FASHION’S FOOTPRINTS
It makes me want to cry,” says Hula CEO Sarah Fung, one member of the Tatler round-table discussion, as Edwin Keh, CEO of the Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel, brings up one of many unsustainable practices of the fashion industry: the destruction of unsold goods by luxury brands to maintain scarcity and thus high prices.
After oil, fashion is the most-polluting industry in the world today, causing environmental degradation and pumping out ever-increasing amounts of greenhouse gases. Despite efforts by luxury and mass fashion brands to become more eco-friendly—huge conglomerates and specialty retailers including Kering, Burberry, H&M and Inditex, for example, have signed the UN’s Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action, which pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30 per cent by 2030—progress is slowing down, according to a report in May by the Global Fashion Agenda, Boston Consulting Group, and the Sustainable Apparel Coalition.
Today there’s a growing movement in the fashion industry to adopt sustainable practices by transitioning from the linear
