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The French fashion governing body will launch two new tools in September to measure the impact of Paris Fashion Week’s shows and collections. Will it be a game changer?
Paris Fashion Week intends to lead the charge to better understand the environmental impact of fashion shows. Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, the French fashion’s governing body, tapped auditing, accounting and consulting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers to develop two new tools to measure the environmental, social and economic impacts of its many runway shows.
After 18 months of conception, the tools are set to launch for the Spring/Summer 2022 season slated from 27 September to 5 October, which is expected to be both physical and digital. Before then, men’s and couture shows in June and July will return to physical form after pivoting to fully digital events during the pandemic.
“We have developed a tool that can be duplicated in space and adapted to different types of events,” Pascal Morand, executive president of Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, told journalists on Friday. “Paris is the world’s capital of fashion, and it has been said that Paris is the world capital of digital fashion with online fashion week. It's our responsibility to develop the necessary tools in terms of sustainability.” An advisory committee around the PwC development included fashion show production company Bureau Betak and PR agency DLX, while 37 stakeholders, including houses such as Chanel, Hermès, Kering, model agencies and venues, also participated in the project.
“All the environmental, social and economic parameters are taken into account; it’s a balance,” said Sylvain Lambert, PWC partner, co-head of sustainability, advising Paris Fashion Week. No estimate of the event’s total carbon emissions in million tonnes was provided. “We have to be wary of preconceived ideas: it is clear that one can think that travel has an impact. But we have to know what it encompasses, and the tool will allow that. We have intuition, but we will wait for the figure.”
Fashion week in Paris as well as New York, Milan and London have been scrutinised for their hefty environmental footprint: the in-person shows call for editors, buyers, models and other talent and attendees to travel across the globe several times a year. A 2019 Saint Laurent runway show staged on the shores of Malibu received criticism for flouting environmental regulations. The pandemic, which forced fashion organisers’ hands to account for digital viewings, offered the industry a chance to rethink its approach to fashion month. Paris organisers intend for the PwC tool, while not a fix-all, to eventually be open-source, allowing for uniform transparency for impact and sustainability across other events.
“Measurement is an important step to gain insights and knowledge,” says Cecilie Thorsmark, chief executive of Copenhagen Fashion Week, which introduced a test pilot in January 2021 of a system in which houses will have to fulfil 18 minimum standards and score necessary points by 2023 to participate in the event. “As fashion weeks organisers, we have an impact and should use it to accelerate the sustainability effort in the industry.”
“Our strategy has two parallel tracks: set targets for fashion week and companies,” Thorsmark says. (The second tool developed by the French Fédération also pertains to collections and the industrial value chain.) The Copenhagen multi-criteria tool includes mandatory compliance and action requirements, unlike Paris.
In creating the PwC tool, the initial goal was to define the scope of the measurement, from the fashion house’s creative briefs to set dismantling and waste disposal. Each step in the measurement process falls into 11 themes, including travel and accommodation, scenography material and waste, communication and digital. The tool is made available to individual houses to use in different ways, from show conception to data transmission. If a house chooses not to measure, the event’s organiser will use an average based on the size of the house to calculate the total impact. The Fédération plans on publishing the consolidated results only. It will be up to the individual houses to publish their own data or keep them confidential.
The digital component of shows is measured, too, by converting streamed video into kilowatt hours, which are then converted to carbon footprint. “We know that [the impact of] digital is far from being insignificant,” said Morand.
Fashion weeks elsewhere have taken sustainability credentials into consideration but in less targeted ways. In New York, the CFDA offers education and guidelines, but it’s up to each house to track its own progress. Last year, the CFDA, in partnership with Boston Consulting Group, released the “Sustainability by Design: Rethinking New York Fashion Week” executive summary and report on the environmental impact of NYFW and a playbook for positive change in October 2020. London Fashion Week monitors the carbon footprint of its digital platform using servers that run on renewable energy but doesn’t currently publish the results. “We are constantly investigating ways of monitoring our digital carbon footprint and will do so when we return to physical shows, hopefully in September,” a spokesperson for the British Fashion Council says. BFC also has a range of other initiatives with its Institute of Positive Fashion and pledged to halve its greenhouse gas emissions before 2030, among other commitments.
"I think that the new tools of the French Fédération have an interesting approach on sustainability, and I want to congratulate them on their initiative. We will be monitoring these closely and be in contact with the French Fédération to study together possible ways of use,” says Carlo Capasa, chairman of Camera della Moda, Italy’s fashion association and organiser of Milan Fashion Week, noting that they already collaborate with the French Fédération on the European Commission’s Product Environmental Footprint initiative.
“It is a step. We will continue to work extremely intensively,” says Morand.
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