It’s a bad day for Earth when even self-appointed sustainable brands are cooling it on environmentally sound practices. Earlier this week, Business of Fashion published an extensive review of the ways sustainability is falling out of the spotlight, partially due to the worsening economic climate and partially because of consumer fatigue.
The same day this article was published, I was getting the scoop on hangers. OK, not just hangers—also wood pulp! At the Challenge the Fabric conference in Milan, hosted by Ekman and organized by the Swedish Fashion Council, material matters more than fashion magic. Fabric mills, environmental activists, scientists, forestry representatives, and people from across the fashion production cycle gathered for two days of innovating and problem-solving the industry’s material issues. They are the ones who forage wood chips to make viscose. The ones who provide organic cotton for this season’s baby tees. The ones who are trying so hard to get massive conglomerates to switch to hangers made from recycled plastic and wood. The CMO of the hanger company, Ekoligens, based in Sweden, had a plea: “If you don’t care about this, how will anyone else?” he said, distressed, under the frescos of a Milanese palazzo.
But caring about it is certainly falling down the list of consumer and business priorities. “I think it’s going to take a slight backseat,” Bernhard Riegler, the CEO of Sappi Verve, a wood pulp provider (in fashion contexts, this pulp is turned into viscose or other fabrics), told me, “because where we stand with the economic pressure, with tariffs, a lot of retailers—especially the lower, high-volume, low-margin retailers—are going into survival mode. Typically, when you go into survival mode, sustainability is at the bottom of your list.”
To problem-solve the decreasing business—and consumer—appetite for eco practices, the Swedish Fashion Council stepped in with a fashion prize. Now in its fifth edition, the Challenge the Fabric Award partners young designers with sustainable fabric producers from around the world, with the goal of challenging conventions and innovation on both ends of the partnership. “I believe creativity will drive the change in the fashion industry,” said Jennie Rosén, the CEO of the SFC. “There is no natural connection between the fabric innovators and young designers, but if you just put people in the same room, people are gonna start talking and things will happen.”
This year, the seven brands and seven suppliers came from the world over: Petra Fagerström partnered with Sappi Verve & Ecocell, Louther partnered with HerMin Textile, Nuba partnered with Birla Cellulose, Oscar Ouyang partnered with Eastman Naia Renew, Shan Huq partnered with Lenzing Group, Women’s History Museum partnered with Circ x Pyratex, and Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen partnered with Circulose x Sinoteco. The results pushed the designers into new places while fortifying their established aesthetics and brand codes. Golden coins jangled from Women’s History Museum’s powerful top and leggings. Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen foraged branches from Milan to complete her look of recycled and plant-dyed cotton.
The winner, however, was Petra Fagerström, who pushed her subversive trad-wife ideology into all black. Fagerström is no stranger to winning prizes—the CSM grad won her school’s L’Oréal Professionel Award in February—but working with Sappi Verve and Ecocell’s all-black jersey and Lyocell provided a challenge. Her lenticular designs, which transform gingham into skin, from covered-up to provocative, can’t be rendered in these materials.
“The project was really about looking at how these fabrics can work for me, how I can incorporate them into my work more long-term, and find a way to make a product that really works with these fabrics,” Fagerström said. “The twill became this trench cape which actually comes from a bomber I’ve done before. The hoodie comes from this Dior Bar shape that I’ve been using in my previous collection but then turning it into a hoodie.” What’s more, in a commitment to sustainability, she didn’t use any contemporary fusings or finishings. “I’m using traditional tailoring techniques like horsehair and hand-stitching to create the shape—also making sure that I’m not using fusibles and glue,” she explained.
While producing this more sustainably takes more time, it is a practice she and her cohort of young talents must commit to. “Thinking sustainably shouldn’t have to be a project-based obsession,” she said. “I think for most young designers I know, it already is a part of the process, most of us use deadstock. Upcycling is a common thing now. I think it’s about starting the business correctly from the beginning rather than trying to do one monumental thing.”
Can they keep it going? After a torrential rainstorm in Milan, the CTF gang congregated at Torre de Pisa for dinner. There was the traditional vacation talk, fashion gossip, and selfie-taking, but there was also a sense of devotion to keeping up the good practices of working in a more sustainably minded way. “Textile growth grows at 2% per year, but viscose and wood-based fibers grow at 6%. There’s already a far higher growth rate than regular textiles, so our share of the market gets bigger and bigger,” said Sappi Verve’s Riegler optimistically. The downturn in sustainable interest “is only going to be a six-month problem.” And for those six months, and then the decades after, a new generation of designers are putting the Earth at the fore of their practices.