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Calls for systems change are building in strength and sustainability has become a key area of development for fashion. The industry needs to move faster and take bigger swings. This year’s sustainability innovators are founders, activists, organisers and designers all working toward a common goal: to bring fashion’s footprint within the realm of planetary boundaries, minimising waste and spent resources. These are the people fighting the uphill battle and proposing new solutions for a better industry.
Rachel Arthur
Advocacy lead for sustainable fashion | United Nations Environment Programme
For a long time, fashion communicators have managed to escape criticism for their role in supporting overproduction and promoting overconsumption, but that is beginning to change.
Earlier this year, journalist, speaker and consultant Rachel Arthur set her sights on making fashion communication sustainable, not just in the way fashion talks about sustainability but in the broader narratives it weaves around the industry and its impacts. Arthur was the lead author on the Sustainable Fashion Communication Playbook published by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the UN Climate Change Fashion Charter in June. Intended as an actionable guide, the playbook walks communicators through the process of narrative change, shifting from communications that promote a linear, take-make-waste model towards a sustainable and circular system in line with the Paris Climate Agreement.
Its four key goals show the scope of Arthur’s ambition: countering misinformation, reducing messages perpetuating overconsumption, redirecting aspiration to more sustainable lifestyles, and empowering consumers to demand greater action from businesses and policymakers. This isn’t her first stab at industry change — Arthur is also the co-founder of Fashmash, a UK-based community bringing together fashion changemakers for events, networking and mentoring underrepresented groups.
International steering committee members
Asia Floor Wage Alliance
Garment workers are integral to the fashion industry, but the fashion industry rarely recognises the contributions of garment workers. Against this backdrop, unions are a critical force for change, advocating for issues that can help garment workers thrive, such as better wages and benefits as well as basic safety measures needed to end rampant gender-based violence and harassment.
Founded in 2007, the Asia Floor Wage Alliance (AFWA) is a global labour and social alliance that covers garment-producing countries (such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Sri Lanka) and key consumer regions (including the US and Europe). The international alliance was intended to create solidarity between producing countries in response to fears that brands would simply relocate supply chains in the face of increasing scrutiny over garment worker rights and wages. Its steering committee — made up of 21 leaders from its 50 allied organisations — is weighted towards Asia, with additional representation from the US and Europe. One of AFWA’s core pillars is establishing living wages. In 2022, AFWA released new living wage figures after surveying 1,686 garment workers from 20 trade unions in six countries. Many garment workers still exist on poverty wages, a situation exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, so these efforts to define and guarantee living wages for garment workers are crucial. Activists say that living wages could also have bigger-picture consequences for fashion’s sustainability agenda by shifting brand-supply chain relationships in line with just transition and decolonisation and forcing brands to slow down overproduction, thus lowering negative environmental and social impacts and making supply chain jobs more meaningful and dignified.
Aisha Ayensu
Founder and CEO | Christie Brown
There’s little about Christie Brown that is typical in Ghana, where the luxury brand is based, or in the fashion industry as a whole. The label’s signature aesthetic is an elegant and seamless blend of modern luxury with African tradition, one that Aisha Ayensu has worked tirelessly to maintain since founding the brand in 2008. The flagship store in Accra that opened in February 2023 feels otherworldly, and yet it fits right in — homegrown luxury, not an international import. The brand produces locally at an atelier across town, an arrangement that is not always convenient but is one that Ayensu believes in. Her attention to detail and exacting standards for production are what have enabled her to attract a loyal and global client base, but they are also anomalous in a region that isn't accustomed to manufacturing at scale, and where limited investment can mean that scaling a business is especially challenging for an independent designer like Ayensu. To stay connected with the women she employs — all of whom live in the surrounding communities — she holds regular and informal coffee meetings with every department at the atelier and brings the entire staff on an annual retreat, providing the chance to meet face-to-face, listen and engage. The connections these experiences enable have been game-changing for her and the integrity she's keen to maintain for the brand she's worked so hard to build, she says. “It makes all the difference.”
