Can Fashion Week’s trash problem be solved?

Fashion weeks are wasteful. One 15-minute runway presentation in Paris, London, Milan or New York can take six months to create, and moments after the lights come up and the music stops, much gets tossed into the garbage: the paper invites, plastic water bottles, leftover food and a lot more.

And then there is the travel. Researchers measured the impact of buyers and designers travelling to attend international shows during four major fashion seasons and found the amount of carbon emitted in one year was about 241,000 tonnes — or equivalent to the energy used to light up the Eiffel Tower for 3,060 years.

But the organisers of Copenhagen Fashion Week, which begins this week, are trying to set a new industry standard in a business that is largely self-governed.

After a decade of positioning itself as a fashion week and community that advocated sustainability, organisers of the small Danish fashion week are making concrete attempts to require it. These reforms apply to both the event itself (including carbon credits to offset the travel of attendees), as well as to the 28 brands that are participating in the official schedule, such as Ganni, Helmstedt and Stine Goya. Beyond the runway, designers must meet 18 requirements around materials, labour and business practices. Brands that do not meet the requirements are not allowed to participate.

“We don’t want guidelines. We need to ultimately, at some point, say ‘no’ to someone because they don’t live up to our standards,” said Nicolaj Reffstrup, former CEO of Danish fashion brand Ganni and a member of Copenhagen Fashion Week’s sustainability advisory board. “That’s when you prove that you’re serious about it.”

Copenhagen’s standards are based on the United Nations’ sustainable development goals and were created with input from a panel of international experts and consultants. They include a promise to use textiles made from at least 50 per cent certified, deadstock, upcycled, recycled, preferred or new-generation materials. Designers must not destroy unsold clothes, as brands like Burberry and H&M have been criticised for doing in the past, and they must commit to exercising due diligence in their supply chains to ensure that factories are safe and free of child labour.

On top of these minimums, there are more suggested actions incorporating broader definitions of sustainability and reforms including designs that promote body inclusivity, materials that consider animal welfare and shows that use digital instead of paper invitations.

However, all of these pledges are essentially on the honour system. Copenhagen organisers said their consulting partner, Ramboll, reviews and validates the information submitted by brands, but they do not yet have the ability to conduct external audits.

The effort to overhaul Copenhagen Fashion Week took about three years and came on the heels of sobering reports on the continuing threat of global warming.

“We are in the middle of a climate crisis,” said Cecilie Thorsmark, CEO of Copenhagen Fashion Week.

“Our industry has been really challenged by a lack of legislation and also so many different agendas and tools and certifications — a jungle of ‘What is sustainability?’” she said.

Thorsmark said she felt a moral responsibility to act, and if necessary, lead by example. “We needed a common direction,” she said.

To implement the changes, organisers first focused on the operations of Copenhagen Fashion Week itself. They measured the event’s 2019 carbon emissions and set out to reduce this number by half by 2023, with the remainder offset by buying carbon credits. There are now electric vehicles to shuttle around guests and presentations must be “zero waste” by limiting garbage and reusing props and sets. (Plastic hangers have been banned.)

Organisers then focused on the designers and gathered self-reported data from each participating brand. None were meeting all of the 18 standards organisers had outlined. In response, organisers offered online seminars on materials sourcing and customer education, carbon accounting tool kits and one-on-one coaching sessions from experts.

“It was a very long and intensive but also super-thorough process,” Thorsmark said.

Brands also had input. After a pilot test of the self-assessment, one of the brands suggested banning fur, and the organisers agreed. Each year going forward, organisers said they plan to add requirements and update existing rules to be more stringent.

Some designers said the self-assessment forced them to consider their practices more closely. Knitwear designer Amalie Roge Hove said the process helped her to clarify approaches to sustainability that she had already been practicing at her brand, A Roege Hove.

She said taking steps like finding a green-certified venue and looking for a sustainable (and more expensive) replacement for the nylon in her sweaters was frustrating at times, but she recognised the value of making the changes. She said it made her think about the future of the brand in definite, measurable ways.

“For so long sustainability has been a fluffy term,” she said. “We really need something quite specific.”

Henrik Vibskov, a Danish designer celebrated for his avant-garde sensibility, said working with organisers helped him remain committed to his own sustainability efforts, despite setbacks.

Vibskov said when he began his career in the early 2000s, “Everything was about the design,” he said. “Nothing was about the environment.” But by 2016, he started to embrace sustainability, using organic or recycled materials.

Yet, he found that some customers were resistant to paying more, and he had to be very careful in how he communicated these efforts to avoid being critiqued for greenwashing.

“I got a little bit demotivated,” he said.

Working with Copenhagen Fashion Week has helped him maintain his commitment to use recycled and organic materials. Vibskov has even shifted his big show from Paris — where he has historically presented his men’s collection — to the Danish capital, in part because of Copenhagen’s emphasis on sustainability.

“We are not finished at all,” he said of the process to revamp his brand. “This is just the beginning.”

Eszter Áron, founder of Hungarian brand Aeron, said she wanted to show in Copenhagen because of the city’s emphasis on sustainability.

“It felt so good that we could be part of a fashion week that takes this seriously,” Áron said.

Before showing at Copenhagen Fashion Week, she was focused on sustainable design, with an emphasis on producing zero-waste knitwear locally with organic or certified fibers, but she said, “the standards of the committee furthers our ambition.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.