In The Responsible Fashion Company, Rinaldi and Testa argue that the fashion industry is at a crossroads: the need for a global shift to a sustainable model has never been more urgent. Yet, they demonstrate that we are witnessing a revolution led by conscious consumers and enlightened companies, who are redefining the rules of the fashion market. The question is: when will the rest of the industry catch up? Rinaldi and Testa raise a fundamental but often neglected issue in the fashion sustainability debate: long-term equilibrium can only be achieved by integrating economic goals with environmental, social and ethical values. "The Responsible Fashion Company" provides a clear overview of the theory, challenges and opportunities of sustainability in the industry and demonstrates how fashion companies can achieve competitive advantage through sustainable innovation. The authors show how leading fashion companies are challenging traditional thinking and present inspiring examples from pioneers such as Gucci, Levi's, Timberland and Brunello Cucinelli, who create quality products without leaving a negative impact behind.Refreshing and timely, The Responsible Fashion Company is essential reading for the socially conscious consumer and anyone with a professional or personal interest in the fashion, design and luxury industries.

This unique text offers a holistic, insightful and timely exploration of sustainable practices across the fashion industry. The book takes the reader logically through each part of the authors’ new Responsible 9 FrameworkTM, providing a clear perspective and examples for each component. The framework thoroughly explains the move away from a singular product commercial focus to a Conscious Item approach and Circular Services business mindset. An organisation’s people are at the heart of the new framework and have therefore been rebranded as Community. Next addressed is the Perceived Value of an item or brand, and how sustainable pricing initiatives actively influence consumer purchase. Insights into Accountable Systems are reviewed to examine the importance of responsible processes when considering and integrating a successful, sustainable supply chain into a fashion business. The section on Governance looks at the different global organisations available to fashion brands and customers alike, which support their transition into a responsible and sustainable future existence. The last two sections of the framework are labelled Storytelling Platforms and Honest Communication, where transparent and honest strategies are highlighted and discussed from a viewpoint of how modern brands are engaging and connecting to the new conscious consumer. For each of the nine aspects, contemporary case studies from global brands such as Stella McCartney, Zalando and Arc'teryx, alongside insights from current, leading experts within the fashion world, bring the theory to life. Showing how sustainability has been integrated throughout the entirety of the fashion business, this textbook is perfect for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students Fashion Management, Fashion Brand Management and Fashion Marketing, as well as reflective leaders and practitioners within the industry.

The book explains in detail and with many examples the concept of responsible innovation by answering the following questions: How will the fashion industry be in 2030? What can the different stakeholders do in order to speed the responsible innovation? Which will be the role of traceability, circularity, cradle-to-cradle, collaborative consumption, B-corporations? How technologies can catalyze the change? How the consumers interested in sustainability can contribute to this change?

From journalist, fashionista, and clothing resale expert Elizabeth L. Cline, “the Michael Pollan of fashion,”* comes the definitive guide to building an ethical, sustainable wardrobe you'll love. Clothing is one of the most personal expressions of who we are. In her landmark investigation Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, Elizabeth L. Cline first revealed fast fashion’s hidden toll on the environment, garment workers, and even our own satisfaction with our clothes. The Conscious Closet shows exactly what we can do about it. Whether your goal is to build an effortless capsule wardrobe, keep up with trends without harming the environment, buy better quality, seek out ethical brands, or all of the above, The Conscious Closet is packed with the vital tools you need. Elizabeth delves into fresh research on fashion’s impacts and shows how we can leverage our everyday fashion choices to change the world through style. Inspired by her own revelatory journey getting off the fast-fashion treadmill, Elizabeth shares exactly how to build a more ethical wardrobe, starting with a mindful closet clean-out and donating, swapping, or selling the clothes you don't love to make way for the closet of your dreams. The Conscious Closet is not just a style guide. It is a call to action to transform one of the most polluting industries on earth—fashion—into a force for good. Readers will learn where our clothes are made and how they’re made, before connecting to a global and impassioned community of stylish fashion revolutionaries. In The Conscious Closet, Elizabeth shows us how we can start to truly love and understand our clothes again—without sacrificing the environment, our morals, or our style in the process. *Michelle Goldberg, Newsweek/The Daily Beast

The Responsible Company, by Yvon Chouinard, founder and owner of Patagonia, and Vincent Stanley, co-editor of its Footprint Chronicles, draw on the their 40 years' experience at Patagonia – and knowledge of current efforts by other companies – to articulate the elements of responsible business for our time. Patagonia, named by Fortune in 2007 as the coolest company on the planet, has earned a reputation as much for its ground-breaking environmental and social practices as for the quality of its clothes. In this exceptionally frank account, Chouinard and Stanley recount how the company and its culture gained the confidence, by step and misstep, to make its work progressively more responsible, and to ultimately share its discoveries with companies as large as Wal-Mart or as small as the corner bakery. In plain, compelling prose, the authors describe the current impact of manufacturing and commerce on the planet’s natural systems and human communities, and how that impact now forces business to change its ways. The Responsible Company shows companies how to reduce the harm they cause, improve the quality of their business, and provide the kind of meaningful work everyone seeks. It concludes with specific, practical steps every business can undertake, as well as advice on what to do, in what order. This is the first book to show companies how to thread their way through economic sea change and slow the drift toward ecological bankruptcy. Its advice is simple but powerful: reduce your environmental footprint (and its skyrocketing cost), make legitimate products that last, reclaim deep knowledge of your business and its supply chain to make the most of opportunities in the years to come, and earn the trust you’ll need by treating your workers, customers and communities with respect.