Maxine Bédat
Founder and director | New Standard Institute
Maxine Bédat is the director and founder of “think and do tank” New Standard Institute. She is also the author of Unraveled: The life and death of a garment (2021), which uses the life cycle of a pair of jeans to expose the rifts in global supply chains and the unequal power dynamics underpinning fashion.
One of her most impactful contributions to the fashion industry is her role as a key drafter of the Fashion Sustainability and Social Accountability Act (also known as the New York Fashion Act). The act — whose supporters include US brands Reformation, Mara Hoffman and Another Tomorrow — is hoped to pass this year and is widely considered one of fashion’s most ambitious and holistic sustainability-related legislative proposals to date. If passed, it could overhaul the way fashion companies operate, finally holding major brands accountable for their environmental and social impacts. The act would mandate that companies doing business in New York, with annual global revenue of at least $100 million, would have to know and disclose their supply chains and take responsibility for their impact through a legally binding due diligence framework, which would include climate targets, garment worker protections and chemical management standards.
Abena Essoun and Sammy Oteng
Community outreach coordinator, and senior community engagement manager, No More Fast Fashion Lab | The Or Foundation
Most of the work carried out by The Or Foundation, which has almost single-handedly put the issue of textile waste on the industry’s agenda, stems directly from what happens inside Kantamanto, a market in Accra that is said to be the largest for secondhand clothing in West Africa. There may be no one who knows Kantamanto better than Abena Essoun and Sammy Oteng, who spend their days with retailers and “re-manufacturers” — designers and tailors who upcycle or somehow repurpose unusable clothing into new products — to learn about their businesses, the challenges they face, the solutions they want to see and what role they think the Global North, where their merchandise originates from, should play in developing them.
Oteng came to the work from a design background — he was a Gucci Design Fellowship Finalist and has been repurposing secondhand pieces for over a decade — while Essoun was a retailer in Kantamanto, and The Or Foundation might not exist were it not for her, the struggles she faced in that role and her willingness to talk about them. She had become trapped in a perpetual cycle of debt because the quality of the clothes she kept acquiring through imports from the Global North was so low that she couldn't sell enough to recoup the investment involved in buying them, which has to be done sight unseen. She spent so much time with Or co-founders Liz Ricketts and Branson Skinner, educating them about how the local trade works and how inherently vulnerable it leaves her and thousands of others in a similar situation, that they decided to find ways to work collaboratively to both identify solutions locally and to give voice to the local community on the global stage.
Shameek Ghosh, Saravanan Parisutham, Hrishikesh Rajan and Madhava Venkatesh
Co-founders | TrusTrace
Over the past year, supply chain traceability evolved from a nice-to-have to a business imperative. As new regulations on raw materials and labour rights grow, brands need to trace their supply chains to ensure that they’re complying with those regulations. But, fashion’s supply chain is tangled and complex, and many brands don’t know where to start. That’s where supply chain traceability platform TrusTrace steps in.
TrusTrace was launched in 2016 by four co-founders, CEO Shameek Ghosh, CGO Hrishikesh Rajan, CTO Madhava Venkatesh and COO Saravanan Parisutham, ex-colleagues who worked in IT and sought to use technology to counter the effects of fashion’s environmental footprint, which they had seen first-hand in India. It’s one of the early platforms providing solutions to a supply chain traceability problem that experts say will continue to deepen as legislation grows. The main challenge that TrusTrace, among others in the traceability space face, is convincing the fashion industry to collaborate to set industry-wide standards and methods of reporting. Headquartered in Stockholm with offices in India, the UK and France, TrusTrace works with brands, including Adidas and Tapestry, to streamline the traceability process, helping them digitalise the supply chain traceability process and stay up to date on the latest legislation. TrustTrace also offers an annual open-access traceability playbook to guide the industry on best practice and what’s needed to move the needle, including how to standardise traceability on an industry-wide scale.
