At this year’s Global Fashion Summit, the theme was Building Resilient Futures. But can we truly build resilience without including the voices of workers in global fashion supply chains? 

At a time when sustainability is under threat, with budgets being slashed, brand commitments scaled back, and teams disbanded, events like the Global Fashion Summit offer a glimmer of hope. They unite industry leaders, policymakers, innovators, journalists and changemakers to evaluate where the industry stands and explore how we can collectively move the needle. 

The world is facing unprecedented turmoil, from geopolitical tensions, to inflation, and the greatest challenge of our time: climate change. These global crises are reshaping industries today and now, more than ever, there is a pressing need to build resilience, ensuring the industries we have become reliant on in our everyday lives can adapt, survive and support the people within them. Recent years have made one thing abundantly clear: fashion supply chains sit on the frontlines of these crises, and business as usual is no longer an option. 

Throughout the two-day Summit, panels covered pressing intersections of fashion, climate, policy, circularity and legislation. Discussions explored the discriminatory health impacts faced by women in fashion supply chains, the growing threat of heat stress in a warming world, the continued relevance of policy as a lever for change, and the successes and downfalls of initiatives like extended producer responsibility (EPR).

But the overall tone was that sustainability is now a strategic business concern, and brands need to adapt and build resilience not for the sake of people, and the planet, but to reduce financial risks. The urgency was placed on how we can frame sustainability as attractive to investors, because, ultimately “if it’s only good for the planet, investors won’t be interested.” 

On the stage, Ami Vitale, National Geographic Explorer, Photographer and Filmmaker, shared a much-needed grounding perspective on the vital role of nature, and our relationship to it. In just 50 years, humanity has wiped out 73% of the world’s wildlife, offering a stark reminder of the urgency to rethink our approach. Vitale emphasised the need for moving away from extractive practices toward relationships grounded in reciprocity and conservation, and the urgency to support frontline communities who are the land stewards, knowledge holders and true conservationists. Vitale challenged brands to look back at their supply chains and consider whether they create value for both people and the land at their point of origin, and if they don’t then something needs to change. 

“Fashion is not just about materials, or carbon, or circular systems, though they matter,” said Vitale. “It’s about relationships and whether we see nature as a warehouse of resources, or as a living system to which we all belong…Unlike the other extinctions, this one has a designer. It runs through supply chains, it shows up in how cotton is grown, how leather is tanned, how forests are cleared, and how water is used and discarded.”

Vitale’s presentation captured the sense of urgency that many of us in fashion are already feeling. As the climate crisis accelerates, its impacts are increasingly showing up across supply chains. In 2025 alone, more than 200 climate-related disasters affected more than 87.8 million people worldwide. Fashion’s role in the destruction of nature, our vital ecosystems,and biodiversity can no longer be ignored. “Fashion is not adjacent to the story. It is one of the systems shaping it,” said Vitale. 

There are signs of progress, and this was evident throughout the Summit’s Innovation Showcase — from RE&UP’s textile-to-textile recycling technologies, to Haelixa’s DNA-based traceability platform, and Fibe’s natural fibres made from potato harvest waste.

But, is innovation enough if the very structures and foundations the industry stands upon remain exploitative and extractive? Unfortunately, it seems the industry remains divisive as to whether these structures should shift or not. Panels made clear that, ultimately, the new paradigm needs to be profitable, and if it’s only good for the planet, investors won’t be interested. One investor in particular highlighted that they are specifically seeking innovations that are immediately ready to integrate into existing supply chain structures, “without overhauling the industry”. The problem with this is the innovation at hand then risks perpetuating the very same harms as current materials and production systems. Existing supply chains, shaped by a linear business model, reward profit and speed above all else. As a result, innovations introduced within these structures are likely to be pushed to scale rapidly, often at the expense of quality, responsible production, and fair labour conditions. 

This concern was raised by Next-Gen Assembly member Kendall Ludwig. “Fashion is not adapting to circularity, circularity is trying to keep up with fashion,” said Ludwig. Currently the industry is not demanding new structures, instead it is asking next-gen materials to scale in existing fast fashion structures. Until we address the entire business model, rather than trying to gloss over it with innovation and circularity initiatives, little will change.

