What Will It Take to Fortify Fashion’s Supply Chain?

“We’ve done a lot of talking. Now, it’s time for implementation.” That was the opening gambit from Textile Exchange conference host Samata Pattinson last week, kick-starting three days of programming that said a lot about the state of sustainable fashion, and the frustrations simmering below its surface.

In recent years, sustainable fashion conferences have been dogged by the same sense of frustration. Attendees often pay thousands of dollars to be in the room, only to lament the lack of representation and authenticity on-stage, and the lack of progress outside it. It often feels like the same people saying the same things they have said for the past decade, albeit varied slightly depending on the political zeitgeist.

Organizers have tried to wrangle this frustration into momentum, choosing conference themes like Ambition to Action (Global Fashion Summit, 2023) and The Implementation Era (Textile Exchange, 2026). But sentiment is slow to change, and systems are even slower.

As Lululemon’s senior vice president of sustainability, Noel Kinder, noted in his keynote on day two, corporate sustainability has been through the ringer. The early 2000s were defined by a “reactionary” approach to workers’ rights, hinged on high-profile investigations and crises like the Rana Plaza factory collapse. The late 2010s saw sustainability boom, with values-driven companies like Reformation, Everlane and Allbirds (now an AI company) attracting huge amounts of investment; greenwashing exploded as brands sought to cash in on consumer awareness of the issue.

Now, with political backlash against sustainability and widespread deregulation taking the wind out of corporate sustainability’s sails, the subject is undergoing another metamorphosis. At this year’s Textile Exchange conference, it became clear that the new sustainability buzzword is resilience.

“The reality of the world around us today warrants more discussions about risk and prevention,” says Patrik Frisk, CEO of textile-to-textile recycler Reju, which was the title sponsor of this year’s conference. “It’s all about regulation and geopolitical and environmental risks.”

Exactly what resilience looks like in fashion supply chains is up for debate. Textile Exchange structured the program around two main solutions: regenerative agriculture for natural fibers, and textile-to-textile recycling for synthetics. Both promise to boost supply chain resilience — be that against climate change or geopolitical unrest — but face significant barriers to scale. And many of the people who could unlock progress were not in the room, says Eileen Fisher’s senior director of materials and circularity Inka Apter: “There was a rather glaring absence of sourcing team leaders and CFOs in this space.”

For attendees, organizers attempted to serve up a heavy dose of reality, courtesy of professor Gail Whiteman, Hoffmann impact professor for accelerating action on nature and climate at the University of Exeter and founder of non-profit Arctic Basecamp. She reminded the audience that seven of the nine planetary boundaries have now exceeded the safe threshold; climate-related disasters increased 83% between 2000 and 2019; and wildlife populations have shrunk by 73% in the past 50 years. Meanwhile, sea and land ice — which she called “the biggest insurance system our climate has” — are melting at record rates. “The scale of change is astronomical,” said Whiteman. “The only words that are important right now are implementation and action.”

A business case hinged on resilience

Against the backdrop Whiteman described, it’s unsurprising that conversation quickly turned to resilience. Around the globe, brands are feeling the impacts of the climate crisis, from raw material sources to shipping and physical retail.

In a session on sourcing strategies in geopolitical unrest, Jordan Lea, vice president of sustainable fibers at leading cotton supplier Olam Agri Americas, noted the devastating effect climate change is having on natural fibers. Cotton Australia has forecast a 40% drop in the country’s cotton harvest this year due to drought, he told attendees, mirroring the effects of flooding on Pakistani cotton in 2022. These wipeouts are becoming increasingly regular, at the same time that disruption in shipping is making it harder to move commodity crops like cotton across the world.

In the same session, VF Corp.’s vice president of global product stewardship, sustainability and government affairs Sean Cady, told the packed-out room how wide-ranging the impacts of continued disruption in the Middle East have been for fashion. The ensuing oil crisis — compounding shortages caused by Russia’s war on Ukraine and the associated sanctions on Russian oil — have sent energy and synthetic material prices soaring. Factories using solar panels and brands using recycled synthetics are somewhat shielded, he explained. Likewise, regenerative agriculture, which outlaws increasingly expensive synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, can help growers keep costs down.

“We are facing levels of uncertainty we have never seen in this industry,” he said. “We have to control what we can, and operate our business strategically instead of managing uncertainty in a reactionary way.”

