Call her an optimist, but Claire Bergkamp, CEO of Textile Exchange, might be one of the few fashion professionals who doesn’t think that the industry is grappling with a so-called “sustainability retreat,” a phrase that Tufts University professor Ken Pucker used to describe what he saw as a deepening rollback in environmental commitments from prominent brands, even as their carbon emissions continued to mount.
Pucker wrote about this phenomenon in the Business of Fashion last August. Ten months and several geopolitical quagmires later, the disquieting trend only appears to be hurrying on a collision course with 2030 climate goals, most critically a pact by nearly all of the world’s nations to maintain any further global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius below pre-industrial levels. It’s a feat that would require slashing greenhouse-gas production by roughly half by 2030. With the United States, the world’s second-largest polluter after China, withdrawing from the Paris Agreement for a second time, a White House intent on ramping up fossil-fuel extraction and a backlash on anything carrying the whiff of “wokeness,” the outlook cannot help but feel bleak.
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But Bergkamp remains hopeful. Rather than a “retreat,” the former Stella McCartney executive sees this juncture in time as, at worst, a “quietening” and, at best, a “redefining” moment. What this means is a need to “get clear, to get more focused, to kind of double down on what we know needs to happen, and where we believe we can see meaningful action,” particularly now that the goodwill born from a healthier business environment is quickly evaporating, she said. Clearly, the great promise that legislation from Europe once supplied can no longer be relied upon now that it appears to be increasingly defanged.
It’s why Textile Exchange decided to release on Thursday a five-year strategy to help the industry regroup by focusing on the need for systems change. The need to do so was evident, Bergkamp said. As far as multi-stakeholder organizations go, it’s the only one of its kind that includes high-profile brands like Adidas, H&M Group and Shein alongside less-publicized raw material producers such as sheep farmers and cotton growers. It’s also clear that Textile Exchange will not achieve its Climate+ goal of reducing carbon emissions from fiber and raw material production by 45 percent by 2030 without a new plan of attack that doesn’t rely on only fluffy storytelling to woo champions.
“We’re recognizing that there we have had overlapping crises, that we’re kind of butting up against a moment of uncertainty around political change in every direction at this moment, and that means that there is just a real need for clarity, even shifting some of the language in the way that we talk about this work so that we are making the business case more clearly,” she said. “I think it’s up to all of us to say, ‘OK, well, how can we move this forward? How do we look for those opportunities to think about supply chain efficiency and resilience? How do we break the economic barriers at Tier 4?’”
Textile Exchange has been working on what it describes as an “internal review and prioritization process” since 2023, when Bergkamp succeeded LaRhea Pepper as chief executive. Despite the nonprofit growing significantly over the past several years—to date, more than 90,000 sites have been certified to its standards globally—it’s been streamlining both its organizational chart and activities in preparation for this public push.
It has identified three “pillars of impact” that its work will revolve around moving forward: increasing stakeholder alignment by leveraging the diversity of its community, strengthening measurement and reporting tools to help scale “preferred” production systems and completing the transition to its unified Materials Matter standard that, among other things, will demonstrate what best practices look like for different materials in a variety of contexts when it’s published later this year. Their effectiveness hinges on the extent to which Textile Exchange’s members will buy in despite what, in many cases, are straining coffers.
“Standards are never going to solve everything, but they do have an important role to play, especially around offering a pathway for verifying supply chains,” Bergkamp said. Improvements are also difficult to make if there hasn’t been any measurement. To that end, Textile Exchange has seven life-cycle assessments “running right now” to improve the wider sector’s baseline data.
“We’ve tested a lot as an industry,” she added. “We have actually made progress, but it’s been in these isolated areas. The opportunity is to take what we’ve learned and de-isolate that to shift away from isolated activities tests into focused activations and opportunities for collective action.” Or, to quote Pepper herself from a 2022 speech, fashion must be “more than islands of good.”
Textile Exchange’s mission and vision have undergone an overhaul, too. Instead of “inspiring and equipping people to accelerate the adoption of preferred materials,” it now seeks to “transform how we produce, choose and reuse materials to benefit the people and places at the source.” A vision that once involved moving toward “an enriching global fashion, textile and apparel industry that protects people and planet by driving beneficial impacts on climate, soil health, water and biodiversity” now sees “a world where materials have lasting value, leading to thriving communities and flourishing landscapes.”
Despite the feel-good messaging, Bergkamp says the organization isn’t blinkered about the fundamental obstacles that have thus far stymied greater progress. Change isn’t viable without the right financial mechanisms to enable it, she said. While details are currently scant, Textile Exchange plans to unfurl a “new model of engagement” to bolster broader community engagement on this front, including by making sure it’s not only listening to the loudest voices in the room.
“We’ve sponsored groups of Tier 4 producers to come to conferences,” she said. “We’ve invested a lot in field trips and kind of regional activations. We’ve got a whole delegation of the team going to Australia next week. We had people in South Africa a couple of weeks ago just trying to be out in the field, listening, understanding, but also reaffirming our partnerships with organizations. And we’ve set up advisory groups so that there are ongoing opportunities to hear and learn from each other.”
What’s clear, Bergkamp said, is that there is a need for more stable financial support, though ‘support’ isn’t a word that she likes to use. “Because it’s not a charity activity, it’s how do we value and pay for what we’re asking people to do on the ground?” she said. “Commodity pricing can be very volatile. There’s an investment in that, and they want a fair price for that investment.”
What gets Bergkamp charged up are the positive stories she continues to hear. Progress with textile-to-textile recycling is continuing apace with the announcement of Circ’s first industrial-scale factory in France, Circulose’s commercial partnership with Mango and Syre’s offtake agreements with Target, Gap Inc. and Houdini Sportswear. The trick now is sticking to those trajectories at a time when financial margins are feeling a bigger squeeze, yet shareholders continue to demand higher dividends. (It wasn’t for nothing that Textile Exchange released a landscape analysis on “reimagining growth” in December.)
“There’s a critical need for us to address economic barriers more seriously as an industry, as an organization, because it’s not like a new thing,” she said. “We’ve known this is a barrier for a very long time, and so it is just putting it more squarely in our sights and saying, ‘OK, what can we do about this? What can we learn from other industries?’”
For brands, this includes not simply using standards, even though they offer a level of assurance about traceability, as a proxy for a direct relationship with their Tier 4 producers.
“For real, widespread system change to occur, you want to do more than that,” Bergkamp said. “You want to build connection points and opportunities for listening and opportunities for active engagement and shared thinking about reporting. Like, how does our Tier 4 community want to report their progress, as well as the brand community? And how do we create opportunities for both sides to be thinking about these things more similarly, despite very different realities?”
All of this will be on the docket when Textile Exchange holds its annual meeting in Lisbon in October. The agenda is still being firmed up, but the theme of the conference, “Shifting Landscapes,” will explore the need for adaptation amid rapid, rampant and, at times, wholly unanticipated and unprecedented change, not to mention ever-rising temperatures that continue to break annual records.
“We have to get very targeted about what is the project plan, what is a hard-nosed, clear, direct way to actually do this and not just a kind of aspirational view of where we want to get to,” she added. “I think if we can do that, we’ve got a fighting chance.”