Anne Gillespie
Director of industry integrity | Textile Exchange
As Textile Exchange’s director of industry integrity for over 15 years, Gillespie was responsible for developing the standards and tools for the industry to improve material sourcing practices, including for down and feathers, leather and recycled and organic fibres. In other words, she helped to build the certification infrastructure for textiles that the industry is increasingly relying on today. Now, as director of impact acceleration, she is focused on looking “beyond standards” to develop market mechanisms that can support brands in driving the pace and scale of change that’s necessary.
Sara Grady and Alice Robinson
Founders | British Pasture Leather
Agriculture specialist Sara Grady and fashion designer Alice Robinson co-founded British Pasture Leather out of a shared frustration: leather is one of the fashion industry’s most widely used materials, but it’s also among the most problematic. Most brands source leather hides from abattoirs, with no oversight of the farms they came from, the treatment of the animals, or the farming practices used. These supply chains are notoriously rife with environmental destruction, from deforestation to high greenhouse gas emissions.
By forging UK supply chains of leather made from cattle raised on regenerative farms, British Pasture Leather is attempting to overhaul this system, tying together two of fashion’s primary concerns in the process: traceability and emissions. Regenerative agricultural practices can have myriad environmental benefits, improving biodiversity, soil health, carbon sequestration and resilience to the climate crisis. Grady and Robinson are intent on getting farmers to factor leather hides into their balance sheets, rather than perpetuate the historic narrative that they are a byproduct of the meat industry.
British Pasture Leather produced its first batch of materials in 2021 while operating under the name Grady + Robinson. The company is close to reaching commercial scale: sample projects with brands show promise, with clients including Mulberry, New Balance and independent designer Phoebe English.
Atle Høie and Christina Hajagos-Clausen, and Alke Boessiger
General secretary and director for the textile, garment, shoe and leather sector, and deputy general secretary | IndustriALL Global Union and UNI Global Union
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On 24 April 2013, Rana Plaza — an eight-storey building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, housing five separate garment factories — collapsed. Its owners had ignored major cracks in the building and desperate pleas from workers to rectify the building’s safety. At least 1,138 people died, with a further 2,500 injured or disabled. In the decade since, Rana Plaza has come to symbolise not only the lack of factory safety in fashion’s supply chains but a matrix of systemic issues — from garment worker vulnerability to the colonial power dynamics between brands and suppliers.
While wages and management practices have changed little for garment workers, building safety has improved dramatically — thanks largely to global unions UNI and IndustriALL leveraging the global outrage to orchestrate the International Safety Accord (formerly known as the Bangladesh Accord).The Accord applies to registered factories and is legally binding. Led by IndustriALL’s Atle Høie (general secretary) and Christina Hajagos-Clausen (director for the textile, garment, shoe and leather sector), and UNI’s Alke Boessiger (deputy general secretary), its founders say it has completed nearly 56,000 safety inspections to date across 2,400 garment factories in Bangladesh, correcting more than 140,000 safety issues, with a remediation rate of 91 per cent. Its impact on workers in registered factories is undeniable, and it is now being rolled out to other geographies, starting in January 2023 with Pakistan.
Tarek Islam and Fatima Zaahra Li
Senior community engagement and outreach worker and senior youth and community worker | Fashion-workers Advice Bureau Leicester (FAB-L)
People from marginalised communities often get stuck in fashion’s most exploitative roles because they have fewer options and resources, which also makes it harder to get out of a harmful work environment. One of the main barriers garment workers in the UK face is a language barrier, which can lead to them being less confident in advocating for themselves and leave them vulnerable to being exploited by factories that threaten their immigration status, job security or wages if they refuse harmful work conditions.
