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Over the years, Scandinavia’s hottest fashion exports have included the likes of Ganni, Marimekko, Stine Goya and Vogue-editor favourite, Totême. Recently, though, the region has increasingly become known for its efforts to reduce the industry’s enormous impact on the planet.
First unveiled back in 2020, Copenhagen Fashion Week’s sustainability action plan means all brands on its schedule have to meet its 18 minimum requirements, which cover six key areas: strategic direction, design, smart material choices, working conditions, consumer engagement and show production. This season – autumn/winter 2023 – marks the first time that the requirements have been fully implemented, following a series of pilot tests over the past two years.
“It’s a very significant milestone for Copenhagen Fashion Week,” Cecilie Thorsmark, CEO of Copenhagen Fashion Week, tells Vogue. “Two years ago, not all brands on the schedule met the requirements. Now we can see this framework does accelerate change in the industry – a lot of progress has been made.”
The transition period between announcing the standards and implementing them has meant that only one brand, which Copenhagen Fashion Week declined to name, did not meet the requirements allowing them to show on the official schedule this year. However, the standards will be ramped up on an annual basis, to ensure that brands are continuously striving to do better, as well as reflecting wider changes within the industry, such as EU legislation coming down the pipeline. “Going forward, we’re going to introduce one new standard a year,” Thorsmark explains. “But we will also work with the existing standards to ensure that they’re strict enough.”
Currently, these requirements mean that brands have to show that at least 50 per cent of their collection is made from certified, preferred, upcycled or recycled materials, as well as their commitment to due diligence across its supply chain. Other requirements, though, such as ensuring brands are “designing to increase the quality and value of our products economically”, are more difficult to assess.
“The documentation [required from brands] includes links to strategies, certification documents, codes of conduct [and examples of] public communication,” Frederik Larsen, co-founder of In Futurum, a consultancy that helped Copenhagen Fashion Week develop its sustainability framework, says. All submissions from brands are verified by a sustainability committee, led by consultancy Rambøll.
It’s worth noting that the process does rely on self-reporting from brands – a criticism that has been levelled at other initiatives, including B-Corp certification, which assesses a company’s social and environmental performance. However, in lieu of legislation and other fashion industry-specific guidelines, the current framework undoubtedly drives brands to be more ambitious in their efforts. “One of its most important purposes is to push sustainability in the industry,” Larsen continues.
“The minimum standards have made us undertake a range of initiatives to improve our sustainable practices, and helped us set goals for those areas we have worked less with, supporting us to stay on the right path and keeping our focus on what’s important,” Amalie Røge Hove, founder and creative director of A. Roge Hove, says. “It has also helped to establish a common language in the industry, especially in the Nordics, for what goals we are running towards, and striving to achieve together.”
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The standards have helped smaller brands formalise their sustainability practices too. “For a small brand with a big focus on sustainability we already work with sustainability in most of our day to day practices, but our team is quite small,” Simon Wick, co-founder of (Di)vision, explains. “Being able to work with Copenhagen Fashion Week [means] we have now developed an official preferred material list and both an internal and external code of conduct, which is something we’re really happy about.”
In addition to the 18 minimum requirements that all brands must meet, there are an additional 58 questions that they must answer – including whether they have signed up to science-based targets to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, and if their supply chain is deforestation-free. “Each brand is given a score for each action point in the sustainability survey, depending on how urgent and complex the specific action is,” Thorsmark explains. “We use that for internal benchmarking [but] of course we encourage brands to increase their score from season to season.”
Along with introducing a sustainability framework for brands, Copenhagen Fashion Week itself has set targets to reduce its environmental impact, including offsetting all carbon emissions from its own activities and reducing its carbon emissions by 50 per cent in real terms compared to 2019. While there has been a long-standing debate around whether fashion weeks should be held in the first place given their environmental footprint, the emissions produced by a fashion week pale in comparison to the emissions created by the production of garments, where the industry’s biggest impact lies.
With Copenhagen Fashion Week – now often referred to as the “fifth fashion week” after the big four of Paris, Milan, New York and London – being part of a newly-formed European Fashion Alliance (which also includes the British Fashion Council), Thorsmark hopes that the framework is now adopted by other fashion weeks globally. “Given the very central role that a fashion week plays in the fashion ecosystem, I think we’ve proven that we can play a role in the green transition of the industry,” she concludes. “We hope we can inspire other fashion weeks to go in the same direction.”