His is not the only dedicated team shifting its emphasis from sustainability as a moral case to resilience as a business case, leveraging translation and integration skills to make sustainability resonate with executives and help colleagues understand how it relates to their competing KPIs. Just look at the announcements coming out of Textile Exchange this year: Vancouver-based non-profit Canopy presented the business case for scaling next-gen alternatives to forest-based fibers like viscose, hoping to convince brands to start with just 5% recycled content, which it says could save them $40 million over a decade from 2028. Meanwhile, advisory firm Sustainabelle launched its “capitalism-compatible” framework, Shift, which allows brands to make a customized business case for preferred fiber transitions.

In these business cases, “short-term payback is only part of the picture”, notes Jesse Smith, director of land stewardship at US regenerative agriculture hub White Buffalo Land Trust, who wowed attendees with his detail-oriented approach to data, spanning everything from dung beetle diversity to soil health and biodiversity. “Businesses exchange many forms of capital every day, including financial, material, living, social, intellectual, experiential, spiritual and cultural, but few of them are recognized on the balance sheet. Brands that learn to identify and move value across those capitals will likely be the ones that gain momentum in the future of textile and fashion.”

The challenge now is for brands to make this business case in time for innovators to survive, says American Circular Textiles founder Rachel van Metre Kibbe. “The innovators showing up here may not be here next year. They’ve invested their capital, their livelihoods, families, and years of work into solutions your company says it wants. Another year of deliberation may be manageable for your company. It may be existential for theirs.”

Brands have questions, suppliers have answers

Unlike other sustainable fashion conferences, which regularly look to brands for leadership, Textile Exchange puts the emphasis on raw material producers, aka Tier 4 in fashion’s supply change. It was a welcome step-change.

In a roundtable about extreme heat, supplier-led organizations like the Fashion Producer Collective, which have developed clear blueprints for extreme heat adaptation and mitigation, came to the fore. But it’s brands themselves that hold the key to scaling progress. “Most factories don’t have the systems in place to measure temperatures, let alone programs to remediate heat,” said Tiffany Rogers, vice president of research and development in social compliance at the Fair Labor Association.

Similarly, in a session about scaling regenerative agriculture, global sustainability and supply chain strategist Lindsay Humphreys advocated for the industry to move from brand-to-land partnerships (where one brand partners directly with one land manager to transition to regenerative agriculture) to a brandscape-to-landscape model (where collective action stops every brand or land manager starting from scratch and cascades best practices). The best thing a brand can do in this situation — as shared by fellow panelist, H&M Group’s biodiversity impact lead Jennie Granström — is be flexible.

“There was a strong focus on conversations centered around growers, ranchers and producers,” said Theory’s vice president of sustainability Gonzalo Pertile. “Any transition in our industry will depend on bringing the people closest to the land and the product into the conversation, and ensuring they are part of the solutions we are trying to scale. That’s what sets Textile Exchange apart — the chance to connect with practitioners from across the value chain who are actively doing the work every day.”

But, as we heard throughout the week, bridging producers and brands is far from straightforward. In conference rooms and attempts at collective action alike, these two opposite ends of the supply chain often have different agendas and different ideas of success, and many speak different languages — literally and figuratively.

“Working directly with cotton farmers, we experience firsthand how challenging it can be to translate sustainability goals into agricultural practices, particularly when dealing with climate variability, economic pressures, and the complexities of transitioning to regenerative agriculture,” Mariela Calderon Ariz of Peruvian regenerative cotton production company Bergman Rivera said. “At Tier 4, implementation is not a future ambition; it is our everyday reality. The real opportunity is to turn these connections and conversations [at the conference] into meaningful action, ensuring that the people working at the very beginning of the supply chain are part of shaping the industry's future.”

As the conference drew to a close, a handful of key themes emerged: the need to address the investment gap between pilots and commercial scale; the call for closer ties between brands and land managers; and the economic reality of scaling preferred production systems as the existing models collapse. But as the conference dug deeper into highly technical subjects, it was a simple provocation from day one that stuck in people’s minds.

This year’s conference took place in Vancouver, on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) nations. Chief Janice George, master weaver and co-founder of L’hen Awtxw Weaving House, and a hereditary chief of the Squamish Nation, was invited to open proceedings. She spoke about the seventh generation principle, a time-honored Indigenous approach to sustainability. “Mother Earth knows how to take care of herself. It’s humans that need to learn how to work with Mother Earth,” she reminded attendees. “How do we use our resources in an intelligent way that takes care of the next generations?”