What Is Changing in the Fashion Industry?
Nae Vegan ShoesIt is easy to be cynical about this industry, and the headline numbers reward cynicism. EU citizens throw away roughly twelve kilos of clothing each per year. Under one per cent of used garments become new garments. Ultra-fast platforms are still growing at double digits.
And yet something has genuinely shifted in the last two or three years — more than in the previous twenty. What makes this wave different from earlier bursts of optimism is that most of it is no longer voluntary. Pledges are being replaced by legal requirements, and by economics. Here is what is actually changing.
1. Sustainability regulations
For decades, sustainability in fashion meant a page on a website. Now the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation sets product-level requirements for anything sold into the European market, and textiles are a priority category.
Its first hard deadline has already landed: since 19 July 2026, large companies may no longer destroy unsold clothing and footwear. Burning surplus stock to protect brand value — a practice the industry denied and then quietly continued — is now illegal at scale.
Running alongside it, the EU adopted the largest extended producer responsibility scheme fashion has ever faced. Brands, including online platforms, must finance the collection, sorting and recycling of what they put on the market. The logic is simple and overdue: the company that produces a garment pays for its end of life, which makes flooding the market with disposable product measurably more expensive.
2. Durability stopped being a marketing word
This is the change we find most encouraging, because it goes to the heart of quality.
Under the same regulation, the delegated act for textiles — expected around 2027, with compliance following roughly eighteen months later — will set minimum performance requirements on durability, repairability, recyclability and recycled content. Not claims about those things. Measurable thresholds, enforced at the border.
France has gone further and faster. Its anti-ultra-fast-fashion law, adopted at the end of June 2026, penalises producers per item according to environmental performance: from between €0.25 and €12 per product in 2026, rising towards €2 to €20 by 2030, capped at half the pre-tax price. Advertising for ultra-fast-fashion platforms is banned from September 2026, influencer promotion from January 2027, and platforms must display where a garment was made, in the same size as the price.
What matters here is not the punishment of any one company. It is that durability and repairability are becoming legal categories with numbers attached — which means, for the first time, a well-made garment gets a structural advantage instead of merely a moral one.
For the first time, making things that last is not just the right thing to do. It is the cheaper thing to do.
3. You will be able to look inside what you buy
The Digital Product Passport is the piece consumers will actually notice. Attached to a product via a QR code or similar, it is expected to carry material composition, substances of concern, environmental performance, durability information and end-of-life instructions.
The textile version is still being written, and the timeline has slipped more than once — adoption is indicated for 2027. But the direction is fixed, and it changes the economics of vagueness. A brand that cannot say what its product is made of will soon have to say so in a standardised field that sits next to a competitor who can.
The regulatory calendar. Filled markers have already taken effect.
4. Materials moved out of the laboratory
Next-generation materials — bio-based alternatives to animal leather, silk, wool and fur — spent years being announced and not delivered. That is changing, though slowly and unevenly.
Fashion for Good counts a rise of around 400% in material innovations since 2017, from roughly 130 to 650. Analysts project next-gen materials growing from under 1% of the global fibre market today to around 8% by 2030 — which, on one estimate, would account for a substantial share of the emissions cuts the industry needs.
The honest version includes the slump. Investment peaked around 2021 and fell sharply afterwards, in what one analysis called a trough of disillusionment: too many announcements, too little available at scale. And a great deal of what is sold as ‘vegan leather’ remains substantially plastic, with end-of-life still unresolved. We have written about that in more detail elsewhere, because a material being animal-free does not automatically make it sustainable, and we would rather say so.
5. Worker power is gaining teeth
This is where optimism has to be most carefully rationed. The EU’s due diligence directive, once expected to make brands legally answerable for conditions in their supply chains, was significantly weakened during negotiation, and labour organisations have described 2026 as a stress-test year for garment workers’ rights.
But the more interesting progress is happening below the level of national law, in what are called enforceable brand agreements: contracts in which brands are legally bound to unions and workers rather than to an auditor they pay. The Accord on fire and building safety in Bangladesh now binds more than 240 brands. The Dindigul Agreement in Tamil Nadu, signed with a Dalit women’s union to address gender-based violence, has published results — in its second year, 76% of gender-based-violence grievances were resolved within two weeks, and management now consults the union on production decisions.
Bangladesh also reformed its labour law in 2026: workers gained the right to refuse hazardous tasks, an employment injury scheme fund was established, and violence and harassment received formal legal definitions for the first time.
The catch is instructive, and worth stating. Brands that signed the Dindigul agreement subsequently reduced their orders from the very factories that had done the work — costing jobs among the women the agreement protected. A model that works only if buyers keep buying is not yet a solution. It is a demonstration that one is possible.
An agreement enforceable by workers, not by an auditor the brand pays, turns out to work. The remaining problem is whether brands keep placing orders where it does.
6. And the buyers changed
Demand is moving too, and faster than most in the industry expected.
The global secondhand market is now valued in the region of $393 billion and is projected to grow at roughly twice the rate of the rest of apparel through 2030. In the United States it grew around 19% in 2025 — several times faster than clothing retail overall — and roughly 60% of adults bought something secondhand that year.
The mindset behind the numbers matters more than the numbers. Researchers tracking affluent consumers report the emergence of a majority view they summarise as buying fewer things and expecting more of them. That is the same instinct that makes people repair a jacket rather than replace it — and repair incentives are now being written into producer-responsibility rules across Europe.
What about the factories themselves?
One more change deserves mention, because it is genuinely double-edged. Automation is arriving on the factory floor: by some estimates a majority of manufacturers will have adopted some form of lights-out or partially automated production this year. For quality, that is good news — machines do not get tired, and consistency improves when the repetitive and dangerous parts of a process are mechanised.
For workers it is a harder question, because when the machine becomes the measure of productivity, and productivity becomes the measure of value, people are asked to perform like machines — as fast as a fully automated line, as consistent as a computer. Where that has happened, workers have been pushed to exhaustion and then let go. So the benefit technology brings to work is not automatic: it can be considerable, and it can be the opposite. The task is to keep tools as tools, and to make them serve the people using them.
The version of this we believe in is narrower and more boring: using better tools to take the strain out of the work and raise the standard of the output, without treating people as the cost to be removed, or exhausting them in a race against machine productivity when the tools were meant to extend what they can do. That is what we described in our own look at how our shoes are made.
What has not changed — yet
Honesty requires the other column.
Moving the right way
Not yet
Where the industry stands: moving, and not yet moving.
Why this wave feels different
Fashion has had optimistic moments before, and most of them evaporated because they depended on goodwill. Voluntary commitments are abandoned quietly; certifications are shopped around; a sustainability report is a document, not an obligation.
What is arriving now is different in kind. A destruction ban is enforced or it is not. A per-item penalty either lands on the invoice or it doesn’t. A durability threshold either passes at the border or the goods stay there. And a contract enforceable by a union is a contract, not a promise. None of it depends on a few people being good — but nor will it arrive on its own, handed down by governments or carried by a handful of exemplary companies. Rules deliver only what someone keeps pushing them to deliver. You can read more about the thinking we work from on our values page, and about the materials themselves in our explainer.
The change worth trusting is the kind that doesn’t require anyone to be good — only to be accountable.
