Kering and the Centre for Sustainable Fashion at London College of Fashion, UAL on Wednesday announced the launch of a new programme, Governance for Tomorrow (GFT). 

The “innovative” programme addresses “governance in the luxury fashion sector, one of the most powerful yet unexamined means for leading sustainable transformation in the fashion industry”.

The programme will convene “leading experts from across sectors along with visionary change-makers to research, apply, test, and realise new alternative governance models, placing earth and equity at the core of decision-making in the fashion industry”.

The partners said the launch “comes at a crucial moment for the fashion industry. Despite some progress, fashion continues to lag on many key sustainability concerns such as responsible production and consumption, decarbonising supply chains and ensuring living wages for garment workers”.

They cited industry reports saying “extreme climate events could put at risk an estimated $65 billion of apparel exports by 2030, and recent news of investors divesting from numerous fashion companies due to slow progress on environmental and social issues”. These facts “highlight the urgent need for the fashion industry to explore alternative governance frameworks as a business and societal imperative”.

So over a three-year period, GFT will bring together its experts and others “to develop interdisciplinary knowledge, practical demonstrators and a leading industry education programme exploring alternative governance models”. 

Combining speculative design and participatory methodology the programme will “research, apply, test, and realise new alternative governance models” based on academics’ call for “interspecies, intergenerational and intragenerational (3I) justice to be used as the basis for realising safe and just earth system boundaries”. 

The 3I non-executive experimental board will “explore governance through the lens of 3I justice, emphasising the importance of justice, fairness and equity for all communities and species as essential to maintain the balance of Earth’s natural systems”.

So what happens next? The Centre for Sustainable Fashion has issued an “open call to visionary change-makers from across industries with an invitation to join [GFT’s] Stewardship Board… the boards will serve as platforms for transformation, bringing together a wide range of change-makers to co-create bold solutions that address the fashion system’s complex challenges”. 

The knowledge developed by the Stewardship Board “will help realise a next-generation governance think tank to advise the luxury fashion sector on alternative governance models, helping to create a legacy that will shape the fashion industry of today towards a better tomorrow”.

Dilys Williams, director of Centre for Sustainable Fashion said: “Through convening imaginative and curious minds, we will prototype frameworks and practices based on the true rules of prosperity, and thus shift from the rules we invented that missed out nature and the commitment to living better, as the basis of a thriving luxury fashion sector.”

And Marie-Claire Daveu, chief sustainability and institutional affairs officer at Kering, added that this “marks a key milestone in our commitment to redefining governance practices in the luxury sector, placing sustainability, equity, and social justice at its heart.”