Circularity in Fashion: Crucial Sustainability Takeaways from the Copenhagen Fashion Summit

Photo Credit: CFS 2019 via Fashion Revolution

Despite the many challenges and constant feeling of uncertainty that the outbreak of COVID 19 has put the fashion industry through, it has also made it possible for creators to develop other ways to express their visionary concept of a post-COVID 19 future for environmental impacts of fashion.

With the current fashion events being transformed into virtual streaming events, the Copenhagen Fashion Summit, for the first time since its first edition in 2009, has decided to not let the spreading of the virus get in the way and hence has created an entirely new project called CFS+, which took place this October 12-13th.

The 2020 edition of CFS+, organized by Global Fashion Agenda —the leading forum of sustainability in fashion under the patronage of HRH the Crown Princess Mary of Denmark— created a sensational gathering of digital content, such as pre-produced segments with creators (hosted by Eva Kruse - CEO of Global Fashion Agenda) followed by live-streamed brainstorming sessions, in which industry leaders discussed how to find potential solutions to current issues regarding the sustainability of the fashion market nowadays.

The theme of the summit, Redesigning Value, has made the point of this edition quite clear: the pandemic is forcing the fashion industry to take accountability for their actions, and to go through a transforming reset to build a better ecologically-friendly environment in the future of the industry.

There was one word in particular around which the presentation of the event, opened by HRH Mary of Denmark and hosted by Eva Kruse, evolved: circularity.

Circularity is different from recycling, and that’s what the participants of the Youth Fashion Summit of the last few years have made clear on the first of the two days of the CFS+ project: circularity in fashion means that business items are created from safe and renewable materials, that can be used for long periods of time and, once they reach the end of their life, can be properly used to create something new again.

The format “Real Talk” from the event opened the summit to this concept, through the words of Korina Emmerich, artist, designer and founder of EMME, who said, “We have created a white and supremacist industry to get products fast(...) and now, we need to create a standard value for people, and creations.” The key to long-lasting value? Inclusivity. And fashion is an industry which, at the moment, is not inclusive enough.

To be able to be oblivious in 2020 of the injustices that occur each day is a privilege; and as explained by Nasreen Sheikh , advocate for Women’s empowerment, child labor survivor and founder of Local Women’s Handicrafts, it was possible to get a personal view of fashion’s non-corporate voices, a reality in which girls in a village are the not-acknowledged. People who since the moment of their birth have been undocumented, unable to know basic personal information, like their age, and have since been treated like possessions by those who put them into the cycle of child slave labor for the textile industry. “I was working 12-15 hours per day in a sweat shop as a child laborer. (…) Some of you are wearing those clothes right now,” said Sheikh.

But while sustainability has been talked and discussed quite deeply in the fashion industry, for some companies, the plan to develop a more approachable way of ethical working has been predicted to be enacted no sooner than in 2030, as Sonia Syngal (Gap Inc.) mentioned in the first panel of The Fashion Pact.

The real progress, therefore, seems to be still quite slow. The only question now is: will the pandemic change this, put pressure on the industry and on the legislations surrounding it?

CFS+ believes in the impact that COVID-19 has had on the whole world this past year, and that soon the process will be finally put into act and sped up.