Fashion for Good in Brief

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Fashion for Good

7 min readJul 24, 2019

Today’s fashion industry is caught in a vicious cycle of ‘take-make-waste’ — we buy 60% more clothing than we did 15 years ago yet we keep each item only half as long. Within a year of being produced, an estimated 60% of all clothing finds its way into landfills or ends up being burned. And although the fashion industry has created millions of jobs for women and men around the world, working conditions can be unsafe and wages remain low, barely covering the cost of living.

It’s a cycle that is clearly not sustainable, and at Fashion for Good, we believe it can be done better.

The Fashion for Good hub in the centre of Amsterdam. Credit — Presstigieux

Take Action. Change Fashion.

With Laudes Foundation as a founding partner, and building on our co-founder William McDonough’s philosophy of Cradle to Cradle™, Fashion for Good was established as a global, collaborative innovation platform to tackle the problems faced by the fashion industry.

In order to create a truly Good Fashion industry, incremental improvements are not enough — to make the change, disruptive innovation is needed. The good news is we see game changing technologies that can bring real change to the industry, that can offer major leaps forward towards circularity, but are unfortunately not being scaled yet. And we increasingly see large corporations that are committed to becoming more sustainable, have pledged towards circularity and who want to adopt these innovations to achieve their ambitions.

We work directly alongside the most promising Innovators, bringing them together with market players, i.e. brands, retailers and manufacturers, in order to make it easier for them to work together effectively, bridge the innovation gap and bring these innovations to the mainstream. These corporates benefit from our innovation scouting and screening capabilities, comprehensive technology landscaping and our hands-on support in piloting and scaling innovations.

Our Mission

For true Good Fashion, and a circular supply chain, to exist, all elements, from design to end-of-use, must be reconsidered and for this to happen, and considering the enormity of the challenge, collaboration is required.

It’s our mission to bring together the entire apparel industry — brands, retailers, suppliers, non-profit organisations, innovators, funders and the wider public — to innovate and collaborate for Good Fashion.

The Five Goods

To facilitate this collaboration, there needs to be a robust definition of what ‘good’ is — an aligned vision as the starting point for change that every single part of the global fashion supply chain can be inspired by and aspire to.

Drawing from the Cradle to Cradle™ framework, Good Fashion is not fashion that simply looks good or is mostly good; it is good in five important ways:

Good Materials — safe, healthy and designed for reuse and recycling
Good Economy — growing, circular, shared and benefiting everyone
Good Energy — renewable and clean
Good Water — clean and available to all
Good Lives — living and working conditions that are just, safe and dignified

We believe Good Fashion is possible but the industry lacks the resources, tools and incentives to put good fashion into practice.

Our Approach

On entering the Experience, the Infinity Mirror presents facts about the issues facing the fashion industry; Credit — Presstigieux

To move the industry forward we act on two fronts: as an Innovation Platform we give promising start-ups the support they need in order to grow and scale. And as a Convenor for Change, we are building a Good Fashion Movement to help people understand and reimagine the ways in which they can make a difference through their clothing choices, from before the point of purchase, to garment care and beyond.

Innovation, practical action, impact.

Designed by Stella McCartney, dyed by Colorifix. Credit — Presstigieux

Our Innovation Platform provides practical support to innovators depending on their stage of maturity. Through the platform we action introductions with brands and manufacturers, provide access to our mentor and investor network, expertise and to funding. Early stage Innovators have the opportunity to test their concepts with our corporate partners, such as a dress by Stella McCartney dyed by Colorifix using synthetic biology.