Fashion-workers Advice Bureau Leicester (FAB-L) offers free, confidential advice and support to garment workers in Leicester, a major UK garment manufacturing hub with a large population of South Asian immigrants. The organisation is led by Tarek Islam, senior community engagement and outreach worker, whose parents were both garment workers, and Fatima Zaahra Li, senior youth and community worker, who also comes from a South Asian background and hails from a family of garment workers. Fuelled by their own families’ experiences, Li and Islam joined forces to start their project in 2021 and launch their services in 2022, with the aim of addressing exploitative practices on the ground. FAB-L’s services range from advice on workers' rights, financial hardship support and health and safety to advice about immigration, housing and domestic violence. In 2022, its first full year of operating, FAB-L made contact with 700 garment workers, provided remediation for modern slavery issues for 80 workers recovered £110,000 of unpaid wages and supported 100 workers with access to social welfare rights services like housing applications and benefits.
Ahmed and Hasan Javed
Executive directors | AGI Denim
As legislation grows around raw materials traceability, and with concerns about forced labour in China’s Xinjiang region prompting sanctions in the US, cotton has been put under a spotlight over the past couple of years. Pakistani denim manufacturer AGI Denim (AGI stands for Artistic Garment Industries) can trace the cotton it uses back to the field in which it is grown.
AGI Denim, a vertical manufacturer, is run by executive directors Hasan and Ahmed Javed, brothers whose grandparents founded the company in 1949. Hasan joined in 2010 and now oversees the denim mill, while Ahmed, who joined in 2017, leads the garment portion of the business. Since the Javed brothers took over, the company has been stepping up its sustainability credentials on a globally recognisable level in an effort to put Pakistan on the map as a sourcing country. AGI Denim became Pakistan’s first B Corp-certified company in June 2022, a certification that’s difficult to achieve in the country due to the documentation, frameworks and reporting lines needed. In 2021, it became the first denim manufacturer to achieve a Gold rating from green building certification programme Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) by creating a zero-waste spinning mill which shreds post-consumer waste into recycled fibre to replace some of the cotton in its garments. Its denim production is designed to avoid water waste at every stage, from cotton farms to the use of recycled water in manufacturing. The company recently collaborated with LA denim brand Triarchy on a capsule collection that was designed to be recycled, which was sold at Neiman Marcus.
Dr Hakan Karaosman and Professor Donna Marshall
Founders | Fashion’s Responsible Supply Chain Hub (FReSCH)
As fashion strives to improve its environmental footprint, it’s vital that social impacts are not forgotten. This concept — dubbed a just transition — is the founding principle of the EU-funded research centre, Fashion’s Responsible Supply Chain Hub (FReSCH), created by academics Dr Hakan Karaosman and Professor Donna Marshall. Both are driven by personal experience of fashion supply chains, having been raised by garment worker mothers. Through their research, Karaosman and Marshall interrogate the complex power dynamics at play in fashion supply chains, uplift marginalised communities, and tease out the trade-offs between environmental, social and business prerogatives that make progress so difficult to achieve.
Their vital research amplifies the voices and experiences of supply chain workers in the Global South, challenging brands to create more inclusive, holistic and context-specific solutions and move away from the transactional, opaque and exploitative practices that have plagued fashion for decades.
Rachel Kibbe
Executive director | American Circular Textiles Group
Around the world, policymakers have long taken a laissez-faire approach to regulating the fashion industry. That has started to change in just the last few years, as brands are beginning to engage in policy and recognise that they won’t be able to achieve their sustainability goals if the legal and regulatory landscape doesn’t shift to help them. In the US, Rachel Kibbe — who in 2011 founded Helpsy, an early e-commerce store for sustainable fashion, and later founded consultancy and policy advocacy firm Circular Services Group — has been busy walking the halls of Congress and state government houses. She helped to found, and was then voted to lead, the American Circular Textiles Group, an industry coalition advocating for policies that could bolster fashion’s sustainability efforts or at least focus them in the right direction. She has engaged with lawmakers on most, if not all of the legislative proposals that have been introduced in the last year, including the Fashion Sustainability and Social Accountability (Fashion) Act in New York and the Responsible Textile Recovery Act in California — while she also convenes brands and other fashion players to drive industry support as well. Anyone who can get their calls returned from both US lawmakers and fashion brands, including H&M, Reformation and a string of others in between, is someone who is going to have an impact on how the fashion industry looks 10 or so years from now.
