Fashion faces a similar blindspot: a brand can improve its own operations, while the communities surrounding its suppliers face water stress, housing shortages or extreme heat that the business never accounts for. That’s why companies like Kering are starting to implement more community-rooted programs — the luxury group’s water strategy, for example, works in and around key water basins, supporting localized community solutions rather than just imposing outside ideas.
Moore says fashion could consider a similar “ecosystem approach”, where brands collaborate with suppliers to achieve joint goals, such as protecting soil systems or improving water efficiency. He points to the “minimum viable ecosystem model” used in other industries, such as mining, where different stakeholders operate collectively with set rules, shared goals, and hard lines in the sand where the ecosystem’s health has to come first. “It needs co-ordination and commitment and the outcomes are collective,” he says. “Everyone has a commercial stake in the region remaining viable.”
This is one way A&KP has found to manage unintended consequences — working closely with local partners rather than parachuting support in and relying on 17 full-time impact managers based permanently in the communities it works with. “If you’re not actually doing something that is identified by the community as a priority for them, then you’re wasting time and effort and resources,” says Sproule. “You have to look at local regional impact, and you have to look at the variables to assess what you can control and what’s out of your control.”
Be realistic about trade-offs
Perhaps the most useful lesson fashion can take from luxury travel is that climate action rarely produces a neat before-and-after story, but that doesn’t mean you should avoid it entirely. Siwash is still a remote luxury travel business and a working ranch. Guests still emit carbon to travel there, and the business still requires vehicles, machinery and infrastructure to run; the environmental impact doesn’t disappear because the destination aims to be regenerative. Fashion faces the same contradiction: a brand can clean up its own supply chains, but may still rely on wider networks it doesn’t fully control. And however much it mitigates negative impacts or invests in positive ones, there will always be consequences it cannot entirely avoid. “The goal is not purity,” says Fremlin. “It is awareness and better trade-offs.”
In order to know where these trade-offs occur, how they affect communities and what brands can do to navigate them, businesses need to acknowledge their dependence on nature, and consider themselves in constant conversation with it. In luxury travel, many companies are physically embedded in the landscapes they depend on, so this is an easier sell. In product-focused industries like fashion, there has historically been more distance between decision and consequence (or at least the illusion of distance), so it’s been easier for impacts to disappear from view.
For Fremlin, the path forward is clear: “Protect what is essential, pay attention to what has changed, and build for the system that is emerging.”
