Global Fashion Summit: barriers remain while bridges fail to span far enough

The Global Fashion Summit, now in its 16th year, took place from 3rd to 5th June 2025 in Copenhagen. It was launched by the Global Fashion Agenda (GFA) in 2009 to “spark urgent action and accelerate impact in the fashion industry”. As in previous years, it attracted over 1000 industry leaders, including C-suite executives, leaders and participants along the value chain from over 48 countries, making it a much anticipated network event.

In fact, judging by the many empty seats during some events, networking may have been the main agenda of many an onsite participant. Or it could have been the addition of a new space, the Ignite Stage, that spread out attendees over more venues. As the name suggests, the Ignite Stage was meant to provide a platform for quick, impactful presentations centred on innovation and a chance for the audience to ask questions. In true sustainable fashion, more attendance may also have decided to join online.

Turning barriers into bridges

In view of the immense pressure that the fashion industry is currently facing - adapting to geopolitical changes and complying with an increasingly complex regulatory environment - this year’s theme was ‘Barriers and Bridges’. It “highlights the dualities of this moment, where traditional barriers have the possibility to transform into bridges for tangible change. With new legislation accelerating, the boundaries between voluntary and mandatory efforts are blurring, demanding both courage and capital to seize this moment of opportunity,” explains GFA. After all, “a wall lying down is actually a bridge,” reminded Christiane Dolva, head of innovation and research at the H&M Foundation in the very first panel to shift perspectives as “walls may be the future bridges”.

“We need to be a force for good,” stressed GFA CEO Federica Marchionni in her welcome address. “Sustainability remains a fundamental priority for businesses, brands and consumers,” she added, especially in times where “climate change is the only certainty.” While there is hope in innovation and solution providers, “leadership is needed most in times of turbulence,” next to courage and cooperation.

Navigating the S-word

In view of new regulations and stricter guidelines, there was hesitancy, fear even, when it comes to communicating one’s sustainability efforts, especially from the brands’ side.

Lauren Bartley, chief sustainability officer at Ganni, confirmed in a panel on “Closing the Consumer Gap" that communicating about sustainability is a challenge. “We are vocal about it but it is becoming more challenging, there is a lot of confusion.”

The brand invests in fabrics of the future and enters into partnerships with makers of next-gen materials and material innovations but “the communication around is very difficult because not only is it a new material so it has to be factually accurate. We have to be careful that it cannot be seen as greenwashing.” She also stressed the fact that complex conversations about sustainability have to be distilled to be digestible for consumers.

Danish designer Henrik Vibskov agreed: “It is tricky how to communicate whatever you do because in Denmark, we have a by-law now, we are not allowed to use the s-word. So we can only use pure facts, pure data. It is a challenge how to communicate to the end consumer that this is could be a better choice or be less harmful.”

For some, the term sustainability was always a bit suspicious. “Earlier, I used to say that sustainability is a bag of vomit,” admitted Sebastien Kopp, co-founder and creative director of Veja, adding “I do not say that any more.” However, he stressed that Veja is not a sustainable brand: “We never talked about ecology, we talked about reality. We are not a socially responsible company, we are not a sustainable company, our focus is to go to the reality of things, meaning materials, people, how is a sneaker built, what is inside a sneaker? What is beyond a sneaker?”

And interestingly enough, that philosophy has enabled the brand to produce in Brazil, pay the workers there significantly more than market rate and use expensive materials, all while offering competitive prices and without relying on investors or loans. The secret? “No advertising at all. It is all word of mouth,” said Kopp, adding that advertising costs can make up 50 to 60 percent of the overall product costs.

Another driver is that Veja uses very few materials (maybe ten in total) but researches and utilises them very well. “This limit is good for me, for creation, for design. You do not waste too much time saying ‘what will be the next materials’, no, you develop one over the course of two years, along the supply chain,” explained Kopp. “We do not talk about circularity, we talk about cobblers. Opening places in the world to repair Veja shoes but also other sneakers. … What we want is a world with more reality, less talk,” he emphasised.