"When most people think of corporate responsibility, they are focusing on a business's effect on and relationship to stakeholders. A Responsible Business sees stakeholders as full partners and meaningful instruments for the evolution of healthier communities and more successful businesses." —from the Introduction The Responsible Business offers a new and strategic approach to doing business that holistically integrates responsibility into all aspects of an organization, allowing for returns at every level, business and social. This book goes beyond the often well intentioned but limited attempts at sustainability to present a framework that allows organizations to bring responsibility into everything they do and re-imagine success. From innovation, product development, and production processes to business management, strategic planning, and shareholder development, the author shows how being a Responsible Business is a practical skill that can be applied day-to-day at every level of the business. No longer just the role of a department or the job of CSR professionals, successful responsibility and business efforts start at the business level, are then taken to the corporate level, and are finally applied throughout the organization. The Responsible Business outlines a framework for building a responsibility and consciousness infrastructure that applies a living systems view to the business and inspires all of its stakeholders, including shareholders. Throughout the book, illustrated by examples from technology to manufacturing, large and small, public and private, Sanford demonstrates how to make responsibility integral to all aspects of a business as an engine for innovation, profitability, and purpose. Praise for The Responsible Business "This is a very significant book. It makes it clear that businesses have a single boss with five interrelated aspects. The stories are among the crispest, most evocative case histories I have seen. The book is for any corporate leader trying to do the impossible: create a business that recreates the world." —Art Kleiner, editor-in-chief, strategy + business, and author, The Age of Heretics "Carol Sanford offers us a proven, practical, and systems-based approach that integrates five stakeholder groups into a business system working as an integral whole. Essential reading for leaders wanting a system framework for sustainability and business success!" —Otto Scharmer, MIT Sloan senior lecturer; author, Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges; and coauthor, Presence "The Responsible Business challenges many assumptions corporate leaders, investment advisors, and sustainability experts have long taken for granted. It provides a road map that can help innovative businesses think about how to be truly transformational." —Sam Ford, Fast Company expert blogger and director, Peppercom "The powerful concepts in The Responsible Business have changed the process of sustainable development and how communities truly thrive. Indeed, these proven approaches will be the roadmap to truly achieve the deepest level of living communities." —Bill Reed, founding member of LEED System and coauthor, The Integrative Design Guide to Green Building "Critical for re-imagining the future of business. Rarely a day goes by that I do not call on this way of thinking and looking at the world. It is useful for taking on the big business decisions that so many of us face every day." —Chad Holliday, chairman, Bank of America

This book provides a critical insight into sustainability and fashion in a retailing and marketing context. Examining a truly global industry, Sustainability in Fashion offers international application with a view to contextualising important developments within the industry. Contributors use their diverse backgrounds and expertise to provide a contemporary approach in examining key theoretical concepts, constructs and developments. Topics include consumer behaviour, communications, circular economy and supply chain management. The individual chapters focus on sustainability and provide a range of fashion sector examples from high street to luxury apparel.

This book examines how sustainability has the potential to transform both the fashion system and the innovators who work within it. Sustainability is arguably the defining theme of the twenty-first century. The issues in fashion are broad-ranging and include labour abuses, toxic chemicals use and conspicuous consumption, giving rise to an undeniable tension between fashion and sustainability. The book is organized in three parts. The first part is concerned with transforming fashion products across the garment's lifecycle and includes innovation in materials, manufacture, distribution, use and re-use. The second part looks at ideas that are transforming the fashion system at root into something more sustainable, including new business models that reduce material throughput. The third section is concerned with transforming the role of fashion designers and looks to examples where the designer changes from a stylist or creator into a communicator, activist or facilitator.

Is global fashion a wolf in sheep’s clothing? An industry insider takes a hard look at the apparel trade. With sales of more than five hundred billion US dollars a year, the fashion industry is one of the most important sectors of the global economy, employing millions of men, women, and often children in the developing world. And yet its record is far from pretty. The collapse of Bangladesh's Rana Plaza with some thirty-five hundred desperately underpaid garment workers inside was a shocking example of what can go wrong when manufacturers ruthlessly cut costs while turning a blind eye to labor rights and workplace safety. Written by an apparel industry insider, Fixing Fashion argues that the true legacy of Rana Plaza is increased awareness of how cheap, disposable clothing has led time and time again to serious community, environmental, and labor rights abuses. Ethical supply chain professional Michael Lavergne explores: The birth of the global apparel trade, from colonialism and slavery to today's neoliberal trade agenda How the infamous race to the bottom has led to some of the worst social and environmental excesses in the global apparel industry The rise of a new breed of entrepreneurs and stakeholders driving change and transparency across international supply chains By taking a hard look at the very real impacts of our consumer culture's addiction to disposable fashion, Fixing Fashion challenges each of us to take full responsibility for understanding the hidden cost of our clothes. Michael Lavergne is an ethical supply chain professional committed to sustainable fashion industry and the protection of labor, environmental and human rights in the developing world.

An investigation into the damage wrought by the colossal clothing industry--and the grassroots, high-tech, international movement fighting to reform it from a bestselling journalist who has traveled the globe to discover the visionary designers and companies who are propelling the industry toward that more positive future.ture.