This was echoed by Grace Forrest, Founding Director of Walk Free. “Without discussing a living wage and addressing mass overproduction, but talking about circularity, to me it’s like discussing if the tooth fairy is real. Because mass overproduction is the major issue. We can’t circulate our way out of the problem.” said Forrest. Too often, at sustainability-centred events, the focus is disproportionately placed on the environmental impact of the fashion industry, with the human and social costs still looked to as an afterthought, or treated as a simple tickbox exercise. But innovation and circularity initiatives that exist within supply chains rife with human suffering and exploitation are not truly sustainable. “You cannot squeeze suppliers on price and speed and still claim sustainability. Those pressures are direct drivers of exploitation. Real resilience comes from fair pricing, long-term supplier relationships and realistic production timelines,” said Forrest.

We need the industry to move away from sustainability as a corporate ambition, and towards the people, communities, and ecosystems that sustain the industry itself.

One message stood out the most at the Summit: those closest to the challenges are also closest to the solutions. Garment workers, farmers, and artisans are not passive participants within supply chains; they are land stewards, knowledge holders, and experts in what needs to change for fairer, more equitable systems. Those who sustain the industry through their labour and skills, are also those who bear the brunt of the industry’s impact, and so the frontline communities – who are both within and closest to the fashion supply chain – are the people who should be shaping the conversations around fashion’s future. 

One panel in particular on fashion, climate, and women’s health was a powerful reflection of this. Dr. Harshita Umesh, founder of the Vaada Hope Foundation, Tiffany Rogers of the Fair Labor Association, Rawnak Jahan, Acting Director in Women and Girls’ Empowerment at CARE Bangladesh and Farhana Islam, Quality Inspector at TusukaTrousers Ltd. came together for a phenomenal discussion unpacking the urgent need to prioritise women’s health, ensure access to fair pay and healthcare, and recognise garment workers as active agents of change.

The conversation addressed persistent workplace inequalities, including gender pay gaps, and highlighted the importance of drawing on workers’ lived experiences and on-the-ground insights to shape more equitable systems and just transitions within the fashion industry. The panel was facilitated by the H&M Foundation, who are working to bring perspectives from across the value chain into the spaces where decisions are being made. These are the conversations we need more of.

Yet conversations like these deserve far greater visibility. They should be centred on main stages, not scheduled alongside competing sessions that allow audiences to opt out of engaging with these critical issues,  especially when worker-led organisations and worker voices are at the heart of the discussion.

When it comes to decarbonisation strategies and emerging optimisation, this is imperative. Aarti Mohan, co-founder of Sattva, reinforced the importance of a “nothing for them without them” approach. Brands’ decarbonisation efforts must be implemented in a way that does not dehumanise workers through over-optimisation. Currently the industry is adopting heavily technical solutions to address human-centric problems. Meaningful progress requires active listening and collaboration with workers themselves, ensuring solutions are rooted in lived realities and adapted to local contexts. “Decarbonisation might solve the climate imperative, but it shouldn’t unlock another crisis in the form of people being left behind,” said Mohan.

If fashion is serious about transformation, sustainability efforts must centre the voices of frontline communities, who the industry relies most heavily upon, yet too often remain excluded from the conversations shaping its future.

Although this issue was raised across numerous panels, the voices of frontline communities and workers within the global fashion supply chain remained largely absent from the Summit. We need to move beyond simply talking about including workers’ voices and begin ensuring that workers are meaningfully represented in these conversations.”Knowledge has to flow up from workers from the front of supply chains, not just down from board rooms or sustainability teams in Europe.” said Forrest. The harsh reality is that giving space to brands like LVMH is a self-perpetuating cycle that rewards the bare minimum, when still we see continual evidence of supply chain abuses and worker exploitation. The conversation becomes one of who has access (which is largely determined by financial power), rather than who has the genuine answers and solutions. “What is lacking from events like the Global Fashion Summit is the voice of frontline workers and the voice of the people who make our clothes…sustainability isn’t real without the human rights of the people behind these products. I would like to see worker voices represented and the people behind these products at every level of the supply chain.” said Forrest.

If the industry genuinely wants to learn from workers, then workers must also be present in the rooms where decisions are being made, this includes at events like the Global Fashion Summit.

The fashion industry is at a critical turning point. We need conversations to lead to commitments, and commitment to lead to action. These conversations cannot belong solely to brands, CEOs, and innovators. The future of fashion must be shaped by the workers in the global fashion supply chain whose labour, skill, knowledge, and craftsmanship underpin the entire system. Without them in the room, little changes. 

