At first glance, fashion month has very little to do with sustainability: it’s a blur of new designs shown against large sets, in front of crowds that have flown in from all over the world. But in the past, some designers have used fashion month as a Trojan horse to showcase innovations or different ways of producing fashion that challenge the status quo.
This season was eerily quiet on the sustainability front. I reached out to a long list of luxury brands to check that I hadn’t missed anything, offering a wide range of entry points, from integrating secondhand items and material innovations to collection themes that touch on climate or social justice. Very few had anything to share. Between the high concentration of creative director debuts and the growing political backlash against sustainability, it wasn’t the moment for big declarations, I was told.