem of industry “sustainability burnout” is very real. A sustainability index by Maike Rabe, professor of textile finishing and ecology at the Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences, is intended to counteract this.
Regulations
There was a surprise announcement at Apple’s annual event, held on the penultimate day of New York Fashion Week. The tech giant announced that it would ban the use of leather for all of its accessories, including watch straps and phone cases. In an effort to reach its net-zero emissions target by 2030, Apple introduced a new textile called FineWoven, a fiber of non-animal origin that will completely replace leather from now on.
In the future, buyers in the EU should be able to better see whether a product is sustainable and how easy it can be repaired. Negotiators from the European Parliament and EU countries agreed on this in Brussels. “I am particularly pleased that in the future it will be impossible to claim that a product has a positive, neutral or reducing effect on climate-damaging gases in the environment. This bans statements like ‘climate neutral’, which are based on CO2 compensation,” said Green Party politician Anna Cavazzini. According to the Council of EU countries, environmental certificates must in future meet certain requirements.