Putting the loom back into heirlooms

At the start of the first day, storyteller and emcee Nadir Nahdi brought the topic of heirloom pieces closer to the audience with a story about his grandmother who came from Indonesia to East Africa by boat. Tightlipped about her history, Nahdi grew up not knowing much about that side of his heritage but for a brightly coloured batik sarong. It was the connection, the missing link, that made him embark on the journey to his grandmother’s village, Here, he met her childhood friend who was able to finally fill in the blanks.

Another story told by a piece of clothing came from Lydie Taylor, a fashion design student and seventh generation at Taylors Run, an Australian sheep farm. Asked what she wore to the event, she revealed that her top was second hand and her skirt an inheritance from her grandmother who in turn had received the skirt from her grandmother.

We may have forgotten today that clothing used to last that long - in this case six generations - as it was truly precious and handmade, something that was treasured and handed down with pride. In times of ultra fast fashion pieces that are discarded almost as soon as they have been worn, the heritage aspect has become lost.

“What exactly are we doing and what is most important to us? It is no longer about volumes, it is about values. So through the process of making, of creating, what are the shared values between the making community and the corporations that own the companies and the end result, which is the garment,” said Omoyemi Akerele, founder and CEO of Lagos Fashion Week, in a panel that discussed life “Beyond Fashion Categories”.

For her, production volumes and overproduction are key problems. “We cannot keep producing at this scale and expect to see change. We can’t keep trying to solve the problem at the end of a garment, we have to think about solutions at the beginning. That is where we eliminate a lot of problems that we see today when it comes to garment production. I go back to my community and how we produce, rethinking design. And understanding that clothing is about creating purpose, creating meaning, ensuring that every garment is made with love, to last. Is made through a process that honours tradition and people.” This includes honouring the process and the people when taking craftsmanship from communities. “‘Collaboration’ is the new sexy word, but let’s take it out and talk about co-ownership,” urges Akerele.

Innovation

Apart from GFS’s Innovation Forum, innovations announcements popped up at the summit. In a sponsored session, the Lycra Company and chemical manufacturer Qore announced that they will soon bring to market the world’s first large-scale commercial production of bio-derived Lycra fibre made with Qira, which uses dent corn as feedstock.

Circular tech company Re&Up revealed at the event that it has become the first fibre producer globally to earn Cradle to Cradle Certified for Product Circularity, validating its recycled cotton and polyester as fully circular.

Bio-design company Modern Meadow presented Innoveera, a high-performance, animal-free material made from plant proteins, biopolymers and recycled rubber. It is scalable and adaptable, and mimics the look and feel of leather and has a renewable carbon content of more than 80 percent.

EBay revealed that it has built a suite of solutions to enable fashion brands to drive resale – from its brand outlet for excess inventory, to Imperfects for items that are slightly damaged but never-worn, to pre-loved take back solutions for brands, including its new partnership with Nobody’s Child. 

Fashion for Good and Arvind Limited announced the launch of Future Forward Factories, an ambitious initiative with two interconnected components: developing a comprehensive open-source blueprint for sustainable textile manufacturing and constructing a groundbreaking physical facility in Gujarat, India that proves these innovations work at commercial scale. 

Information

Online fashion retailer Zalando presented a follow-up report from its 2021 publication “It Takes Two” dedicated to the consumer or action gap - consumers wanting to buy sustainably but then not doing it. “It Takes Many” looked at the European consumer in five markets (France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and UK ) and found out that while consumers care (74 percent want more sustainable products), there is still a gap disconnect between consumer behaviour and intentions. Price is still the main deterrent, also lack of knowledge in terms of identifying sustainable options and where to shop. Hence the consensus that it takes many - brands, the consumers themselves, governments, regulators and legislators - to close the gap.

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) launched the Circular Transition Indicators (CTI) Sector Guidance for Fashion and Textile v2.0 to empower textile and fashion value-chain actors to unlock business value by embedding circular performance measurement into decision-making.

One year after the launch of The Fashion ReModel at the Global Fashion Summit, The Ellen MacArthur Foundation released “Scaling circular business models: a guide for fashion leaders”, which aims to equip fashion leaders with the insights and tools to embed circular business models into core strategy, make a compelling business case and unlock financial and climate benefits.