Fashion industry summits and conferences shaping the future of the sector should commit to measurable targets: at least half of all speakers and panellists should come from frontline worker communities, with funded participation for workers across all stages of the supply chain and dedicated sessions on critical issues such as fair wages, heat stress, and creating safe and healthy working environments. Workers, not brands, should be setting the agenda and leading the conversation. Resilience cannot be built in rooms that exclude the very people sustaining the industry.

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Sacha Daly is the Digital Editor at Eco Age.

Every material will eventually return to the biosphere, and whether it does so as a resource or as a pollutant is a design choice.

Start with a forest floor.

A leaf falls. Within hours, it crunches under the feet of adorable mammals like deer and raccoons. Tiny invertebrates begin fragmenting it, bacteria colonise its surface. Fungi begins threading into it. Microbes metabolise what remains. In a matter of weeks if not days in some parts of the world, what was once a leaf has been transformed into nutrients that feed the very tree that dropped it. Nothing is lost. Everything is continuously becoming something else, sharing and rearranging. The forest doesn’t have a waste problem because it has decomposers: the patient, invisible architects of renewal that sit at the heart of every healthy natural system.

Now consider the fashion industry. In 2021, The Biomimicry Institute published a report that started from a deceptively simple question: what would fashion look like if it actually operated like a natural ecosystem? We looked at how natural materials cycle, and why. We went back to the first of all principles: the fundamental rules that run our physical world.

What we found is something the industry has been quietly avoiding. It is a truth rooted not in opinion but in the laws of physics.

The Law No Circular Economy Can Escape

The second law of thermodynamics is non-negotiable. Materials trend towards dispersal. Industrial loops leak. No matter how elegantly we design a recycling system, no matter how tightly we imagine our circular loops, the biosphere is always the outermost container. Everything we make is ultimately inside nature, not alongside it.

If materials are going to escape our industrial systems regardless, then the question isn’t how to stop them from leaking — it’s what they become when they do.

In nature, this is entirely solved. What disperses from one organism becomes nutrients for another. The fallen leaf fuels the forest. This works because natural systems are built around three interlocking actors: primary producers, consumers, and decomposers. Producers concentrate energy and matter into useful forms. Consumers extract that value. And decomposers break everything back down into the building blocks that producers need to begin again.

Fashion has built extraordinary infrastructure around the first two. We grow fibres, spin yarn, weave cloth, design garments, and recirculate them through increasingly sophisticated resale and recycling channels. But we have largely forgotten the third actor. We have built a system with no decomposers, and the consequences are everywhere.

When textiles escape our industrial loops, as they inevitably do, there is nothing waiting to receive them. Polyester fibres shed into oceans as microplastics. Blended, dyed, chemically-treated garments pile up on the banks of sacred waterways. The link between decomposition and primary production — the link that makes natural systems endlessly generative — is broken in the systems we have built. Waste becomes pollution; not because we have been careless, but because we have been incomplete.

The Missing Engine

This is the central insight that drives the Nature of Fashion: Design for Transformation initiative, led by The Biomimicry Institute and funded by Laudes Foundation. Decomposition is not a niche concern, a technical footnote, or the last resort after recycling fails. It is the missing engine of true circularity. And without it, every circular economy model we build is solving only part of the problem.

This is not an argument against recycling. Recycling is vital where existing infrastructure is hard-won and must be preserved. But recycling, alone, cannot address a system that exceeds planetary boundaries by design, produces materials that have no safe decomposition pathway, and concentrates its failures in the communities least responsible for creating them. Decomposition begins where recycling reaches its limits, receiving what remains. It is the phase that transforms spent materials back into the building blocks of new life. It is, in nature, how abundance perpetuates itself.

The Nature of Fashion initiative is now in its second phase, working with three pilot partners across three very different contexts to test what it actually looks like to bring decomposition back into the textile industrial system. Each pilot is locally adapted, ecologically grounded, and asks a different version of the same fundamental question: how do we learn to design endings well?

Three Pilots, Three Answers

In the Netherlands, Circle Economy and partners including EV Biotech, BioFashionTech, and TNO are building a system of partnerships that resembles a forest floor at industrial scale. Instead of waiting for a single technology to solve everything, they asked what happens if you link enzymatic hydrolysis, bacterial fermentation, and gasification together — each processing a different fraction of mixed textile waste, each feeding its outputs into the next phase, each performing the role of a different decomposer in a natural ecosystem. The discovery is already significant: these processes can work synergistically. A tangle of unsellable, unsortable mixed textiles that would otherwise be incinerated becomes glucose, biodegradable polymers, and syngas. Waste becomes feedstock. The Netherlands becomes, quietly, a proof of concept for industrial symbiosis at the systems level.

