Explorations

What fashion’s retreat from sustainability, as the climate crisis becomes more urgent, says about the industry’s business model

A personal perspective by Rosita Cigliola

Yesterday it was sustainable. Today it is AI-powered. Tomorrow it will be something else.
The Financial Times has just asked what happened to sustainability in fashion. After years of ambitious commitments, brands are quietly retreating from targets, scaling back initiatives and putting profitability at the centre of the conversation.

The obvious explanation is that sustainability failed. 

But I think something else happened. Sustainability didn’t fall out of fashion. It was never really in fashion. At least, not in the way the word suggested.

During the pandemic, when factories closed, shops emptied, and fashion had the opportunity to look at itself in the mirror, sustainability became one of the industry’s favourite words. Brands and experts announced commitments (for instance, Rewiring Fashion). Collections became conscious—even fast fashion. Businesses became responsible. Materials and packaging became eco-friendly. Circularity was everywhere.

The language was reassuring. 

The problem was that the business model remained awfully familiar.
Fashion still needed to sell more clothes.
And more clothes.
And more clothes.

In fact, this was the uncomfortable contradiction at the heart of the sustainability conversation: an industry built around growth, overproduction and overconsumption was trying to present itself as increasingly sustainable without even questioning the pattern itself.

In This is Greenwashing, we argued this was no accident. Sustainability had become a marketing language – a collection of attractive but often vague words that allowed brands to communicate environmental responsibility. A responsibility that didn’t necessarily require demonstrating systemic change. The industry didn’t need to lie outright. It simply needed to choose its words with care.

Conscious.
Responsible.
Eco.
Green.

Words that sounded like progress. But words that required considerably less evidence than the impression they created. That impression was enough.

Now persistent economic volatility continues to affect the markets, and something revealing is happening.
When sustainability was fashionable, brands could afford to talk about it. But when it became too expensive, too complicated or commercially inconvenient as other costs increased, those commitments became less urgent.
That tells us something important. Especially now, when extreme weather is no longer an abstract warning for a distant future but a reality unfolding all around us. 

The climate crisis did not become less urgent. Sustainability became less convenient.

The problem wasn’t a lack of good intentions. They were in abundance. The incentives were wrong. And sustainability was turned into a marketing strategy to reach those incentives.

The underlying problem is that the rules and rewards of fashion have not fundamentally changed. 
Producing and selling more generates more revenue. Companies are rewarded for sales growth and profit. Investors expect financial returns. Sustainability can cost more and reduce margins. But voluntary environmental targets often have no consequences if they are missed. 
And perhaps that is why I am less surprised by the retreat than some people seem to be. 

What surprises me more, though it shouldn’t, is how quickly the industry has found another story. AI. 

AI is now everywhere in fashion. 

AI for demand forecasting.
AI for product development.
AI for personalised shopping.
AI-generated models.
AI-generated campaigns.
AI for supply-chain management.
AI for sustainability reporting. 
AI to reduce waste.
AI to make fashion more efficient.

Efficient, not sustainable.  

Sustainability seems to disappear beneath yet another change in marketing labels.

Some of these applications may be useful. AI can help brands analyse enormous quantities of information, identify inefficiencies and improve forecasting. The technology itself is not the point, although its massive freshwater and energy consumption raise serious sustainability questions. The problem is what happens when technology becomes a marketing adjective. Because we have seen this movie before. Replace sustainability with AI-powered and ask the same questions.
What exactly does it mean?
Where is it being used?
What has actually changed?
What problem does it solve?
What evidence do we have?
And – most importantly – does it change the business model, or does it simply make the existing business model faster?

That last question matters enormously in fashion. If AI allows a company to predict demand better and therefore produce fewer unwanted garments, wonderful. If it allows a company to generate thousands of new designs faster, create more marketing content and accelerate production of more things nobody needs, then efficiency has not necessarily made fashion more sustainable. It may simply have made overproduction more efficient.

This is where the sustainability conversation went wrong.

We became fascinated by the solution before asking whether we were solving the right problem. We celebrated recycled polyester without asking how many polyester garments we actually needed. We celebrated resale platforms without understanding the impact on the environment – or that they were pushing overconsumption further. We celebrated circularity without asking how much clothing was entering the system. In essence, we celebrated innovation without asking whether innovation was reducing consumption or simply making it easier.

Now AI arrives with the same seductive promise: technology will fix the mess. Perhaps it will fix some of it — the business problems, not the environmental ones. But technology cannot decide what fashion should produce. Which, on a deeper level, also means what world we do want.
People do. 
Companies do.
Consumers do.
And ultimately, the business model does.

There is also a delicious irony here.

We spent years telling consumers to look for the green label. Now we may tell them to look for the AI label. And if history is any guide (even this seems quite dubious lately), we should be careful. Because once a word becomes valuable enough to sell something, marketing will learn how to use it. 

This does not mean that sustainability was meaningless. Nor does it mean that every brand that made environmental commitments was acting cynically. There are designers, manufacturers, and brands doing serious work. And there are consumers who genuinely want fashion to have less impact. But meaningful change was never going to come from vocabulary alone. 

A more sustainable fashion industry cannot be created by changing the adjectives attached to the same products, the same volumes and the same incentives. That is the uncomfortable part. And perhaps the most useful conclusion we can draw from sustainability’s disappearance is not that fashion has abandoned the environment. It is that we should finally stop confusing talking about change with changing the system. 

Because if sustainability disappears when climate change gets brutally real, it was not a business principle. 

It was a trend.