Lisa Lang
Director of policy and EU affairs orchestrator | Climate-KIC
The European Union’s splashy sustainability agenda promises to overhaul fashion regulation in the lead-up to 2030. Behind the scenes, a few key players are working to prepare the fashion industry for the changes coming its way and make sure its voice is heard in the process. One of the most influential names to know is Lisa Lang. Her main role is director of policy and EU affairs orchestrator at innovation catalyst Climate-KIC, co-funded by the European Union. But she also operates as a high-level expert advisor to the European Commission for creative industries, and chairperson of the United Nations’ culture and creative industries (CCI) taskforce, which leverages creativity and culture to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.
Lang describes the 27 EU countries as her 27 children, which she herds towards more sustainable practices, carefully balancing conflicting agendas with the EU’s ambitious vision for the future of fashion. In the midst of seismic regulatory changes, players like Lang are increasingly important, bridging the fashion industry’s lobbying gap and keeping legislators in line with what is actually possible in a highly complex global industry.
Eileen Mockus
President and CEO | Coyuchi
Circularity and organic and regenerative agriculture claims are now common in fashion, but home textiles company Coyuchi has been working on these concepts in its own supply chain for years. Most of its products are organic and fair trade, and the brand was one of the founding members of the California Cotton and Climate Coalition (C4), an initiative launched last year to help brands source cotton directly from farmers who have transitioned to climate-beneficial practices. The brand is also one of the few companies to “have gone all the way through a circular business model”, says Nicole Bassett, co-founder of The Renewal Workshop (and Vogue Business 100 listee last year) and is “actually recycling their old product into a new one”. That stands out in an industry where brands talk a lot about circularity but, for the most part, have yet to see it through.
Danielle Nkojo
Sustainability lead, product and circularity | Ralph Lauren
Creating change at a large company can be slow and difficult. Changing how a company operates can seem altogether impossible — yet, it’s what is necessary for fashion to deliver on its promises of circularity. Danielle Nkojo is making it happen at Ralph Lauren, if only for a handful of products, but with the ultimate aim of taking the learnings from those products and applying them companywide. Nkojo, who worked in recycling and environmental health with government agencies and others before jumping to fashion, leads the brand’s development of circular design principles and the product certification process with non-profit Cradle to Cradle and the first certified luxury product launches this year, the Purple Label and Collection Cashmere Sweater.
Marissa Nuncio
Director | Garment Worker Center
Under Marissa Nuncio’s leadership, the Garment Worker Center in Los Angeles has kept a laser focus on worker rights while also expanding to campaign and lobby for the policies needed to address the root causes of problems so many garment workers face. The non-profit, which was founded in 2001 to support low-wage garment workers and provide a space for them to organise collectively for social and economic justice, was a key driver of the momentum that helped to pass SB62, the California legislation that holds brands accountable for wage violations in their supply chain in California. Nuncio is a “powerhouse in terms of putting Made in America to mean jobs of dignity”, according to Remake founder (and 2022 Vogue Business 100 listee) Ayesha Barenblat. She and GWC have now turned their attention to the Fashioning Accountability and Building Real Institutional Change (Fabric) Act. The proposed legislation would increase garment workers’ wages, hold brands accountable if they work with factories that pay less than the federal minimum wage, and establish incentives for companies to do more manufacturing within the US. It is scheduled to be reintroduced on 14 September 2023.
Lewis Perkins
President | Apparel Impact Institute
Most of the work needed to decarbonise fashion’s supply chain is high-cost and high-reward for the planet. Brands, however, have little economic incentive to invest in things like renewable energy in the supply chain and tend to be drawn instead to sustainability efforts they can communicate in a marketing campaign or share through a product launch. However, fashion is not going to meet its climate goals with brand-specific efforts alone. As president of the industry coalition Apparel Impact Institute, Lewis Perkins is acutely aware of this gap and has spent the last several years building mechanisms for brands and investors to come together to fund the work that is unsexy but so extremely urgent. The organisation, along with brand partners H&M Group, Lululemon and others, last year launched the $250 million Fashion Climate Fund to finance initiatives, from renewable energy to next-gen materials, that will help decarbonise the supply chain. Perkins had seen the donor-collaborative funding model used in philanthropy and other sectors. “I thought, this is what the fashion industry needs,” he told Vogue Business last year. The first grants are expected to be announced and distributed this autumn.