In Germany, the Beneficial Design Institute and partners at the Fraunhofer Institutes are extending this logic further. Polyester-rich textile waste is hydrolysed and fermented into PHB, a biodegradable biopolymer with promising medical applications. And in a process that feels almost improbable, CO2 from the syngas of gasified textile waste is fed to microalgae, which process it via photosynthesis to produce beta-glucan for agriculture and biomaterials. Carbon cycling back into living systems. The Berlin-Brandenburg region is positioned to become a textile bioeconomy hub where discards from one process become the input for another, exactly as nature has always operated.

These two European pilots are pursuing commercial viability, technical innovation, and systems integration. They are essential. And they tell part of the story.

The other part of the story is in Accra.

Where the System Ends Up

Kantamanto Market in Ghana processes around 15 million used garments every week, imported from the UK, the EU, the US, Canada, and China. It is one of the world’s largest secondhand clothing hubs, providing an extraordinary service of keeping garments in use within a broken system built on overproduction. As fashion novelty accelerates and garments are designed to be disposable, the task becomes impossible to complete. What cannot be sold accumulates. And it accumulates in Korle Lagoon — Naa Korle, a sacred waterway behind the market that has absorbed decades of the world’s textile waste.

And yet, underneath the ecological devastation, life is innovating. The lagoon’s microbial communities are evolving to metabolise polymers once considered indestructible. Korle is not just a site of crisis. It is an evolution hotspot.

What the Or Foundation has discovered at Korle is something that reframes the entire conversation. The lagoon’s microbial communities are evolving under the evolutionary pressure of extreme synthetic pollution to metabolise polymers once considered indestructible. Korle is not just a site of crisis. It is a Living Lab, the most concentrated ecosystem on earth for synthetic textiles. Developed not in a laboratory, but in direct response to what the fashion industry sent there.

The Or Foundation’s pilot does not seek to out-engineer this. The team seeks to learn from it, support it, and ultimately restore the lagoon and the community surrounding it. Community members are co-investigators. The science being developed through field-deployable DNA analysis tools, bioreactor designs informed by the lagoon’s own microbial logic, is grounded in a principle of democratised knowledge. And the work holds a truth that no amount of industrial biotech can circumvent: the communities at the end of the line are also the communities with the most intimate knowledge of what the system has produced. Justice and ecological intelligence are not separate conversations. They belong together and are inextricably linked.

What This Asks of Us

The Nature of Fashion initiative does not offer a silver bullet. That framing is precisely what we are trying to move beyond. What it offers is a paradigm upgrade: a way of thinking about the fashion industry as nested within natural systems, constrained by the same physical laws, and therefore capable of learning from the same biological genius that has sustained life on earth for billions of years.

This means designing textiles as nutrients from the very beginning, understanding that every material will eventually return to the biosphere, and that whether it does so as a resource or as a pollutant is a design choice. It means investing in decomposition infrastructure alongside recycling infrastructure, understanding that these are complementary, not competing. It means confronting the fact that the places where textile waste accumulates most intensely are not peripheral to this story but in fact central to it.

And it means approaching this work with the humility that nature itself models and accepting that transformation takes time. On the forest floor, decomposition happens not through force but through collaborations: the right organisms, the right environment, the right sequence. 3.8 billion years of evolution have refined those conditions to extraordinary efficiency. 

We are at the beginning of understanding how to do the same. The pilots in the Netherlands, Berlin-Brandenburg, and Ghana are showing us that it is possible, and that it is already underway — in laboratories, in living lagoons, and in the communities who have been waiting for the rest of the system to catch up.

In nature, every ending is the beginning of something new…

Everything we make will come back to the earth. The question has always been what it becomes when it does.

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Asha Singhal is Director of the Nature of Fashion: Design for Transformation initiative at The Biomimicry Institute. The initiative is funded by Laudes Foundation and works with pilot partners The Or Foundation (Ghana), Circle Economy (Netherlands), and Beneficial Design Institute (Germany). Learn more at biomimicry.org . Case studies from all three pilot partners are published and can be viewed here.