Fashion talks about sustainability differently than it did five years ago. The promises have become quieter, the vocabulary more cautious and the easy solutions harder to defend. Behind that change in tone, however, the industry’s environmental reckoning is becoming more concrete.
There was a period when sustainability seemed capable of becoming a fashion trend in its own right. Collections arrived with recycled capsules, new materials were introduced with ambitious environmental claims and brands competed to announce increasingly distant climate targets. « Conscious », « responsible » and « circular » became part of the industry’s everyday vocabulary, appearing across product pages, campaigns and corporate strategies.
In 2026, the conversation feels noticeably different. Sustainability has not disappeared, but much of the enthusiasm surrounding the word itself has. Environmental claims are receiving greater scrutiny, some corporate targets are proving harder to reach than they appeared when announced, and the limitations of solutions once presented as straightforward progress have become increasingly difficult to ignore. At the same time, the subject is moving somewhere more consequential. In Europe particularly, questions of durability, waste, traceability and product information are becoming matters of regulation rather than voluntary positioning. The sustainability era may be losing some of its visibility, but the work behind it is becoming harder to avoid.
Promises versus progress
The early 2020s produced no shortage of commitments. Major fashion groups established emissions targets, companies joined environmental initiatives and material strategies became central to corporate sustainability reports. Halfway through the decade, however, progress remains uneven.
In June 2026, The Business of Fashion found that many of the industry’s largest companies were behind schedule on the near-term climate targets they had set earlier in the decade. There are important exceptions. H&M and Kering have both reduced emissions by more than a third, according to the publication’s analysis, while others have made considerably less progress relative to their stated ambitions.
Materials reveal a similar tension. Textile Exchange recorded approximately 132 million tonnes of global fibre production in 2024, up from 125 million tonnes a year earlier and more than double the volume produced in 2000. If the current trajectory continues, production could reach around 169 million tonnes by 2030.
This growth complicates almost every environmental achievement the industry can point towards. Better fibres matter, as do cleaner energy and more efficient manufacturing, but their impact becomes harder to reconcile with an industry that continues to increase the total amount of material entering the system. Fashion has become better at improving individual products without necessarily resolving the more difficult question of how many products it makes.
Materials and volume
Material innovation became one of the most visible expressions of sustainable fashion. Recycled polyester, certified cotton, alternative leathers and lower-impact fibres gave brands something tangible to change, while offering consumers an apparently simple way to distinguish one product from another.
There has been real progress. Among companies participating in Textile Exchange’s Materials Benchmark, the share of materials covered by sustainability programmes rose from 58 percent in 2023 to 67 percent in 2024. Virgin fossil-based polyester use among comparable reporting companies declined over the same period. These figures show what targeted sourcing policies can achieve, although Textile Exchange cautions that participating companies generally outperform the wider industry.
The global picture remains considerably more difficult. Polyester accounted for 59 percent of fibre production in 2024, and 88 percent of it was fossil-based. Recycled fibres represented only 7.6 percent of total production, with most recycled polyester still derived from plastic bottles rather than discarded clothing. Less than one percent of the global fibre market came from pre-consumer and post-consumer recycled textiles.
That distinction is important. Turning a plastic bottle into clothing can reduce demand for virgin polyester, but it does not create a closed textile system. Once converted into a garment, that material may still have no viable route back into another piece of clothing. Circularity therefore remains much further from scale than its prominence in fashion’s vocabulary once suggested, while continued growth in production makes the challenge even greater. A more responsible material can improve a garment without making an ever-expanding production model sustainable.
Green claims under scrutiny
Consumers have been asked to navigate this complexity through language that is often remarkably imprecise. Terms such as « eco », « conscious », « responsible » and « better » became commonplace without always giving shoppers enough information to understand what had actually improved.
A garment might contain a percentage of recycled fibre while saying little about its manufacturing, durability or eventual disposal. Another could carry an environmental message because of one material choice despite belonging to a business model built around very high volumes. The resulting scepticism is hardly surprising. The European Commission reports that more than two thirds of Europeans identify confusion around sustainable options and mistrust of environmental information as barriers to making more sustainable choices.
Even basic product information is not always reliable. An EU market surveillance campaign published in June 2026 tested 132 clothing products and found that 37 percent did not accurately state their fibre composition. Some contained different proportions from those declared, while others included different fibres altogether. Beyond consumer protection, inaccurate composition data creates a practical problem for recycling, which depends on knowing what a garment contains.
The sustainability conversation is consequently moving away from asking consumers to trust a word printed on a label. Increasingly, companies are expected to demonstrate what sits behind the claim and provide information that can be checked rather than simply communicated.
Regulation steps in
July 2026 marked an important threshold in Europe. On July 19, the prohibition on destroying unsold apparel, clothing accessories and footwear began applying to large companies under the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation. The measure addresses a practice the European Commission estimates results in between 4 and 9 percent of unsold textiles in Europe being destroyed before they are ever worn.
