2024 in Review: Why Sustainable Fashion Feels Stuck—And What to Do About It
Progress, paradoxes, and the path forward.
Did the fashion industry make progress on its sustainability goals in 2024?
As we head into the new year, this question is top of mind for many.
For all the initiatives, pilot projects, collaborations, commitments, reports, and investments made in 2024, is the fashion industry any closer to achieving its sustainability goals?
The answer: yes and no.
2024: A Year of Uneven Progress
2024 brought a mix of ambition and accountability. Kering became the first fashion company to adopt science-based targets for nature, committing to measurable goals for preserving biodiversity. California passed SB 707 requiring fashion brands with annual revenues over $100 million to create recycling programs by 2027. The EU introduced Digital Product Passport regulations to track environmental impact starting in 2026. Yet, even with these headline-grabbing achievements, progress across the industry was uneven.
For every two steps forward the industry took in 2024, it seemed to take a step-and-a-half back. But not for a lack of effort—or a lack of solutions.
Promising innovations in textile-to-textile recycling and next-gen materials showed potential, but a lack of investment in infrastructure, brand commitment, and cohesive regulation continued to stall progress.
At the same time, the industry’s fundamental issues remained unaddressed. Overproduction and overconsumption remained the industry’s Achilles’ heel in 2024, driving waste, depleting resources, and undermining sustainability efforts at every turn. Fast fashion, marked by an 182% increase in U.S. textile and apparel imports since 2000, perpetuated this cycle of disposability. Polyester, the most produced fiber globally at 57% of total production, underscored the industry's continued reliance on fossil fuels.
As a result, the global textile industry remains only 0.3% circular, according to Circle Economy. A staggering 99% of the 3.25 billion tons of materials consumed annually are sourced from virgin resources, while nearly two-thirds of textile waste ends up in landfills or incinerators. Worse yet, one-third of low-quality clothing is never sold, amplifying waste and resource mismanagement.
Meanwhile, apparel consumption is projected to grow by 63%, reaching 102 million tons in the next five years, according to the Textile Exchange’s 2024 Materials Market Report. If the industry stays on its current trajectory, it could consume over a quarter of the world’s carbon budget by 2050.
These challenges are not confined to environmental issues—they are deeply entangled with social and economic injustices. In 2024, after months of violent crackdowns on protests—with reports of arrests, injuries, and even deaths—wages for Bangladeshi garment workers increased by 9%. Yet, systemic issues like poverty wages, rising living costs, and exploitative conditions persist.
Similarly, suppliers and manufacturers continued to shoulder the financial and operational burden of meeting brands’ sustainability demands, from costly facility upgrades to navigating fragmented reporting requirements, all while being excluded from key decision-making.
Overhauling the supply chain to achieve decarbonization is estimated to cost $1 trillion, according to the Apparel Impact Institute. This burden disproportionately falls on suppliers operating on razor-thin margins in economically disadvantaged regions. While loan-based financing initiatives are emerging, critics argue these often shift responsibility onto suppliers without sufficient brand support or guarantees of ROI, perpetuating inequities in the supply chain and stalling meaningful progress.
By the end of the year, some progress emerged: manufacturers gained visibility at industry events, and the Transformers Foundation released a pivotal report calling for supplier inclusion, equitable engagement, and shared accountability. However, without fair pricing and meaningful financial support from brands, the imbalance will continue to hinder systemic progress.
Meanwhile, global climate goals are slipping further out of reach, with the world on track for 3.1 degrees of warming—far beyond the 1.5-degree target needed to avert catastrophic impacts.
The Toolbox Paradox: Why Solutions Fall Short
Amid these systemic failures, the fashion industry continues to introduce new initiatives and innovations in an attempt to drive change. Yet, despite these ongoing efforts, progress remains elusive. The industry grapples with what we can call the 'toolbox paradox'—where the tools for change exist, but their usage and impact remain constrained by deeper structural and systemic barriers.