Our Scaling Programme supports market ready innovators who have passed the proof-of-concept phase and are ready to scale their innovations in the supply chain. Connecting these innovators with large, corporate and regional players such as adidas, BESTSELLER, C&A, Chanel, Galaries Lafayette, Kering, Levi Strauss & CO., Otto Group, PVH Corp., Stella McCartney, Target, Zalando, Arvind, Birla Cellulose, Norrøna, vivobarefoot and Welspun to name a few, is a crucial step to driving adoption. The Organic Cotton Traceability Pilot with Bext360, the lead technical partner of the initiative and an Innovator in our Scaling Programme, is one such example. This groundbreaking pilot towards successfully tracing organic cotton through the supply chain from farm to store, is truly unique in its multi-stakeholder nature — partnering with Fashion for Good, Laudes Foundation (formerly C&A Foundation), and the Organic Cotton Accelerator (OCA), as well as Kering, Zalando, PVH Corp., and C&A, and supported by technical partners Haelixa, Tailorlux, and IN-Code Technologies, with ongoing field trails carried out in Pratibha Syntex farm groups in India. The Scaling Programme offers deeper coaching, bespoke fundraising support and hands-on guidance with these pilot projects, in conjunction with our global partners.

By creating a platform that exists in a uniquely pre-competitive space (i.e. looking at ways in which brands gain material benefits by working together — like sharing investments to de-risk technological innovation), brands and retailers can learn from each other, sharing experiences with innovation and partnering on pilots.

The Good Fashion Fund

The Good Fashion Fund is the first investment fund focused solely on driving the implementation of innovative solutions in the fashion industry. The fund provides impact lending tools to finance investments in supply chain innovations specifically in India, Bangladesh and Vietnam as well as other focus areas throughout Asia. With a target size of USD 60m, the vision for the Good Fashion Fund is for manufacturers in the apparel supply chain to invest and reinvest in innovations that deliver both economic growth and good fashion practice, mobilising the use of safe and recyclable materials, clean and efficient energy, closed-loop manufacturing and the creation of fair jobs and growth, in line with the FIVE GOODS: Good Energy, Good Water, Good Materials, Good Economy and Good Lives.

Small to medium manufacturers whose products or services are in line with these criteria looking to implement best-in-class technology and equipment, will be eligible for funding. The Fund is also mandated to support larger manufacturers committed to investing in highly disruptive technologies. The Good Fashion Fund is the result of unique collaboration. It is initiated by Fashion for Good, with Laudes Foundation (formerly C&A Foundation) and The Mills Fabrica as launching investors and managed by impact investment firm FOUNT.

Convenor for Change

The Fashion for Good Impact Cascade, an interactive wall showcasing the Good Fashion movement. Credit — Presstigieux

We believe that the paradigm shift needed within the industry is only possible when individuals and industry alike are activated for change. So, through our building in Amsterdam, we aim to support on all sides. In our co-working space, we host a Circular Apparel Community — a community of like-minded organisations like the Laudes Foundation, the Sustainable Apparel Coalition(SAC), Zero Discharge for Hazardous Chemicals Programme(ZDHC), Organic Cotton Accelerator(OCA) and other experts and practitioners brought together under the same roof, to work towards the same mission of making fashion good.

The Fashion for Good Museum

Also in the building, you can find our interactive Fashion for Good Experience, a free, public-facing museum where we inspire, educate and engage people from across the world. Visitors learn about the past, present and future of the fashion industry and with the digitally-enabled Good Fashion Journey and an RFID bracelet, they can discover and commit to ways that they can make a difference. At the end, they take home a personalised Good Fashion Action Plan, a digital guide filled with tips for extending what they learned in the Experience into their daily lives.

Using the RFID Bracelet, visitors can collect actions to add to their Good Fashion Action Plan. Credit — Presstigieux

Within the museum sits our next-generation retail space, The Good Shop. Built around a thought-provoking theme which we change twice a year, the Shop features a curated selection of product collections related to the topic at the time. Themes cover issues facing the industry such as the role of water throughout the supply chain, traceability and transparency, and dyeing and colouring — which accounts for 20% of global water pollution. We host workshops, documentary screenings and lectures around each theme to educate, empower and equip visitors to incorporate Good Fashion thinking into their lives and join our global movement.

Fashion for Good by the numbers: Three years in.

20 Corporate Partners in our innovation network
135+ Innovators in support Programmes (and over 2500 have been scouted)
129+ Pilots with Innovators
€400m+ in Capital Commitments raised during the Programme

More about Fashion for Good

Find out more about Fashion for Good and the work we are doing at fashionforgood.com