Orlando Rivera
CEO and founder | Bergman Rivera
While the scientific community has yet to agree on exact methods and metrics for measuring the impact of regenerative agriculture, the idea that it is better for the environment and people is largely undisputed. Experts say its benefits range from increased soil health and carbon sequestration to improvements in biodiversity and farmer wellbeing. But, the transition process — which can take three to five years, often with compromised yields in the meantime — is a financial burden most farmers can’t afford to bear.
One company helping to derisk this and shift the power dynamic between farmers and brands is Bergman Rivera. CEO Orlando Rivera, who founded the company in 2007 to consolidate his father’s 20-year-old organic cotton business, also sits on the board of non-profit Textile Exchange. The Swedish-Peruvian company connects Peruvian farmers with global brands, including Patagonia, Veja and Outerknown, who take on the upfront costs and pay premiums to those lower down the supply chain in exchange for certified regenerative organic cotton. Over 300 farmers are currently in Bergman Rivera’s programme, with many more having used the cotton initiative to graduate to more lucrative regenerative organic crops once their land — and often their personal health and wellbeing — has improved. In the last year, Bergman Rivera’s brand partnerships have brought it closer to commercial scale, and allowed it to expand community support from farm-level changes to broader social initiatives such as nurseries for farmers’ children and farming infrastructure, including organic composting.
Gauri Sharma
Assistant general manager, communications & sustainability innovation | Shahi Exports
There’s a lot of symptom-treating in fashion’s sustainability efforts. Gauri Sharma works on root causes. In her dissertation on buyer-supplier relationships and circularity at the University of Cambridge, she demonstrated that one of the main barriers to achieving circularity is, in her words, “the transactional nature of buyer-supplier relationships in the fashion industry: the inherent power dynamics, lack of trust and one-way communication is holding the industry back from big breakthroughs”. Sharma drives change not just within her own company, Shahi Exports, one of the largest apparel manufacturers in India, but in the broader supplier ecosystem as well. The brand-driven conversation about sustainability tends to centre on the Global North and consumer countries; the dialogue happening in major manufacturing countries is equally important. Through the supplier meetups she engages in, and a community platform called Suss that she co-founded in 2018, Sharma has elevated the conversation about sustainable fashion in India.
She has also helped to figure out how to keep workers at the forefront when designing projects or planning other initiatives — so that the company is able to address actual needs rather than just tick the boxes of a brand audit or compliance form. “Each manufacturer has their own set of challenges based on their location, workforce composition, regulatory framework, and business operations,” she said. And some of Shahi’s biggest and most successful environmental and social initiatives “were not brand-driven but rather driven by risks and challenges we identified through our operations”.
Tawhida Shiropa
Founder | Moner Bondhu
Former journalist and women’s health advocate Tawhida Shiropa is the founder of Bangladeshi startup Moner Bondhu, which provides low-cost, accessible mental health and wellness services to garment factory workers, women and young people, including counselling, workshops, beauty and nutrition.
The services cost from $0.27-0.94 per session, and they’ve served 210,000 group session participants since launching in 2016, with a focus on the 20 million garment workers across the globe, many who live far away from their families and suffer from mental health issues. Shiropa secured €100,000 investment from Tommy Hilfiger in April as part of the brand’s Fashion Frontier Challenge, aiming to support marginalised entrepreneurs in fashion and adjacent industries. “[Tommy Hilfiger] manufactures all over the world. And we have seen improvements with labour in Bangladesh. But, this takes it to another level,” Hilfiger said during the awards. “[Moner Bondhu] allows factory workers to tap into mental health support, access counselling services and improve their lives.” Shiropa plans to invest the money in broadening the service to other territories as well as serving more and more garment workers in need in her native Bangladesh.
