The UN set 17 sustainability goals. It needs fashion’s help meeting them – Vogue Business

Key takeaways:

The United Nations is calling on the fashion industry to help it achieve its Sustainable Development Goals, which include relevant topics like ending poverty and climate action.

In addition to lessening its impact, fashion is positioned to serve as an awareness platform for the public, the UN says.

At the core of fashions connection to the SDGs is the promotion of sustainable consumption, which involves moving away from selling more to consumers.

The evening before New York Fashion Week kicked off in February, guests gathered at an art space in Manhattan for an event unrelated to the runway shows. The art exhibition Arcadia Earth and the UN Office for Partnerships hosted representatives from Gucci, Theory and Mara Hoffman, along with influencers like Sierra Quitiquit and Marina Testino to discuss the connections between fashion and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

The UNs main message: Fashion has a responsibility and the creative leadership to help it achieve its sustainability goals, which were laid out in 2015 to benefit the planet and its inhabitants. Also known as the Global Goals or SDGs, they cover areas like ocean health, gender equality and sustainable consumption. While nonprofits and developmental agencies are closely tied to these goals, achieving what the UN has laid out will be impossible without participation from the private sector. Fashion ranks high among the industries that need to take action given its size and impact.

To Arcadia Earth founder Valentino Vettori, who spent two decades in fashion, the many touch points between fashion and the UNs goals are loud and clear. Should we talk about womens rights? Its obviously connected to that. Should we talk about slavery? Its obviously connected to that, he says. The industrys consumption and pollution of water might be the most conspicuous of all. It will become the most precious thing ever and we use 2,000 gallons of it to make a pair of jeans? I dont think so.

Fashion can improve its practices in all these areas, the UN believes, and it can also be a platform to reach more people regarding the substance of these challenges.

The UN is offering resources as it calls on fashion to do its part, through a combination of brand-specific efforts, cross-industry alliances and public service, to transform production habits while also putting the onus on consumers to make informed and responsible choices.

The fashion industry has incredible potential for us for advocacy, education, creativity. We need to better tell the UNs story on sustainability, and fashion is a great platform, says Lucie Brigham, chief of office, the UN Office for Partnerships. We need to engage the creative industry to help us educate customers.

Established to steer progress toward the UNs 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and designed to build on, and fill in gaps left by, the Millennium Development Goals, the SDGs are made up of calls for action like ending poverty, ocean conservation, climate change mitigation and ensuring quality education and clean water for all. Fashion is arguably most directly related to the no poverty; gender equality; decent work and economic growth; sustainable development and consumption; climate action; and partnerships goals.

The goals have helped some fashion and related companies set their priorities. A Kering spokesperson says the company used the SDGs when developing its 2025 strategy to ensure it was addressing the full suite of global challenges, from climate change to employees wellbeing. Textile Exchange, a nonprofit that works with brands and suppliers to shift to more sustainable fibres, has used the Global Goals as a framework for promoting organic and lower-impact fibres since 2016, saying they can serve not only as a risk management tool but also to drive innovation, and that investors and businesses are increasingly incorporating them into their risk and materiality assessments.

Attendees at Arcadia Earth's New York Fashion Week event in February 2020.

Arcadia Earth

Guidance from the UN can also help brands to set more ambitious goals, rather than simply meet the bare minimum. For brands already focused on issues covered by the goals, looking to the SDGs can help them solidify their priorities or shed light on areas they havent prioritised before.

UK bag and accessories brand Bottletop, founded in 2002, started exploring natural rubber as a material, says co-founder Cameron Saul, in pursuit of meeting Sustainable Development Goal 15: preserve life on land. The brand was chosen last year by the UN to produce bracelets to represent a larger public awareness campaign.

The UN came to us and said, Listen, were not going to achieve these goals unless people on the street are aware and empowered to deliver them, he recalls. According to Saul, the campaign has sold 55,000 bracelets, which are made out of upcycled illegal firearms and ocean plastic, and resulted in 900 million social impressions.

Saul argues that while awareness doesnt necessarily translate into action, it does represent the first step. The industry has enormous impacts on the planet. If you can transform that, were talking about a seismic impact on people and planet, but also fashion can be the cheerleader. It can carry people and voice in a way that nothing else can. We all relate to fashion.

#TOGETHERBAND (the bracelet that works with the UN to further advancing towards the global goals).

Bottletop

The Global Goals are also prompting companies to form partnerships to work collaboratively on an issue. The UN launched its Alliance for Sustainable Fashion last year to promote and coordinate such efforts from within the UN. The UN Office for Partnerships is trying to work with other organisations and sectors of the industry to increase these efforts, recognising that they wont necessarily happen on their own.

One initiative the UN has backed is One X One, led by Swarovski and the Slow Factory Foundation with support from the UN Office for Partnerships, which matches designers with scientists or advocates to explore solutions for various challenges; New York designer Mara Hoffman, for example, is working with workforce development programme Custom Collaborative to build a training programme for renewing garments.

The goals also raise areas to attention where the least progress is getting done. For Ayesha Barenblat, founder of the California nonprofit Remake, gender equality and opportunities for safe and inclusive employment with fair wages for all is where the fashion industry falls most short. Whether youre looking at aspiring designers or garment workers, its very unusual for an industry to be made up predominantly of women but run by men, she says. Were talking about a $3 trillion industry, but for the most part its built on degradation and poverty wages.

These issues have been documented. But Barenblat says large companies typically address them with little more than training sessions, which she calls window dressing rather than substantial change. Its more claiming the empowerment of women rather than getting to the structural issues, says Barenblat.

Some brands, though, are exploring ways to effectively address these issues, which are covered in the UN goals of gender equality, no poverty, and decent work and economic growth. US apparel and footwear brands Able and Nisolo have partnered on a campaign, the Lowest Wage Challenge, to encourage brands to share their lowest wages to boost transparency. Nudie Jeans has committed to paying workers a living wage, while apparel brand Alta Gracia runs a factory in the Dominican Republic certified by the Worker Rights Consortium to pay a living wage.

Ultimately, changing customer behaviour is necessary for many of the other efforts to succeed. Kevin Moss, global director of the nonprofit World Resources Institutes Business Center, says the goal of sustainable consumption sits at the intersection of nearly all the others. That to me is at the nexus of what people do, what people buy and the environment.

The UN describes sustainable consumption as filling peoples basic needs and improving quality of life while minimising emissions, waste, toxic materials and the use of natural resources in order to protect future generations. Its an issue that has been left out of many sustainability and development initiatives in the past. According to the international agency, worldwide material consumption reached 92.1 billion tons in 2017 a 254 per cent jump from 27 billion tons in 1970.

Jode Rodrigo de Araujo aka The Rubber Doctor in #TOGETHERBAND Voices, created by Andrew Morgan.

Andrew Morgan

The solution, he says, lies in finding models of growth that provide jobs and economic wellbeing that dont depend on selling more stuff to more people. That may include sales of more services rather than material goods; and more brands getting into resale and abandoning the model of selling only new items. Such steps will also require behaviour change on the part of consumers, but he thinks thats not unreasonable to expect, with some effort.

I don't think its innate human behaviour to want to possess more and more and more stuff. I think its been brands and industry [pushing] to make us want more, he says. Companies can play a role in shifting consumer behaviour to reverse that mentality while figuring out the business models to accommodate. If you change the model but not the behaviour, it can fail. If you change behaviour but not the business model, youll drive customers elsewhere. The trick for businesses is to be doing both at the same time. Not waiting though theyve got to do it now.

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that Arcadia Earth is for-profit art exhibition, rather than a non-profit.

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