Refiberd is winner of Trailblazer Programme

For the second time, a winner of the Trailblazer Programme was announced by GFA and PDS Ventures, namely US-based AI-enabled textile material detector Refiberd. This year, the programme received over 200 applications from 44 countries across six continents - nearly double from last year. Nine innovators were selected by a cross-sector jury including representatives from Ralph Lauren, Fashion for Good, Zalando, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, GFA and PDS Ventures and featured at GFS’s Innovation Forum.
 

Refiberd, shortlisted under the ‘Closed Loop Pathways’ category, was selected for its pioneering technology using hyperspectral imaging and AI to accurately identify the material composition of textiles, thus unlocking critical advancements in textile recycling, resale authentication and traceability.
  As the Trailblazer winner, Refiberd will receive an investment of up to 200,000 US dollars from PDS Ventures, pending successful completion of financial and legal due diligence and final Investment Committee approval. The award also includes strategic commercial and operational support from PDS Group, including development and commercialisation assistance from its innovation-focused subsidiary, Positive Materials.

“The Refiberd team is thrilled to have been selected as the winner for the 2025 Trailblazer Programme. Having our technology be recognised by so many influential members of the fashion and textile industry is incredible validation for our team, and we are so grateful that the judges recognised the need for more accurate material data across the supply chain. This opportunity comes at a critical growth point for Refiberd, and we are thrilled to work towards scaling our technology with the support of the Trailblazer Programme, PDS Ventures and Global Fashion Agenda,” commented Refiberd co-founder and CEO Sarika Bajaj.

A bit of protest

On the final day of the Global Fashion Summit, Dutch vintage fashion site Boas and resale AI tool Vnyx quite literally aired the industry’s dirty laundry by stringing clotheslines filled with discarded garments across the city—from bridges to the Little Mermaid. Each piece carried a message like “Wear me”, “Repair me” or “Donate me,” thus calling attention to the billions of garments dumped or burned each year. 

The campaign aimed to urge passersby to pause, reflect and act immediately on their consumption habits. “You can touch these clothes, take them, smell them—and realise that every second, a truckload of fashion is dumped or burned. But the solutions are simple, and they are already printed on the clothing: wear, repair, sell, share and donate,” explained Boas co-founder Romy Goedhart.

The way forward

Looking at the fact that Copenhagen is one of the most expensive European cities, where one night in a hotel costs as much as a garment worker owns in a whole months as one panelist remarked, is it still timely to have the Global Fashion Summit here, far from the Global South, where much of the issues that need to be tackled are to be found? Why not have the next edition in Bangladesh, India or Vietnam? After all, it is the Global Fashion Summit, not the European Fashion Summit.

This is also what Kalpona Akter, executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Worker Solidarity (BCWS), mentioned. “Workers voices are needed but they are always the missing puzzle, the discussion is not worker-centric.” Take the Omnibus proposal, for example, introduced by EC president Ursula von der Leyen earlier this year and framed as a simplification of key EU laws. “There was hope,” said Akter, in view of sustainability laws like the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), “all the good things were coming for workers but the Omnibus bill is ruining the show in the name of simplifying.” “Either have a good agreement or no agreement,” she adds. “This toothless directive protecting rather the companies than the workers will not work.”

Akerele, who is also the founder and CEO of Style House Files, echoes this sentiment. “So 2023 might look great but for me, it looks really daunting if we continue at this speed. I think it is important that we were able to get decision makers in the room, which includes the people who make the clothes, not only the big guys and women in suits.”

“So if we are looking at 2023, we have to rethink production volumes, we have to rethink consumption patterns. …I must acknowledge that there are signs of progress; it is not all gloom and doom but it is important for us to be mindful that if things continue the way they do, a seemingly tokenistic approach to problem solving, 2030 will not be very great,” cautions Akerele.

Or as Marchionni put it , “sustainability is a marathon, not a sprint. It is a long journey of winding roads and difficult terrain. If there is an obstacle, you do not just turn around but face it.” And that is good to keep in mind indeed while tackling the future.