The issue isn’t a lack of solutions; it’s that, instead of scaling existing tools and innovations, the focus often shifts to chasing the next shiny tool, hoping it will serve as a silver bullet to solve all problems.
But at its core, the paradox stems from the fashion industry’s growth-at-all-costs model, where profit is prioritized over sustainability. This creates a constant tension between long-term environmental and social goals and the economic incentives driving overproduction, waste, and the exploitation of resources and labor.
Sustainability professionals are often caught in a difficult position—lacking the authority, resources, and organizational support to push for transformative change.
As a result, efforts shift to incremental wins—not out of a lack of ambition, but necessity. These smaller victories help build business cases, demonstrate profitability, and lay the groundwork for larger systemic changes.
This combination of systemic barriers, misplaced focus, and constrained authority ensures that even the most promising solutions remain underutilized. Without addressing these deeper issues, the tools for change will continue to fall short of delivering the industry-wide transformation that sustainability demands.
Misaligned Priorities
The consequences of this misalignment between tools and implementation is exactly what we are witnessing in the industry today.
Record-breaking heatwaves are disrupting supply chains, while climate impacts intensify globally. Economic uncertainty and rising inflation are forcing companies to prioritize short-term survival over long-term sustainability goals. Geopolitical instability and trade tensions further complicate supply chain transformations, while relentless growth pressures incentivize overproduction, exacerbating environmental costs.
Yet even as these challenges mount and tools and resources become more available, corporate focus is moving away from sustainability.
The Business of Fashion and McKinsey's 2025 State of Fashion report reveals a troubling trend: only 18% of executives now rank sustainability as a top-three growth risk—down from 29% in 2024.
This retreat from sustainability commitments comes at a critical moment and is compounded by a fragmented regulatory landscape, which has made it even harder for brands to translate their commitments into action.
The Complexity of Regulation
Regulation is often cited as the bridge between intention and action, offering accountability that voluntary efforts lack. Yet, in 2024, the regulatory landscape revealed its own complexities.
While policies like California’s SB 707 and the EU’s Digital Product Passport regulations promise progress, the lack of consistency in compliance rules and reporting standards across jurisdictions has created significant confusion for businesses—prompting the EU to introduce the Omnibus Simplification Package to streamline and harmonize EU requirements.
Additionally, France’s AGEC (Anti-Waste for a Circular Economy) law mandates unprecedented levels of supply chain transparency, requiring brands to disclose details like the recycled content in products, the environmental impact of materials, and manufacturing locations. These regulations highlight a deeper issue: the industry’s limited visibility into its own supply chains. While some companies, like LVMH, are investing in traceability tools to meet these stringent requirements, many businesses are still unprepared for the operational shifts and extensive data collection required, especially as the law's progressive implementation expands its scope through 2025.
Without a unified voice or coordinated advocacy strategy, the fragmented approach to regulatory engagement leaves companies navigating a complex, often conflicting web of requirements. This lack of cohesion not only diminishes the industry’s ability to influence policy outcomes but risks creating rules that are economically burdensome, operationally impractical, and unsupportive of the innovation needed to achieve sustainability goals.
The Consumer Disconnect
While regulation attempts to steer the industry toward accountability, consumer behavior often counteracts these efforts, presenting another significant obstacle to progress.
When it came to consumer behavior, 2024 was a year of stark contrasts. Movements like "deinfluencing" and "underconsumption core" gained traction, promoting mindful consumption and challenging the relentless cycle of overconsumption. These trends seemed to signal a cultural shift toward conscious consumerism—but the reality was far more complex.
The "attitude-behavior gap"—where consumers claim to support sustainability but prioritize fast fashion’s immediate rewards—remains a major hurdle.
While many express a willingness to pay more for ethically made products, their actual choices often tell a different story. Fast fashion continues to succeeded, not just because of affordability, but because it delivers social validation, trendiness, and a sense of belonging—factors that deeply resonate with consumers.