Solitaire Townsend
Co-founder and chief solutionist | Futerra
Working in sustainability can be demoralising, but Solitaire Townsend is determined to remain optimistic. This is the thread that connects her work as an author, speaker and entrepreneur. First and foremost, Townsend is the co-founder and chief solutionist of Futerra, a sustainability change agency whose clients include the United Nations, Lancôme, Yoox Net-a-Porter Group and PVH. Futerra’s logic and approach has spurred award-winning campaigns which challenge clients’ thinking as well as their footprint.
In 2022, Townsend delivered a trailblazing TED talk on the role advertising agencies, PR firms and lobbyists play in promoting unsustainable behaviours, enabling greenwashing and ultimately destroying the planet. This year, Townsend published her second book, The Solutionists: How Businesses Can Fix the Future, a rallying call for business leaders to play a more active role in solving the climate crisis. The book uses Townsend’s tried and tested methods to guide readers to identify the values and strategies they can personally contribute to the collective movement for change.
Mostafiz Uddin
Founder and CEO | Bangladesh Apparel Exchange
When suppliers faced a crushing wave of order cancellations at the beginning of the pandemic, the public backlash was swift. Mostafiz Uddin was one of the first suppliers to speak out about what was happening — an unprecedented move in an industry where suppliers, whose margins are often precariously thin, fear loss of business and retaliation. It was not the first time he spoke out about issues he cares about, nor was it the last. In Bangladesh, Uddin publishes articles and op-eds constantly in an effort to spark dialogue and move the needle on some of the biggest challenges he and so many of his fellow suppliers face, whether it’s low prices from brands or the lack of investment in renewable energy. At the same time, he works tirelessly to put Bangladesh on the global stage as well. He convenes the Sustainable Apparel Forum, which is perhaps the only sustainability forum in fashion that is primarily both by and for suppliers — and held in Bangladesh, not in Europe. This year, he took the same idea on the road: the inaugural ‘Best of Bangladesh’ event, meant to showcase what Bangladeshi companies could offer to Europe, took place in Amsterdam in early September.
Kim Van der Weerd
Freelance consultant, host of the Manufactured Podcast and intelligence director | Transformers Foundation
Former garment factory manager and now an advocate, Kim Van der Weerd understands better than most the depth and the significance of the disconnect between brands and suppliers when it comes to driving real change in the industry. Since turning her attention to pushing for responsible manufacturing in fashion, she’s become a driving force within the Transformers Foundation, an organisation focused on “positive change” in the denim supply chain, and has sparked meaningful industry-wide dialogue with her podcast Manufactured. She is also largely credited with creating a platform — monthly virtual meetups convened by the Asia Garment Hub — used by suppliers who now not only come together but feel comfortable enough to speak openly when doing so. The goal is for suppliers to be able to share frustrations and suggestions for advancing sustainability in the supply chain — to fill the gap left by brands that tend to tell, rather than ask, suppliers what they need to do to improve their own operations, ignoring their expertise in the process.
Susan Wheeler
Jewellery designer and founder and CEO | Chicago Responsible Jewelry Conference
Jewellery’s supply chain may be even more opaque than fashion’s, yet the industry isn’t facing the same pressure to reform its environmental and social practices. Not only has independent jewellery designer Susan Wheeler managed to align her own brand with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, she has also pushed the industry more broadly to be more responsible by engaging with, and occasionally exerting pressure on, some of its most powerful players. She sits on the board of directors of organisations, including Ethical Metalsmiths, and is the founder and CEO of the Chicago Responsible Jewelry Conference. The annual event, which was founded in 2016 and covers issues from artisanal mining to carbon emissions and wildlife trafficking, has become the main gathering place for anyone working for a more responsible jewellery sector — designers, producers, miners, educators and others.
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