As the fashion industry faces down a relentless barrage of tariff threats, geopolitical turbulence and climate chaos, Claire Bergkamp, CEO of Textile Exchange, has some good news.
Speaking on the first day of the sustainability nonprofit’s annual meeting at the Vancouver Convention Center in Canada on Tuesday, the former Stella McCartney executive told a packed auditorium to take heart that “we are actually building on real progress.” Among companies reporting to Textile Exchange’s Materials Benchmark, for instance, the use of so-called preferred materials rose to 72 percent in 2025, up 4 percentage points from the year before, including 82 percent of cotton and 76 percent of polyester. By comparison, preferred materials made up 37 percent of global cotton production and 12 percent of global polyester production.
What this demonstrates, Bergkamp said, is that while change is still not happening at the scale it needs to, the “positive indicators of that progress” show that people are still “leaning in” and “taking steps” to ensure that sustainability remains a priority.
“We can sometimes feel very daunted by the size of the challenges ahead,” she said. “But what I want to remind us is that the people in this room are doing the work, and I want us to just keep doing the work.”
That’s not to downplay the difficulties to come, Bergkamp said. Global fiber production grew from 109 million tons in 2020 to 139 million tons in 2025, an “enormous increase” in just five years. And with only 20 percent of that coming from preferred fiber systems, the gap between ambition and impact remains wide. At the same time, she said, most in the industry could only dream of a figure that size a decade ago. The goal now is to double down and “fight for that next 20 percent,” then the next after that.
Nevertheless, Bergkamp acknowledged that the realities on the ground may be rockier than the numbers suggest, with inconsistent market signals making it difficult for companies to plan, invest and scale sustainable materials at the pace they need.
“Because whether you’re a farmer considering changing your practices, or you’re someone thinking about investing in a textile-to-textile recycling infrastructure, you need confidence that those investments can be sustained,” she said. “But when we really think about progress and we really think about what it is that we’re trying to do, we’re really thinking about this system and how we can sustain it, how progress can reinforce itself, and this is where I think we do have a really big opportunity in this moment.”
With research and testing now pointing to what delivers results, it’s time for the industry to “put our chips down and make a bet,” Bergkamp added.
“We’ve spent decades experimenting, learning, building evidence, demonstrating what better practice can look like on the ground,” she said. “That work has been enormously important. But demonstrating what works and creating the conditions for wider adoption are two different things. As we move towards greater scale, the challenge becomes less about proving what is possible and much more about connecting the system.”
It’s why Bergkamp is excited about launching Materials Matter, a unified sustainability framework that replaces and merges multiple older material-specific standards such as the Global Recycled Standard, Recycled Claims Standard and the Responsible Wool, Mohair and Alpaca Standards. More than a benchmark, it’s an “opportunity to bring together everything that we have learned, the experience that we’ve gained as an organization and collectively in this room, the relationships that we’ve built and the understanding of what it takes to make meaningful change happen on the ground to deliver the outcomes that we want to see collectively for climate, nature, people and animals,” she said.
“This is about alignment. It’s about connection. It’s about clarity. It’s about a moment that we can create to cut through some of the noise and the pressure that we all feel, but people outside of this room are also feeling,” Bergkamp said. “It’s been a little bit of a noisy moment.”
If there’s one thing she wants the audience to hold onto, however, it’s the positivity and momentum that have carried the industry this far.
“While we know that we have challenges ahead of us, we know that change is possible,” Bergkamp said. “We have seen it happen. We are seeing progress being reported in, and with everything we’ve learned, the relationships we’ve built, the new ideas and energies we’re bringing together, I just want us to imagine what we can unlock together next.”