Influencer marketing underscores this gap. Platforms like LTK drove nearly $5 billion in annual retail sales in 2024, with 40 million monthly consumers instantly shopping styles recommended by their favorite creators. The industry’s projected $24 billion valuation reflects how influencer-driven commerce amplifies fast fashion’s dominance—often at the expense of sustainability.
At its core, this disconnect is about perceived value—how consumers weigh emotional and social rewards against ethical and environmental impact. Fast fashion excels by fulfilling immediate emotional needs, from staying on-trend to expressing identity and fitting into social groups.
Sustainable fashion, by contrast, struggles to offer these same rewards. While it leads with ethics and environmental responsibility, it has yet to fully tap into the emotional drivers that shape consumer behavior. Without addressing these dynamics, sustainability risks remaining an abstract ideal rather than a desirable choice.
The challenge for sustainable fashion lies in repositioning itself—not just as the "right" choice but as the compelling one. By aligning sustainability with identity, social belonging, and status, brands can start to close the gap between intention and action.
Until then, the industry will face a paradox of progress: advancing sustainability in theory, while consumer behavior hinders meaningful transformation.
Why Incremental Progress Isn’t Enough
Consumer behavior poses immediate challenges for sustainability efforts, but it doesn’t exist in isolation. Instead, it reflects the industry’s broader approach to sustainability—short-term, incremental, and reactive rather than transformative. Just as consumers prioritize immediate rewards, the industry often focuses on piecemeal solutions, sidestepping the deeper, systemic changes required for meaningful progress.
This shared reliance on incremental gains highlights a deeper issue: both consumers and brands are entrenched in systems that prioritize convenience, affordability, and short-term wins over long-term sustainability. The challenge isn’t just changing consumer habits—it’s the industry’s failure to align its strategies with the systemic shifts necessary to influence behaviors at scale.
Incremental progress, while often necessary given the industry’s constraints, becomes problematic when isolated gains are treated as endpoints rather than stepping stones toward systemic transformation. Without a cohesive and unified strategy, these achievements risk falling short of their potential.
Even investors are signaling their frustration. In 2024, ASN Impact Investors divested €70 million from major fashion companies, citing insufficient progress on circularity, human rights, and environmental impact. Meanwhile, next-generation material innovators are increasingly turning away from the fashion industry, discouraged by its lack of investment, adoption, and scalable pathways for innovation within fragmented supply chains.
As a result, the industry remains at a standstill—another year defined by incremental progress and small wins.
While 2024’s wins prove that meaningful progress is achievable, they also highlight the scale of the work that lies ahead.
The tools and solutions to address fashion’s systemic barriers exist, but they remain constrained by entrenched structural challenges, shifting corporate priorities, and consumer behaviors rooted in instant gratification over long-term sustainability.
Sustainable fashion feels stuck because current efforts, though valuable, often address symptoms rather than root causes. Without a unified strategy to confront these deeper challenges, incremental progress will continue to fall short of the transformative change the industry urgently needs.
The Industry’s Biggest Bottleneck
Fashion faces one of the most intricate sustainability challenges of any industry. With its globalized supply chains, resource-intensive processes, and rapidly shifting consumer demands, the journey toward sustainability requires more than individual brand efforts—it demands true collaboration.
Fashion’s sustainability goals are unattainable without industry-wide collaboration. Yet, for all the talk of industry-wide cooperation, collaboration is often superficial, fragmented, and focused on treating symptoms rather than addressing root causes.
For brands:
Collaboration within the fashion industry often feels cautious, confined to "safe" partnerships that avoid direct competitors rather than engaging the full breadth of the industry. While brands may pursue renewable energy initiatives or decarbonization roadmaps independently or within comfortable networks, the kind of open, unified collaboration necessary to drive systemic change remains notably absent.
