If conversations about apparel and textiles have seemed few and far between at the United Nations climate conference, known this year as COP31, it’s because they have been.
As a bloc, fashion has largely sat out the two-week conference since 2024, when major conglomerates like Kering and LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton joined prominent world leaders from France, Germany and the United States in skipping COP29 in Azerbaijan due to a heady mix of geopolitical tensions, domestic political crises and changing corporate sustainability priorities.
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Despite worsening extreme heat, drought and wildfires that pose an existential risk to supply chains—not to mention the people working within them—alongside warnings of what scientists say is an inevitable overshoot of the Paris Agreement’s 1.5-degree Celsius threshold, the industry hasn’t shown up in a meaningful way since. Even as brands fall further behind on their climate targets, there will be no equivalent to Stella McCartney’s COP26 “Future of Fashion” materials exhibition in Antalya, Turkey, this month, nor to the COP27 fashion industry target consultation led by Global Fashion Agenda and the United Nations Environment Programme.
Part of the reason, Lewis Perkins, president of the Apparel Impact Institute , surmises, is that as the stakes have risen, the focus has moved to bigger-picture priorities: mustering financing to help developing and small-island nations adapt to climate change and address the loss and damage already underway, for instance, or persuading nations to commit to electrifying more than a third of the global economy by 2035.
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