Textiles are also among the first priority product groups under the EU’s broader ecodesign programme. Future requirements are expected to address qualities such as durability, repairability, resource efficiency and recycled content, shifting attention towards how garments are designed before they reach a shop floor.
Another significant change will come through the Digital Product Passport. The European Commission launched its DPP Registry in July 2026, while textile-specific requirements are currently scheduled to be adopted in late 2027. Once implemented, the system is intended to make standardised product information accessible digitally, potentially covering composition, environmental impacts, durability, repair, recycling and traceability depending on the final rules.
For years, sustainability communication largely depended on what a company chose to tell its customers. The emerging regulatory model changes that logic by asking companies to collect, structure and substantiate information whether or not it lends itself to an attractive campaign. Sustainability becomes less dependent on saying the right thing and more closely tied to what a company can demonstrate about the product it has made.
Limits of resale
Resale offers one of the clearest examples of an environmental idea becoming part of ordinary fashion behaviour without necessarily retaining the sustainability label. Secondhand is no longer confined to charity shops and specialist vintage stores. Platforms have made resale easier, luxury houses have experimented with authenticated pre-owned programmes and younger consumers increasingly move between new and used fashion without treating them as opposing markets. McKinsey expects secondhand fashion and luxury to grow two to three times faster than the firsthand market through 2027.
That growth matters because extending the useful life of garments can keep existing products in circulation. But resale has limits, particularly when it is expected to absorb the consequences of continued overproduction.
The reality becomes clearest further down the secondhand chain. Kantamanto in Accra, one of the world’s largest secondhand clothing markets, has long received enormous quantities of clothing discarded elsewhere. Textile Exchange, drawing on research from The Or Foundation, describes a system where local traders, repairers and upcyclers extract value from garments that might otherwise become waste while facing volumes increasingly difficult for the market to absorb.
Passing a garment to another owner can extend its useful life, but it does not erase the resources used to make it or guarantee that another person needs everything the fashion system produces. Circularity has considerable value when it preserves garments already in existence. Its limits become much clearer when resale and recycling are expected to manage permanent excess.
Less visible, more structural
There is a curious consequence to all of this. As sustainability becomes more technically demanding, it may become less visible in fashion itself.
A durable seam does not necessarily produce an exciting campaign, while supply-chain data rarely makes compelling runway imagery. Accurate fibre identification, waste reporting and repairability are far less romantic than the experimental biomaterials and recycled capsules that characterised an earlier phase of the conversation, yet these quieter interventions may ultimately prove more consequential.
The environmental performance of fashion is determined across an enormous network, beginning with fibres and agriculture or fossil extraction, continuing through spinning, dyeing, finishing, manufacturing and transport, then extending into how long something is worn and what happens when its first owner no longer wants it. No single fabric or capsule collection can resolve a system operating at that scale.
This does not make innovation irrelevant. New fibres, recycling technologies and alternative production processes remain necessary, but the industry is moving towards a more difficult understanding of sustainability, one where improvement has to survive beyond the launch of an individual product and become embedded in the way fashion is designed, produced and eventually discarded.
Measuring real progress
It would be equally misleading to describe the last decade as a failure. More companies are measuring their material use, sourcing through certification programmes and setting formal climate targets. Textile Exchange’s latest benchmark recorded 423 participating brands and retailers in 2025, compared with 57 when the initiative began a decade earlier. Among comparable reporting companies, the use of virgin fossil-based polyester fell and the share of materials covered by sustainability programmes increased.
The difficulty lies in placing those achievements beside the growth of the wider system. Textile Exchange estimates that greenhouse gas emissions associated with raw material production for apparel, footwear and home textiles rose by around 20 percent between 2019 and 2024.
These realities are not contradictory. Fashion can improve how cotton is sourced, reduce virgin polyester within individual supply chains, invest in recycling and become better at measuring its impact, while still moving collectively in the wrong direction when overall material production continues to rise. Acknowledging that tension does not diminish the progress already made, but it does change the standard by which progress should be judged.
A post-trend reality
Perhaps the most meaningful change in 2026 is that sustainability is becoming harder to package as an aesthetic. There is no particular silhouette that represents a lower-impact fashion system, no material capable of solving every environmental problem and increasingly little value in attaching green vocabulary to a garment without evidence behind it.
The subject is moving towards less glamorous territory, involving regulation, fibre data, product design, energy, waste infrastructure and difficult decisions about production volume. None offers the immediacy of a new material presented on a runway, but together they address parts of the system that a capsule collection never could.
Sustainability was always too large a problem to function comfortably as a trend. Trends depend on novelty and replacement, while environmental progress requires almost the opposite qualities, from longevity and accountability to improvements that continue after public attention has moved elsewhere. The language surrounding sustainability may be becoming quieter, but the expectations behind it are becoming more concrete.
May