Ten years since Rana Plaza Factory collapse and fashion’s focus is finetuned on good.
“The goal is clear,” said Cara Smyth, senior managing director, retail ESG at Accenture, and fellow and founder of Fordham University’s Gabelli School Responsible Business Center, during a virtual sustainability forum with WWD. “We all know we want to be a respectful and regenerative ecosystem that is supporting both economics and ecology. Once you know where you’re going, it’s much easier.”
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With a focal point on the horizon, the question is — what now?
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In its second iterative ESG solutions report, in partnership with WWD, Accenture identified 12 key action areas for fashion to push progress further. They include carbon and net zero; materials, regenerative agriculture and biodiversity; water and chemicals; circularity, waste and redefining growth; plastics and packaging; traceability and transparency; consumer engagement and labeling; worker and human rights; women’s empowerment, education and digital wages; justice, equity, inclusion and diversity; supply chain, and transportation and logistics.
It took five analysts five months to condense learnings in the space into tangible actions.
“There has to be an open-sharing of what’s working right now,” Smyth said. There are only about 40 or 50 “famously visible brands” in sustainable fashion, she quipped, but many more suppliers feeding into the frontrunners. Smyth highlighted Gap’s Rise program for gender workplace advancement and Madewell’s cotton sourcing as indicative of progress. She underscored brands will have to ensure progress is not only documented and demonstrated, but most of all, “correct” as it enters the public domain.
Underneath those transitional strides is a fashion system in flux. She said the industry is in the “messy middle” of its transformation. “I think there are pockets of hope that make us feel like we can do it. A good part of that is we all recognize we are stewards of each other and our planet. I think that’s a big deal because we are only 10 years [out] from Rana Plaza. The Patagonias, Walmarts, Textile Exchanges of the world certainly started before that, but if we think of a 100-year-old, ready-to-wear system, 50 or 60 years in its current form, and we are trying to dismantle it, redirect it, reshape it — in 10 years — I think a lot of progress has been made.”
She argued fashion has made concrete strides in deepening ESG fluency, complying with science-based corporate goals (such as the Science Based Targets Initiative), fostering collaboration through resources like Apparel Impact Institute and technology advancements.
With the foundation “well set,” she cautioned against seeing fashion as superficially motivated, offering an alternative lens for fashion that is a “multidimensional, interrelated, interconnected system of systems.” This is why Accenture’s report showcases the overlapping or collective benefits in its model, where gains in one box equate to gains in others.
Per Smyth, education is imperative and doomsday language is a roadblock in fashion. “We almost have to flip the script and get out of the language of, ‘Oh, we must do this because it’s the right thing.’ It’s the right thing for your business, and if we don’t change that and align that with the way business actually works, I think it’s scary and slows progress.”
And regulation is helping, per Smyth, in forcing sustainability progress from laggards so long as approaching timelines (echoing other industry bodies) do not set the industry up for failure in the case that companies lack confidence in their own datasets.
“The reality is let’s all remember that it’s only 10 years, that we had a two-year COVID-19 blackout, a lot of advancements have been made, the fluency is there, the new governance is there, regulations are coming on stream,” she said. “Even there, remembering again it’s a team.”