If brands collaborated more openly, they could pool resources for joint investments, achieving progress at a scale that no single company could accomplish alone. Such efforts have the potential to address systemic issues, benefiting the entire industry rather than just individual players.
A key step would involve sharing anonymized, non-competitive data, enabling brands to benchmark their performance, identify areas for improvement, and adopt best practices. By clearly distinguishing between pre-competitive and competitive data, brands can drive collective progress without jeopardizing their market advantages.
Yet, hesitation abounds. Sharing insights often requires relinquishing control over a brand’s sustainability narrative, which risks allowing competitors to capitalize on their work without contributing in return. Transparency adds another layer of complexity, as it might expose uncomfortable truths—like overproduction, waste, or inefficiencies—that could harm a brand’s reputation. Unlike marketing campaigns, the benefits of collaboration are harder to quantify, further discouraging brands from engaging in collective action.
This challenge extends vertically to suppliers, who face conflicting demands and limited support from brands. Without alignment on sustainability objectives or coordinated investment in solutions like renewable energy or worker training, suppliers are left to bear the financial and logistical burdens of compliance alone. This fragmented approach perpetuates inefficiency and slows industry-wide progress.
The lack of both horizontal (brand-to-brand) and vertical (brand-to-supplier) collaboration reflects the broader systemic challenges facing the industry. Progress will continue to lag without shared objectives, streamlined initiatives, and collective investment in solutions that benefit the entire supply chain.
Only through genuine collaboration can the fashion industry address its systemic challenges and achieve the transformation required for a sustainable future.
For Industry Organizations:
Industry organizations and coalitions play a critical role in the sustainable fashion ecosystem, creating the frameworks, reports, pilot projects, initiatives, and certifications that brands rely on for guidance. However, these organizations often fall into the same competitive traps they urge brands to avoid.
Despite advocating for collaboration, they are structurally incentivized against it.
Memberships, donations, sponsorships, and event partnerships are critical revenue streams, pushing organizations to differentiate themselves to retain support. This drive for relevance often results in redundant tools, reports, and initiatives—adding complexity rather than clarity to the industry.
While competition can drive innovation, the current dynamics frequently push beyond healthy competition into counterproductive territory. After more than a decade of balancing competition with collaboration, it’s evident that this approach isn’t working. While competition can spark innovation in niche areas, the collective impact of these organizations could be exponentially greater if efforts were aligned, tools integrated, and progress measured against shared, industry-wide goals.
The proliferation of frameworks, certifications, and tools creates confusion and inefficiency. Brands are left to navigate an ever-expanding maze of initiatives, reinforcing the "toolbox paradox," where the abundance of solutions fragments efforts and stalls true progress.
This competitive mindset—where every organization aims to be the definitive voice in sustainability—has led to overlapping efforts, wasted resources, and fragmented progress.
Instead of competing for relevance, organizations must coordinate on foundational standards, pool resources for critical research, and develop interoperable frameworks that reduce complexity for companies and brands. This kind of strategic collaboration—not just within supply chains but across the entire ecosystem—is essential for achieving meaningful, scalable change.
Breaking the Toolbox Paradox: Radical Collaboration as the Key to Progress
As we head into a new year, one thing is clear: we can’t solve tomorrow’s challenges with yesterday’s thinking. The fashion industry cannot rely on the same approaches and mindsets that have driven us to the brink. Year after year, we’ve seen the limits of incremental progress and the cost of fragmented efforts.
The tools to drive meaningful change are already here, but they remain underutilized. Breaking the toolbox paradox means embracing collaboration—not as a buzzword, but as the cornerstone of systemic transformation.
This is the moment for brands, suppliers, and organizations to align their efforts, share resources, and tackle these challenges together.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. Climate urgency, evolving consumer demands for accountability, and the industry’s ethical obligation to workers and communities leave no room for hesitation or half-measures.
Whether the fashion industry seizes this opportunity to act boldly—or continues on its current path—will determine its future. And ours.
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